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UNDERSTANDING LAW & GOSPEL ❘ IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU ❘ AN INTERVIEW WITH TIM KELLER

MODERN REFORMATION

RIGHTLY DIVIDING THE WORD

VOLUME

19, NUMBER 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010, $6.50

MODERN REFORMATION

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Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Ryan Glomsrud Managing Editor Patricia Anders Marketing Director Michele Tedrick Department Editors Ryan Glomsrud, Reviews Michael Horton, Final Thoughts Staff | Editors Lori A. Cook, Layout and Design Elizabeth Isaac, Copy Editor Ann Smith, Proofreader Contributing Scholars Michael Allen Peter D. Anders James Bachman J. Todd Billings John Bombaro Jerry Bridges John N. Day Adam S. Francisco David Gibson W. Robert Godfrey T. David Gordon Gillis Harp D. G. Hart Paul Helm John A. Huffman, Jr. Daniel R. Hyde Ken Jones Julius J. Kim Philip J. Lee Jonathan Leeman Richard Lints Korey Maas Keith Mathison R. Albert Mohler, Jr. John Warwick Montgomery Kenneth A. Myers Roger R. Nicole Robert Norris J. I. Packer Craig Parton Mark Pierson Lawrence R. Rast, Jr. Donald P. Richmond Kim Riddlebarger Rick Ritchie David Robertson Rod Rosenbladt Justin Taylor Kate Treick David VanDrunen Gene E. Veith David F. Wells Donald T. Williams William Willimon Todd Wilken Paul F. M. Zahl Modern Reformation © 2010 All rights reserved.

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An Introduction to the Law and the Gospel What are law and gospel? Are they merely abstract theological categories or are they relevant to the Christian’s understanding of the Bible? Does our relationship with God depend on us, or does it all rest on the completed work of Christ?

by Sean Norris Plus: The Distinction between Law and Gospel in Reformed Faith and Practice

15 Rightly Dividing the Word: Negotiating Continuity and Discontinuity What do the Old Testament and the New Testament have to do with each other?

Does the newer cancel out the older?

The author looks at the Reformed perspective on the unfolding of God’s grace throughout the Scriptures.

by Michael Horton Plus: William Tyndale’s Pathway into Holy Scripture

22 Reflecting Upon Scripture: “You’re So Vain, You Probably Think This Text Is About You” In today’s culture, it’s easy to reduce the Bible to yet another self-help book. The author says we need a Copernican revolution in the way we approach and handle Scripture, removing ourselves from the center of our universes and acknowledging God’s proper place.

by Shane Rosenthal

26 Recovering the Message of Scripture Nine pastor-theologians help shed light on some popular texts of Scripture that tend to lose their true redemptive-historical meaning in a culture of interpretive narcissism.

COVER PHOTO: ALEKSEY TREFILOV/ISTOCKPHOTO

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In This Issue page 2 | Letters page 3 | Common Grace page 4 Preaching from the Choir page 6 | Interview page 41 | Reviews page 45 | Final Thoughts page 52

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IN THIS ISSUE

The Sum and Substance of the Sacred Scriptures

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his is an exciting issue of Modern Reformation as it is dedicated to two of our favorite themes: seeing Christ in all of Scripture, and reading the Bible with an understanding of law and gospel. These are critical for recovering Scripture in our preaching, corporate, family, and individual Bible study.

Law and gospel is not as much a way of reading the Bible as the basic categories one finds in the Bible itself. It means distinguishing instruction from declaration, command from promise, “Do this” from “Christ has done,” and our best effort from Christ’s work on our behalf. This is not simply for Christians in their maturity, perhaps for the few who want to go deeper with God. Understanding the Bible in terms of law and gospel is how we arrive at maturity; it is how we find Jesus where we need him most, in his saving office. The apostle Paul captures these themes well when he instructs Timothy to “rightly handle the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15).

What does it mean to divide or handle the word of truth? Starting at the beginning, Sean Norris, author of the important book Two Words, introduces and simply defines law and gospel as the essential way to read the Bible for spiritual benefit. The law does not simply mean the Old Testament, nor does the gospel equate to the New Testament (a common misunderstanding in evangelicalism); rather Paul relates the distinction between law and gospel to covenant history, in terms of an analogy between Abraham’s two sons, between two mountains and two covenants—the Mosaic and the Abrahamic (Gal. 4:21–31). As such, our editor-in-chief Michael Horton helps us negotiate continuity and discontinuity throughout the whole of the Bible by addressing several important questions of interpretation. Running alongside these feature articles are two sidebars that bear testimony to the near-universal formulation and acceptance of law and gospel in early Reformation traditions, including the early English Reformer William Tyndale.

It is remarkable to know that as Anglo readers held the Bible in their own language for the first time, they did so with a preface by Tyndale that explained law and gospel as the pathway into Holy Scripture. Next, Shane Rosenthal, producer of the White Horse Inn, reflects upon the problem of narcissistic Bible reading in an article subtitled, “You’re So Vain, You Probably Think This Text Is About You.” We began this year by describing the problem of biblical illiteracy in evangelicalism today, but just as common is the problem of knowing the biblical stories yet not really understanding them. Seizing an opportunity, this is when the law within us ever so gently pushes us to read the Bible as we would Aesop’s Fables, to find a life lesson—almost always a moral one—in every story. As recovering Scripture sometimes means saving the Bible from ourselves, we’re featuring a series of short studies on familiar passages that are frequently misinterpreted in a moralizing direction in sermons, small groups, and individual quiet times. The Bible should be read as an unfolding drama of redemption that exposes the nastiness of sin through the law and glories in the surety of the gospel promise of redemption in the central character—the person of Christ. These essays represent our way of pressing home the importance of theologically informed Bible study.

Of course, there are moral lessons to be learned in Scripture: the law orders and norms our life of sanctification that we pursue with grateful and earnest hearts.

But the power unto salvation, for both justification and sanctification, is always the gospel—the word that announces “Christ has accomplished it all!”

NEXT ISSUES November/December 2010 Sola Scriptura January/February 2011 Ryan Glomsrud The Great Announcement Executive Editor

LETTERS y o u r

I found Modern Reformation magazine to be a great delight to read. It’s been refreshing to see content with depth, where Christ is the centerpiece and not an aside. My son, a fifteenyear-old pastor wanna-be, pesters his parents constantly, “Are you through with MR yet? Can I see it when you’re done?” The ultimate compliment to your efforts is that my son puts down his iPod to pick up Modern Reformation.

Gaye Clark Augusta, Georgia “Canon Formation” (May/June 2010) was an astonishingly excellent and useful issue from end to end. My only (slight) quibble comes on the very last page, in Michael Horton’s “Final Thoughts.” As a committed Anglican, I make the distinction between the regulative and normative principles, and so the distinction between the faith and the practices of the faithful. It is not necessary to claim “divine authority” to claim that the church has sufficient authority to order its own affairs in matters of worship and discipline. Jesus himself went up to the temple at the feast of the dedication (Hanukah) in John 10:22. This “festival” was and is not a scripturally mandated, regulative observance. It is, however, scripturally normative, containing nothing repugnant to the Word of God written. A thoroughgoing rejection of any concept of “normative” would (reductio ad absurdum) prevent the local proclamation that services will begin at, say, eleven o’clock and not ten, since there is no scriptural warrant for so insisting. The normative principle only becomes a slippery slope when the corresponding regulative principle has been abandoned—an ever-present temptation in all churches.

Eric Cosentino Rector The Church of the Divine Love Montrose, New York

Author’s Response This is a longstanding difference between Anglican and Reformed/ Presbyterian churches. Given the ecumenical nature of our magazine, I do not expect all readers—or writers— to share the conviction that we can only do in worship that which is warranted by Scripture. However, we’ve always distinguished between “elements” (e.g., salutation and benediction, preaching, administration of the Sacraments, prayer, singing, offering, confession of sin and declaration of pardon, confession of faith) and “circumstances” (e.g., meeting times, ministerial dress, architecture, and order of the liturgy). Admittedly, the regulative principle requires wisdom in application. For example, some (especially in the more PuritanPresbyterian heritage) see any observations other than the Lord’s Day as a violation of the regulative principle, while others (especially in the continental-Reformed heritage) hold stated services for Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension Day, and Pentecost.

Since even among the former special days of thanksgiving and prayer are held, I do not believe that the latter practice binds consciences beyond God’s Word. In my view at least, we ought to gather whenever we have opportunity to receive God’s good gifts and respond in thanksgiving (circumstance), as long as we only require attendance on the Lord’s Day (element).

Michael Horton Editor-in-Chief We appreciated John Bombaro’s article “Bible, Inc.” (July/August 2010), but we noticed a small error that seems to reflect a misunderstanding of the nature of Da Jesus Book. It is not a joke or “parody product” but a serious translation into a documented language considered by linguists to be distinct from Standard English: Hawai’i Pidgin (also known as Hawai’i Creole English). This lan-

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guage was determined in 1986 to have 600,000 speakers, a good portion of which were monolingual (www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=hwc). Wycliffe Bible Translators has been working with local translators since then to get the Bible in their own language. Only the New Testament has been published so far, but the Old Testament is currently in process with translation checking using the Hebrew text (www.pidginbible.org). The language might sound silly to us, but it speaks to the hearts of many of our fellow believers whose first language is Hawai’i Pidgin.

Beau and Lisa Cooper

Modern Reformation Letters to the Editor 1725 Bear Valley Parkway Escondido CA 92027 760.741.1045 fax Letters@modernreformation.org Letters under 200 words are more likely to be printed than longer letters. Letters may be edited for content and length.

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The Two-Kingdoms Homemaker

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ecently, I was invited to attend a “Christian” yoga class at the local community

The creation is then good but not sacred. By God’s college. What exactly is Christian yoga? Apparently it involves the same stretches common grace given to all, unbelievers and believers as regular yoga, but they have “Christian” names apropos to the memory verses alike work together in the civil kingdom, which is, as recited along with each pose. That struck me as a little Jason Stellman in Dual Citizens calls it, “the theatre for a proweird, even cheesy. Can we really make yoga a Christian gram of redemption.” As Christians, we are citizens of both activity by slapping the prefix before it and adding some kingdoms, although our allegiance to one is higher than the Bible verses? What is a Christian activity? Is it bad for a other. This doctrine seems more in line with both the Christian to attend a regular yoga class? This is one of the covenantal and eschatological framework in Scripture, yet funnier examples to me, but there is much of this line of it demands much more critical thinking through the tension thinking in contemporary evangelicalism. of where these kingdoms overlap. For example, plumbing is Sure, I want to think Christianly about everything I do, not being redeemed. But as a Christian, I should be thinkrelating to both the church and the secular culture, but I ing seriously about such things as how to operate a business, doubt this is what Paul was thinking when he gave us the proper work ethic, customer relations in a godly manner— and who’s qualified to fix my toilet! imperative to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

And then there’s my yoga invitation. It is a relief to This is why I believe theology is so important. Christianity know that it’s not my job to redeem yoga for Christ! and culture has been a hot topic lately, as it should be. Isn’t Nevertheless, being an activity closely associated to Eastern that what every Christian wants to know—how does my religions, it is a sensitive area. I believe it falls under the faith relate to my life? As a homemaker theologian, I’ve been advice Paul gives in 1 Corinthians 8 in that I can separate asking these questions and studying two of the more credthe beneficial exercises from the idolatry with which they ible perspectives on this matter. are associated. Some cannot, however, and it would not be We often hear it said today that at this current time Christ prudent or loving of me to lead them into any temptation is redeeming everything. This is a very attractive perspective, to sin or breach their own conscience. in that all of culture is put in the framework of creation, Fall, I don’t need to Christianize my neighborhood, town, or and redemption. As we move toward the end of the age, Christians can really play a major role in transforming the government, but I do need to be a Christian in them. I am culture under the dominion of Christ, preparing the world for to be as salt and light to my neighbors, as I enjoy the good its eschatological goal: the new heavens and the new earth. alongside them. Sure, the gospel transforms my participation Who doesn’t want to be a part of this movement? Well, at the in culture, such as my thinking in areas like beauty, hospipractical level it gets a little hazy. This is where “Christian” tality, femininity, and stewardship. As I go to church (the yoga comes in—or “Christian” plumbing, politics, and podiChristian activity), I am given Christ and all his benefits atry. All occupations, hobbies, and activities are in need of through the preached Word and his Sacraments. By his redemption, which sounds like a noble cause except that I Word and his Spirit, I am the one being transformed—one don’t really see any biblical promise of Christ returning to a of the many. Just as my body will one day be delivered from Christianized society. corruption, resurrected as an eternal new body, so will the The other position is the two-kingdom perspective. As David new heavens and the new earth. While I know that there VanDrunen in Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms describes, is eternal value to the work we do in our culture, I am also aware that the world as we now know it is temporary. And [This doctrine portrays] God as ruling all human instiwhile I sometimes want to scream out “How long!” I can tutions and activities, but as ruling them in two fundashamelessly enjoy my workouts with whomever I choose. mentally different ways….God rules the church (the spiritual kingdom) as redeemer in Jesus Christ and rules Aimee Byrd is a homemaker and a member of Pilgrim Presbyterian the state and all other social institutions (the civil kingChurch (PCA) in Martinsburg, West Virginia. dom) as creator and sustainer, and thus these two kingdoms have two significantly different ends, functions, and modes of operation.

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Join the Conversation!

Have you ever considered writing for Modern Reformation? Here’s your chance! We’re continuing these departments in 2010 and we want your words to be featured in them.

“Open Exchange”: A forum for reader response. If you’ve ever read an article printed in our pages and thought that something else needed to be added, this is the place for your contribution.

“Ex Auditu”: Examples of Christ-centered sermons. Christ-centered preaching is sadly rare in all our circles. Have you heard or preached a good sermon? Send in the transcript to give others a model to follow.

“Preaching from the Choir”: Perspectives on music in the church. Beyond the old “worship wars,” we want to give people a way to think about the music we sing in formal worship contexts and in our private worship. Draw attention to the resources that matter.

“Family Matters”: Resources for home. Catechism resources, ways of teaching theology to children, help with holiday themes: this is the place to direct others to resources you’ve found helpful in your efforts to be faithful at home.

“Borrowed Capital”: Witnessing to Christ in our age. Where do you start in your witness for Christ? How do apologetics play a role in your evangelism? Got a story or a helpful idea? Share it with others in this space.

“Common Grace”: God’s truth in art and culture. God gives gifts to both believer and unbeliever. How do we see those gifts expressed in the art and culture surrounding the church? In this space, we want to hear from artists and cultural observers looking for glimpses of grace in life.

Intrigued? Ready to write? Send your 850-word essay (Ex Auditu sermons can be longer) to editor@modernreformation.org. Be sure to tell us in which department you think your essay belongs and send all your contact information. If we decide to run your work, we’ll extend your subscription by one year.

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Worship Wars: Toward a Biblical Resolution

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orship wars are not uncommon. We may think they are an entirely new

that. But there is more to be discerned. God did not phenomenon, but they are not. Upon revisiting the history of the church, reject Cain’s gift because God was exercising his we are repeatedly reminded of the vigor and vitriol in which battles over divine prerogative. Instead, he rejected the offering worship have raged. In The Spirit of the Liturgy, Joseph because it did not fit the pattern of worship given to Adam Cardinal Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) reminds us that the and Eve after they fell from grace. Abel, in following the patGnostics used songs to such great effect that the Council of tern of blood sacrifice, was obedient and therefore acceptable Laodicea forbade “the use of privately composed psalms to God. Similarly, as we read through the Bible, we find God and non-canonical writings in divine worship” (144). St. repeatedly emphasizing proper worship—worship according Ephraim the Syrian composed hymns in order to combat to the pattern he established. In other words, if we are heresy. Both the orthodox and those who are heterodox use going to overcome our worship wars, we will need to come song and worship in order to influence. to Holy Scripture and discover the priorities, principles, and And so, we are not alone. Worship wars continue to practices of proper worship. occur. Recognizing the historicity of our situation, howA second consideration is the priority of theology. Worship is a decidedly and distinctively theological activity. The ever, does not resolve our problems. The question is how we “how” and “why” of worship clearly indicates the “who” of can begin to resolve our differences and move on with the worship. As a theological enterprise, if not the primary thebusiness to which God has called us: worshipping God and ological enterprise (as per David Fagerberg), worship “tells” loving others. and celebrates the ongoing story of God in history. Are we It can be imagined that some denominations have an eastelling the right story in the right way? Consequently, buildier time with this question than those who come from a ing upon the biblical imperative, we cannot worship any “free church” tradition. Roman Catholics have the Council way we wish. My personal assessment is that many of Trent and the Second Vatican Council to guide them; the churches across a multitude of denominational spectrums Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, have their Lutheran have a limited understanding of the theological implications Service Book; and those of us who are Anglicans have our of worship. What is often of utmost concern is whether the Book of Common Prayer to guide us. Having worshipped in each of these traditions, and many others that are quite forsongs and the sermon present a cohesive message. I do not mal, I can assure you that even these denominations do not in any way disparage this concern. Sermon and song should have it easier, and questions about the “how” of worship are be coordinated. But there are many more theological issues not entirely settled. to be considered. The theology of such a concern, however What can be done? As I reflect upon our dilemma, I am warranted, suggests a perspective that is somewhat limited repeatedly challenged to remain faithful to several priorities. and that does not in any way represent the fullness of bibObservance of these priorities will reduce friction and greatly lical revelation or religion. Briefly, it suggests an exaggerated enhance cooperation. In the process, observance of these priemphasis upon word over action and, as such, limits an orities will also encourage proper worship—worship that is appropriate biblical emphasis placed upon the actions of in Spirit and in truth. worship. Here is a question that every pastor, associate pasThe priority of Holy Scripture is our first consideration. We tor, and worship team must ask: Does our service of worship cannot worship as we please. Just because something feels communicate sound doctrine? good, or because it is appealing, does not mean it is right.

The priority of the priority must also be considered. Why do From one of the very earliest texts of Holy Scripture, we we come to church? Why are we gathered? An examination learn that true worship has very little to do with good intenof many contemporary churches today suggests that our pritions. Cain thought it was quite legitimate to offer God the ority in worship is to feel good. More often than we would very best of his fruits and vegetables. Abel thought blood saclike to admit, we go to church in order to get our “boost” for rifice was appropriate. Who was right? We can simply say the week. A similar focus can be seen at the traditional that God accepted Abel’s gift and not Cain’s, and leave it at Wednesday night prayer meeting. We want to be recharged 6 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

so we can more effectively face the week ahead of us.

Unfortunately, feeling good and being recharged are at best secondary considerations. We gather together in order to worship God. We do not come to a service of worship merely for fellowship. We do not come to the worship service to evangelize. We do not come to feel good. We come to worship. Period. While fellowship, evangelism, instruction, and socio-psycho-pneumatic healing may occur, these are by-products and not the priority. The priority is the priority of God himself. If in any way our worship does not fit what has been revealed in the Bible, and if our service of worship does not have worship as our priority, it is false worship.

The priority of the principles is another issue. Take a moment to reflect upon the foundational principles governing your worship service. Although what I am about to say may appear like a word game, in practice it is not. Do we have “worship services” or are we engaged in the “service of worship”? Unless we are engaged in the service of worship, our worship services are a waste of time. In fact, if we have worship services that do not have the service of worship as a priority, they are counterproductive or dangerous.

What’s the difference? When we come to the service of worship, we come to do service to God. Worship is the rightful work of the people of God. It is “right” in that we should celebrate the Great God who has called every believer out of darkness into light through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. It is “work” in that it requires some measure of sacrifice, discipline, learning, and time. Worship is not a slipshod activity of the spiritually slothful. Worship is right work that flows from grateful hearts.

This leads to the final principle: Worship is the work of the people. As such, entertainment approaches to worship are, at best, suspect. We come to worship, and we must be trained to worship and must be reeducated out of our sound-bite entertainment mindset. We need to rethink what priority we place upon “seeker-sensitive” and entertainment-focused worship. Fundamental to all of these assertions is that our service of worship is always and without exception responsive. We celebrate, as the late Robert E. Webber has suggested, God’s saving acts in history—and among us today.

David W. Fagerberg in his text Theologia Prima echoes the same sentiment when he tells us that “[l]iturgy is the…response of the body of Christ to the activity of the Trinity.” Our service of worship is entirely a responsive reply to the saving and sanctifying activity of God. This perspective must never be lost or compromised.

The priority of practices is another consideration. In his excellent texts on worship, the Alleluia Series being just one example, Webber outlines a number of practices that are appropriate to worship. These practices must correspond to the “shape of the liturgy” (Gregory Dix) and not be haphazard. Referencing the work of Rev. Dr. Andrew Greeley, Webber suggests a fourfold shape: Gathering, Word-Focused, Communion-Centered, and Dismissal.

Gathering focuses upon personal preparation for worship and the recognition that God is present among us. We gather to celebrate the saving acts of God—who was, is, and

will be. God is in and among his people. This is something to celebrate.

Word-Focused prioritizes the use of Holy Scripture as worship activity. This includes adequate readings of the biblical texts and appropriate preaching. Second-rate readings (that is, insufficient attention being paid to the coordinated reading of the Old Testament, Psalms, Epistles, and Gospels) and third-rate preaching dominate our churches.

Communion-Centered celebrates Christ’s offering of his body and blood on our behalf (let’s not in any way minimize this in practice!).

Dismissal recognizes, as stated in The Book of Common Prayer, that we now go into the world to love and to serve.

As such, worship is as much about how we live our lives during the week as about what we do within the walls of the church.

The practices must fit, exactly fit, the Gather-WordCommunion-Dismissal pattern outlined. Anything that detracts from or minimizes this priority is suspect. As such, every hymn, song, sharing, sermon, Holy Communion, and dismissal must be ordered and properly orchestrated. We must not give God second-rate service.

Finally, there is the priority of propriety. Worship must be “decent and in order.” This does not mean that there should not be room made for more exuberant forms of worship.

This does not mean we must perpetually play the reserved Michal as against the far more exuberant David. This does not mean that, given certain guidelines, innovations in art and music cannot be enjoyed. This does not mean, again within certain guidelines, that our contemporary setting should not be considered. What it does mean is that worship must be prayerfully planned and patterned. What it means is that even our way of dress must be considered. Does our dress suggest that we are in church to do the work of worship or does it suggest that we should lie back, relax, and enjoy the “ride”? Everything must have an air of propriety that is proper to the season of worship.

The worship wars will not be easily resolved. These wars, however, cannot be reduced to the dysfunctional “old ways versus new ways” paradigm. “Old ways” may be just as suspect as “new ways.” What we must look for are God’s ways—God’s priorities, principles, and practices—of proper worship.

The Very Rev. Dr. Donald P. Richmond, a widely published author, is a priest and examining chaplain with the Reformed Episcopal Church, Diocese of the West.

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"LAW AND GRACE" BY LUCAS CRANACH THE ELDER (GOTHA VERSION, 1529)

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An Introduction to the Law and the Gospel

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he distinction between the law and the gospel is a completely foreign concept to many Christians and one that eluded me for many years. Before I heard Christianity presented in these terms, the standard framework by which I understood Christianity was couched in relational language. The foundation of religion was expressed something like: “I want to get to know Jesus more,” or, “It’s all about a relationship with the Lord.” The result of such a framework was a rather ambiguous understanding of the faith. If I was honest with myself, I only kind of knew what I believed, and I sort of knew why I believed it. My faith was dependent on my experience and emotions, which meant that I really had to work hard to keep the experience going. It was important to feel close to the Lord at all times because that was the primary indicator of a good relationship with him.

What did that look like? The usual: experiencing an intimate time of worship (warm fuzzy feelings or being brought to tears), a regular quiet time (reading the Bible), journaling, and so on. This outward show also extended to abstaining from the usual vices: swearing, gossiping, making fun of people, envying, lusting, and on, and on, and on. This was a depressing and scary way to live because I was never successful. The core of my entire belief system and worldview was built upon the sandy shore of my ability.

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SEAN NORRIS

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Thankfully, I was introduced by one of my seminary professors to the distinction between the law and the gospel, which laid waste to all of my efforts to attain closeness to God. This article is intended to serve as an introduction to the law and the gospel. By no means is it exhaustive. Volumes have been written about this distinction, and the more we study the law and the gospel, the more it brings home the reality of Jesus’ cross and resurrection in our hearts and minds. Hopefully, this article will whet the appetite for further study and contemplation.

What are the law and the gospel? They are not abstract theological categories made up by people in their studies many years ago with way too much time on their hands.

The law and the gospel are God’s two words spoken to us in his Bible; they are its two main subcategories, if you will. As such, they constitute more than simply one of many possible frameworks for reading and understanding the Bible; they are the foundational framework.

Understanding them and the distinction between them is key to understanding the whole of God’s Word and the whole of the Christian religion. As Martin Luther wrote, “Virtually the whole of the scriptures and the understanding of the whole of theology depends upon the true understanding of the law and the gospel.”2 God’s First Word: The Law he first of God’s two words is always the law. It is exactly what it sounds like: the rules. The law is God’s set of rules or demands regarding how we should be. In the Bible, the first mention of the law is at the very beginning of human existence: “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die’” (Gen. 2:16–17). We know how the rest of the story went. Adam and Eve disobeyed the one rule God made for them (they sinned), and they were cast out of the Garden, out of the realm of eternal life into the realm of death. The relationship between man and God, the one we try so hard to keep together through our own efforts, was broken because of our inability to keep his commands, his law.

Consider the defining characteristic of law. It is conditional in nature—it proscribes certain behavior and describes the consequences. Law contains an if/then structure or action/consequence. We can read the previous passage as: “If you do not eat the fruit of the tree of good and evil, then everything will be fine and you can stay with me.

If you do eat of it, then you will die.” This is true of all kinds of laws. If you go over the speed limit and the police pull you over, then you will get a ticket. If you abuse your dog, then he will grow aggressive. If you eat cheeseburgers and donuts every day, then your health will suffer. This is law and we understand it implicitly. We are used to conditional relationships. We like the idea of action and consequence.

It is very logical and clear-cut. As is obvious from the above examples, however, not all laws are created equal. Breaking

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some laws results in far more severe consequences than others. Breaking some laws leads to angry dogs and a larger waistline, while breaking others leads to separation from God and to death. What is the reason for this variance?

Every law, no matter how trivial, is related to God’s holy law, and therefore breaking any law elicits the same result: death.3 As Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and the first commandment. And a second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:37–40).4 The difference between breaking the speed limit and eating of the fruit of the tree of good and evil has to do with the function of the law. The law operates in two different arenas: one is civil (or political) and the other is theological (or spiritual).5 In the civil arena, the law acts as a bridle on sinful humanity. It restrains evil behaviors for the sake of civil society. Think of most of the laws that govern our country. They promote order and provide protection, and our obedience to them allows us to live in relative peace with our neighbor. In this case, then, the law addresses outward actions: as long as one is able to abstain from certain behaviors one will be an upright citizen.

The function of the law in the theological arena goes deeper. In this sense, the law acts as “the hammer of death” to sinful humans.6 It exposes our inability to keep it and crushes any notion that we ever could in light of the fall.7 “Is not my word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?” (Jer. 23:29).

While in the civil arena the law focuses on outward actions, in the theological arena it addresses the heart, motivation, and psyche.8 There is certainly still an outward aspect to the theological application of the law, but those outward actions are considered bad fruit from a corrupt root, and the root is the concern.

Martin Luther refers to this theological understanding of the law as its “principal use” because it fundamentally alters our perspective.9 As previously mentioned, people like the conditional nature of law. We prefer to view life as merit based, structured as if/then statements. If I obey the law, then I am a good person and God will be pleased with me. This tit-for-tat, quid pro quo, action/consequence philosophy of ethics was delineated by Aristotle and still prevails today. According to Aristotle, the outside determines the inside.10 What you do defines you, good or bad. This is an attractive perspective because it gives us a sense of control. We think, “If I can just change my behavior, then I will change who I am.” This way of thinking was the source of all of my efforts to maintain a feeling of closeness with God, as mentioned above. Jesus, however, turns this philosophy of ethics on its head in his presentation of the law.

The Pharisees, like many of us, were in Aristotle’s camp.

They thought God’s law existed to ensure that their outward behaviors would remain pure so that they could attain inward purity (outside in, fruit to root). This led to their objections to Jesus and his disciples not washing S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 9

God’s Second Word: The Gospel his is all very depressing forgiven. Because Christ has fulfilled the law, to our ambitious and independent selves, and it therefore you are set free from its demands. has to be because otherwise we would not be ready to hear The gospel is the answer to the law’s accusation.

God’s second word, the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is the good their hands before they ate (a violation of one of the cernews, “that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinemonial laws). Jesus responded, ners” (1 Tim. 1:15). He has fulfilled the law on our behalf, has died for our sins on the cross, and has been raised Hear and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth again for our justification. The perfection (or righteousthat defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; ness) needed to be in right relationship with God is Christ’s this defiles a person…what comes out of the mouth probut is imputed to us (declared as ours) by God’s grace ceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out through the cross.13 This was the plan all along. As seen of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexabove, after the Fall we were never able to fulfill the law; ual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are its purpose in our lives now is first to reveal our sin and what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands kill any notion that we are good on our own. Then, as a does not defile anyone. (Matt. 15:10–11, 18–20) result of the gospel of grace, the Holy Spirit directs our lives of gratitude in congruence with the law. The law always Here the Lord reveals that Aristotle and the rest of us are points us to Jesus and his cross. That is the place where our wrong. The world may want to operate according to sin was imputed to him and his righteousness was imputed action/consequence or from the outside in, but God does to us. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no not operate that way. Rather, he is concerned with the sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of heart, the motivations, the inside, the root, and so is his God” (2 Cor. 5:21). An incomplete understanding of the law in its primary theological function. law may lead one to the conclusion that it is ours to fulfill.

Jesus also reveals this in his Sermon on the Mount. He No: the law is always his to fulfill. “Do not think that I have explains that we do not break God’s law simply through come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come our actions, but first in our thoughts and hearts. Anger to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matt. 5:17). with your brother is the same as murdering him. Lusting As a result, our relationship with God is not dependent after another is the same as committing adultery. Jesus on our works but on his completed work for us. We are takes the law to its highest pitch here. It is concerned with saved by grace through faith. We believe that Jesus has matters of the heart. The only way for anyone to be good already done everything for us so that we might be free and pleasing to God is to have a pure heart, to have comfrom the obligation of the law and its penalty of death pletely pure motivations, to never have a bad thought (Gal. 5:1). As a result, we are saved from having to be perabout anyone or anything. In short, as Jesus sums up, “You fect on our own. We are forgiven, and we stand in the fact that “it is finished” (John 19:30). therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” Jesus’ final word on our sin reveals the radical nature (Matt. 5:21–48, emphasis mine). This is language about our of the gospel: it is a free gift (Eph. 2:8). It is based on faith state of being as opposed to our behavior. The law is about and not works, which means it is unconditional and canmore than individual sinful actions; it is about the sinful not be earned or deserved. While the law can only make state of the heart that leads to those actions. demands of us, “the Gospel contains no demand, only the Now we have hit bedrock. We have come to the foungift of God’s grace and truth in Christ.”14 The if/then condation of the matter. The law is God’s demand for our perditional nature of relationships ends and because/therefore fection. In order to be in right relationship with God, as I wins out. “Because we have been justified by faith, therefore tried to be, we have to be perfect like God. What a crushwe have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” ing reality! As God’s first word to us, the law acts as a mir(Rom. 5:1). Because Christ died for you, therefore you are ror to reflect to us our sinful selves.11 The law is not the tool we use to get better because we can never use it to forgiven. Because Christ has fulfilled the law, therefore you improve ourselves; this was never its function.12 Rather, are set free from its demands. The gospel is the answer to the law exposes our failure to be better, to be perfect. In the law’s accusation. light of this, our feeble attempts to improve ourselves What are the implications of this distinction between here and there are laughable. We don’t even come close! law and gospel for our understanding of the Bible?

This is the reality of the law: “No one is righteous, no, not Considering both the law and gospel kills the notion that one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have the Bible is a manual for living—a view commonly held turned aside; together they have become worthless; no today. If the Bible were such a manual, Christianity would one does good, not even one” (Rom. 3:10–12). be all about what we do. Instead, the Bible is God’s active

Because Christ died for you, therefore you are

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Word in our lives. From it comes the law, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” crushing any notion of self-justification by our good works and revealing our sinful state. With the law is the gospel—the freeing message that Jesus Christ died for our sins and was raised for our justification (Rom. 4:25). The two words tell us that Christianity is all about what he has done! The Bible is the proclamation of the truth—the truth about us and about God. It is nothing short of revelation, and this truth sets us free indeed. C. F. W. Walther said it best: “The true knowledge of the distinction between the Law and the Gospel is not only a glorious light, affording the correct understanding of the entire Holy Scriptures, but without this knowledge Scripture is and remains a sealed book.”15 What are the implications of these two inseparable words for our everyday lives?16 As mentioned above, our relationship with God does not depend on us; rather, it rests solely on the completed work of Jesus Christ at the cross. When we understand this about our relationship, the result is that we can rest. We can finally have peace.

Our efforts to preserve a relationship with God can stop.

Our motivations for our study of the Bible, prayer, and worship can come not out of fear of punishment or separation from God but out of the joy of security in God’s faithfulness to us shown in his Son, Jesus, so that we are inspired to grateful living. Whenever we feel the accusation of the law, we can recognize its purpose, which is to drive us back to the cross where we hear the gospel again.

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:38–39) ■

Sean Norris is an M.Div student at Trinity School for Ministry (Anglican) after serving as director of National Programs for Mockingbird Ministries. He is editor of Judgment and Love and Two Words (Mockingbird Ministries) and co-host of Two Words (www.thetwowords.com), a theology program that airs on Pirate Christian Radio.

Gerhard Ebeling, Luther: An Introduction to His Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 111. John Calvin is in complete agreement with Luther regarding the division of the Scriptures into the two words of law and gospel. Calvin demonstrates this in the title of Book Two of his Institutes of the Christian Religion: “The Knowledge of God the Redeemer in Christ, First Disclosed to the Fathers under the Law, and Then to Us in the Gospel” (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 241. Also see C. F. W. Walther, The Proper Distinction between Law and Gospel (St. Louis: Concordia, 1986), 6.

2“For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it” (James 2:10).

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In his summation of all of the law and the prophets into these two great commandments, Jesus reveals that the law is concerned with our relationship first to God (“You shall love the Lord your God”), second to our neighbor (“Love your neighbor”), and third to ourselves (“as yourself”). So, all laws fall under one of these categories. For example, exceeding the speed limit is a sin against my neighbor and myself as it endangers us both. Although the speed limit is not a “holy law” specifically, it is an echo of it in that it asks you to consider and “love” your neighbor (and yourself) by driving at a responsible and safe speed. Even the speed limit reveals us to be lawbreakers.

4Martin Luther refers to these as “The Double Use of the Law” in his Commentary on Galatians (Grand Rapids: Kregel Classics, 1979), 189. For more on “the double use,” see 189–200, and see also chapter 8 of Gerhard Ebeling’s Luther: An Introduction to His Thought.

5Luther, Commentary on Galatians, 190.

6Calvin wrote, “The fulfillment of the law is impossible for us.” Calvin, 353.

7Luther writes in his Commentary on Romans, “But God judges according to what is at the bottom of the heart, and for this reason, His law makes its demands on the inmost heart and cannot be satisfied with works, but rather punishes works that are done otherwise than from the bottom of the heart, as hypocrisy and lies” (Grand Rapids: Kregel Classics, 1976), xiii.

8Luther, Commentary on Galatians,190.

9Paul F. M. Zahl, “The Tradition of Christian Social Ethics,” Systematic Theology Course 360 (Christian Social Ethics), Trinity School for Ministry, Ambridge, PA (25 January 2005).

10Luther, 194.

11Martin Luther wrote in Thesis 1 of The Heidelberg Disputation, “The law of God, the most salutary doctrine of life, cannot advance humans on their way to righteousness, but rather hinders them.” In Gerhard O. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 23. In addition, John T. Pless wrote, “The Law is a powerful word. It has the power to crush and to kill, to convict and to condemn. But the Law is absolutely impotent to give life and renew. The Law can uncover our lack of love for God, but it is powerless to create this love.” John T. Pless, Handling the Word of Truth (Saint Louis: Concordia, 2004), 71–2.

12Article XI of the Articles of Religion of the Anglican Communion reads, “We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our works or deservings. Wherefore, that we are justified

by Faith only, is a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort.” The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing, 1979), 870.

13Pless, 13.

14Walther, 60.

15James Nestigen wrote, “Separated from the Law, the Gospel gets absorbed into an ideology of tolerance in which indiscriminateness is equated with grace. Separated from the Gospel, the Law becomes an insatiable demand hammering away at the conscience until it destroys a person.” In Pless, 12.

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The Distinction between Law and Gospel in Reformed Faith and Practice

By Michael Horton

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here is no “rightly dividing the Word of truth” if we confuse law and gospel. Both are essential—neither can be ignored and both are distinct.

Commands and promises not only teach different things, they do different things. I agree with Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor in Geneva, who said that “ignorance of this distinction between Law and Gospel is one of the principle sources of the abuses which corrupted and still corrupt Christianity.”1 In recent years, though, I have heard some people say that this is just a Lutheran axiom.

First, many who say this have not really understood the point. Some seem to think it means that the law is bad and the gospel is good, but this misunderstands the position.

No less than the Reformed has Lutheranism affirmed God’s law. Furthermore, both traditions hold that the law is good not only in exposing our guilt so we will flee to Christ (the “first use”), but also in its third use (guiding believers). In fact, this “third use” was first advanced by Luther’s associate Philip Melanchthon and is affirmed in the Book of Concord. The law and the gospel are not opposed in the abstract (as if God’s command could be inherently opposed to his promise), but in the concrete situation of our condemnation in which the question arises as to how we can be right with God. Second, many who say this have not observed the numerous references to this distinction, which is accepted as a standard rule of thumb in our circles. Calvin, Beza, Knox, and Cranmer all affirmed it. Calvin says that his critics “still do not observe that in the contrast between the righteousness of the law and of the gospel, which Paul elsewhere introduces, all works are excluded, whatever title may grace them [Gal. 3:11–12]….[N]ot even spiritual works come into account when the power of justifying is ascribed to faith.” It is the chief mistake of the medieval scholastics “who mingle their concoctions” to “interpret the grace of God not as the imputation of free righteousness but as the Spirit helping in the pursuit of holiness.”2 In his Reformed Symbolics, Wilhelm Niesel observes, “Reformed theology recognises the contrast between Law and Gospel, in a way similar to Lutheranism. We read in the Second Helvetic Confession: ‘The Gospel is indeed opposed to the Law. For the Law works wrath and pronounces a curse, whereas the Gospel preaches grace and blessing.’”3 As early as the first page of his Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, Ursinus (the primary author of the Heidelberg Catechism) states: 12 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

The doctrine of the church is the entire and uncorrupted doctrine of the law and gospel concerning the true God, together with his will, works, and worship....The doctrine of the church consists of two parts: the Law, and the Gospel; in which we have comprehended the sum and substance of the sacred Scriptures….Therefore, the law and gospel are the chief and general divisions of holy scriptures, and comprise the entire doctrine comprehended therein…for the law is our schoolmaster, to bring us to Christ, constraining us to fly to him, and showing us what that righteousness is, which he has wrought out, and now offers unto us. But the gospel, professedly, treats of the person, office, and benefits of Christ.

Therefore we have, in the law and gospel, the whole of the Scriptures comprehending the doctrine revealed from heaven for our salvation….The law prescribes and enjoins what is to be done, and forbids what ought to be avoided: whilst the gospel announces the free remission of sin, through and for the sake of Christ….The law is known from nature; the gospel is divinely revealed….The law promises life upon the condition of perfect obedience; the gospel, on the condition of faith in Christ and the commencement of new obedience.4 Peter van Mastricht recognized that a failure to distinguish law and gospel, or the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, leads inevitably to treating the gospel as a “new law” and a denial of Christ’s all-sufficient salvation.5 In his Pearl of Christian Comfort, the formative Dutch minister Petrus Dathenus takes as its main thesis that its interlocutor did not know how to properly distinguish law and gospel because of the preaching she evidently had to endure.6 The continental Reformed theologians during and immediately following the Reformation period were unanimous in this respect, and the significant structural place they give to law and gospel in their systems is evident even as recently as Louis Berkhof’s opening to his Systematic Theology in the section, “The Word of God as a Means of Grace.”7 J. Van Bruggen adds more recently, “The [Heidelberg] Catechism, thus, mentions the gospel and deliberately does not speak of ‘the Word of God,’ because the Law does not work faith. The Law (Law and gospel are the two parts of the Word which may be distinguished)

onciliation in the cross. Man’s inventions, man’s judges; it does not call a person to God and does not work instrumentality, man’s authority, are nothing in such trust in him. The gospel does that.”8 Reformed theology in Britain followed the same course. a case, and have no power; they may palliate, but they The law-gospel distinction is carefully developed by the cannot cure the agony of a wounded spirit, —they early Scottish theologian Robert Rollock.9 According to may perplex, they cannot pacify a troubled conWilliam Perkins, father of Elizabethan Puritanism, “The science. None but CHRIST, beheld by the eye of faith, basic principle in application is to know whether the pasin the glory of his divine majesty, the tenderness of his sage is a statement of the law human sympathies, the fullor of the gospel. For when the ness of his gospel offices, the Word is preached, the law and perfection of his finished “The power of God’s law is such the gospel operate differently. work, the efficacy of his one The law exposes the disease of and constant that nothing else can meet it but atonement sin, and as a side-effect stimuintercession, the greatness of lates and stirs it up. But it prohis Almighty power, and the the power of Christ’s Gospel.” vides no remedy for it….The riches and freeness of his law is, therefore, first in the grace. None but CHRIST, order of teaching; then comes and Christ without any the gospel.”10 Even believers need to hear the Bible other, can bind up the broken-hearted, and give libpreached and applied with a clear view of this distinction. erty to the captive soul.16 “Our sanctification is partial as yet. In order that the remnants of sin may be destroyed we must always begin with Charles Spurgeon, a Calvinistic Baptist, said, meditation on the law, and with a sense of our sin, in order to be brought to rest in the gospel.”11 There cannot be a greater difference in the world The law-gospel distinction is enshrined in the contrast between two things than there is between law and between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace grace. And yet, strange to say, while the things are diaas it is taught in the Westminster Standards.12 It is replete metrically opposed and essentially different from each in the sermons and theological treatises of Episcopal other, the human mind is so depraved, and the intelPuritans such as Perkins, Richard Sibbes, and Archbishop lect, even when blessed by the Spirit, has become so Ussher; Presbyterian Puritans such as Thomas Cartwright turned aside from right judgment, that one of the and Thomas Watson; and Independents such as John most difficult things in the world is to discriminate Owen and Thomas Goodwin. In commenting on Hebrews properly between law and grace. He who knows the difference, and always recollects it—the essential dif12:18–24, John Owen contrasts Sinai and Zion in terms of ference between law and grace—has grasped the marlaw and gospel. The moral law is still obligatory for believrow of divinity. He is not far from understanding the ers, Samuel Petto observes; however, “they take it not gospel theme in all its ramifications, its outlets, and its from the hand of Moses, in its terror and rigour, but from branches, who can properly tell the difference the hand of Jesus Christ, who has redeemed from the curse of it.”13 between law and grace. There is always in a science some part which is very simple and easy when we In his Treatise on the Law and the Gospel, J. Colquhoun have learned it, but which, in the commencement, (1748–1827) noted in his introduction, “Every passage of stands like a high threshold before the porch. Now, the sacred Scripture is either law or gospel, or is capable of first difficulty in striving to learn the gospel is this, being referred either to the one or to the other.”14 In fact, he warns critics, “If they blend the law with the gospel or, between law and grace there is a difference plain enough to every Christian, and especially to every which is the same thing, works with faith, especially in the enlightened and instructed one; but still, when most affair of justification, they will thereby obscure the glory enlightened and instructed, there is always a tenof redeeming grace and prevent themselves from attaindency in us to confound the two things. They are as ing joy and peace in believing.”15 opposite as light and darkness, and can no more agree Jumping ahead to the nineteenth century, we than fire and water; yet man will be perpetually strivencounter the same emphasis across a broad spectrum. We find it throughout the work of Bishop Ryle, and Scottish ing to make a compound of them—often ignorantly, Presbyterian James Buchanan recalled the distinction as and sometimes willfully. They seek to blend the two, he challenged trends in his own day: when God has positively put them asunder.17 If [one’s] conscience has really been quickened by the power of God’s Word and Spirit, it cannot be pacified but by the simple faith of Christ. The power of God’s law is such that nothing else can meet it but the power of Christ’s Gospel. A sense of God’s wrath in the conscience can only be allayed by a view of God’s rec-

Closer to our own time, Westminster Theological Seminary’s John Murray warned, “In the degree to which error is entertained at this point, in the same degree is our conception of the gospel perverted….What was the question that aroused the apostle [Paul] to such passionate zeal and holy indignation, indignation that has its kinship with

the imprecatory utterances of the Old Testament? In a word it was the relation of law and gospel.”18 As I point out in my article “Rightly Dividing the Word: Negotiating Continuity and Discontinuity” (see page 15), the art of distinguishing law and gospel does not mean simply dividing every sermon into a “law” section and a “gospel” section. Nor does it eliminate the importance of the third use of law as the way of gratitude. It simply means that every time we preach, hear, or read God’s Word, we recall that God not only tells us what to do but announces to us what he has done for us in his Son.

Theodore Beza, The Christian Faith, trans. James Clark (Focus Christian Ministries Trust, 1992), 41ff.

2John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), 3.11.14–15.

3Wilhelm Niesel, Reformed Symbolics: A Comparison of Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Protestantism, trans. David Lewis (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962), 217 4Zacharius Ursinus, Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, from the 1852 Second American Edition), 1–3.

5Cited by Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. Ernst Bizer, trans. G. T. Thomson (London: Wakeman Great Reprints, from 1950 edition), 290.

6Petrus Dathenus, The Pearl of Christian Comfort (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Press, 1986, reprint).

7Louis Berkhof, “The Law and the Gospel in the Word of God,” Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 112: “The Churches of the Reformation from the very beginning distinguished between the law and the gospel as the two parts of the Word of God as a means of grace. This distinction was not understood to be identical with that between the Old and the New Testament, but was regarded as a distinction that applies to both Testaments. There is law and gospel in the Old Testament and there is law and gospel in the New. The law comprises everything in Scripture which is a revelation of God’s will in the form of command or prohibition, while the gospel embraces everything, whether it be in the Old Testament or the New, that pertains to the work of reconciliation and that proclaims the seeking and redeeming love of God in Jesus Christ. And each one of these two parts has its own proper function in the economy of grace.”

8J. Van Bruggen, Annotations on the Heidelberg Catechism (Neerlandia, Alberta: Inheritance Publications, 1998), 170.

9Robert Rollock, “A Treatise of Our Effectual Calling and of Certain Common-Places of Theology Contained Under It,” in Select Works of Robert Rollock, ed. William M. Gunn, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: The Woodrow Society, 1849), especially chapter 2.

10William Perkins, The Art of Prophesying (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1996), 54.

11Perkins, 60.

12Westminster Confession of Faith, chap. VII: “The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience unto him as their Creator, yet they 1

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could never have any fruition of him, as their blessedness and reward, but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which he hath been pleased to express by way of covenant. The first covenant made with man was a covenant of works, wherein life was promised to Adam, and in him to his posterity, upon condition of perfect and personal obedience. Man, by his Fall, having made himself incapable of life by that covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second, commonly called the covenant of grace: wherein he freely offered unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in him, that they may be saved, and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto life, his Holy Spirit, to make them willing and able to believe.”

13Samuel Petto, The Great Mystery of the Covenant of Grace (Stokeon-Trent, UK: Tentmaker Publications, 2008, reprint), 72.

14J. Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Law and the Gospel (Grand Rapids: Soli Deo Gloria, 1999, reprint), xxv.

15Colquhoun, xxvi.

16James Buchanan, On “The Tracts for the Times” (Edinburgh: John Johnstone (London: R. Groombridge, 1843), 102.

17C. H. Spurgeon, The New Park Street Pulpit. Sermon preached 2 March 1856, available online: http:www.spurgeon.org/sermons/0069.htm.

18John Murray, Principles of Conduct (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957, reprint 1991), 181.

A Poem on Law & Gospel The law supposing I have all, Does ever for perfection call; The gospel suits my total want, And all the law can seek does grant.

The law could promise life to me, If my obedience perfect be; But grace does promise life upon My Lord’s obedience alone.

The law says, Do, and life you’ll win; But grace says, Live, for all is done; The former cannot ease my grief, The latter yields me full relief....

The law brings terror to molest, The gospel gives the weary rest; The one does flags of death display, The other shows the living way....

Lo! in the law Jehovah dwells, But Jesus is conceal’d; Whereas the gospel’s nothing else But Jesus Christ reveal’d.

—Ralph Erskine (1745)

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Rightly Dividing the Word: Negotiating Continuity and Discontinuity

By Michael Horton

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ften we find that differences among Christians over end-times views reveal broader disagreements about how to interpret the Bible as a whole.

Ancient Gnostics (especially Marcion) rejected the Old Testament, pitting Yahweh the Creator God of the Jews against the New Testament Christ of Spirit and grace.

Irenaeus, second-century bishop of Lyons, refuted Gnosticism not only at the level of its heretical doctrines, but in terms of its insistence upon a radical discontinuity between the two testaments. As a result, the church father’s Against Heresies remains one of the most articulate explorations of covenant theology in the church’s history.

During the medieval era, the emphasis fell on continuity. The New Testament was called “the new law,” revealing more of God’s truth but not fundamentally different in its administration. In fact, it was generally assumed that “Christendom” was an extension of Israel’s history.

Monarchs were anointed as David’s successors, leading the armies of the Lord against the infidels—as well as against each other. Led by John of Leiden and Thomas Müntzer, radical Anabaptists in the sixteenth century captured some German cities and instituted a violent though short-lived theocracy. Most Anabaptists, however, were pacifists.

Instead of invoking Joshua’s holy wars, they withdrew

from secular society, taking the Sermon on the Mount as their constitution. Emphasizing the discontinuity of the testaments, Anabaptists rejected infant baptism. Although the old covenant included the children in the covenant, entrance into the new covenant community can only be secured by a personal decision.

The Protestant Reformers opposed all of these options.

On the one hand, the fusion of Christ’s kingdom and Europe (or a few German cities as the “New Jerusalem”) was seen as a “Judaizing error,” similar to the mistake of Jesus’ contemporaries who sought a renewed old covenant theocracy. On the other hand, they affirmed the continuity of the gospel and the covenant of grace. The promise that God made to Abraham remains the basis for the covenant, even though the theocracy constituted at Sinai has become obsolete with Christ’s advent. Therefore, children are still included in the covenant. In other words, the Reformers recognized continuity in terms of God’s unfolding covenant of grace, while affirming on the basis of the New Testament the points of obvious discontinuity between old and new covenants.

In our own day, we see a similar spectrum of opinion about the relationship between the two testaments. At one extreme are those who emphasize continuity to the point S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 15

where the New Testament is seen merely as an extension of the old covenant, at least at the level of the civil laws.

A small but influential movement in the 1970s and ‘80s, known as Christian Reconstruction (or Theonomy), was an example of this extreme. At the other extreme is dispensationalism, which divides biblical history into various dispensations that have their own program, each ending in failure. A sharp contrast is drawn between the age of law (corresponding to most of the Old Testament) and the age of grace (corresponding to much of the New Testament). Following C. I. Scofield, Lewis Sperry Chafer, and Charles Ryrie, many dispensationalists have gone so far as to suggest that some New Testament passages remain “under the law,” while others (like the Lord’s Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount) are relevant only for a future “kingdom age.”

Dispensationalism is not just a particular view of the end times; it is a hermeneutic—that is, a way of interpreting the whole of Scripture. It stresses the discontinuity between God’s various covenantal dealings with human beings and especially the distinction between Israel and the church.

Instead of reading the Old Testament in the light of the New, we should read the Bible progressively. As we will see, this is the heart of the difference between covenantal and dispensational hermeneutics. Furthermore, dispensationalists generally adhere to a literalistic hermeneutic.

That is, although they recognize typology (for example, the Old Testament sacrificial system pointing forward to Christ’s work), they believe that every prophecy naming Israel refers literally to the nation of Israel and that details, such as lions lying down with lambs, are to be taken literally as references to actual animals. Nondispensational interpreters have usually regarded such prophecies as referring to the expanded Israel of God in the new covenant, with a remnant from Israel and the Gentile nations, with the apocalyptic imagery of peace between the nations and a church that is no longer persecuted. Obviously, this requires that we read the Old Testament promises in the light of their New Testament fulfillment, just as the apostles interpreted the Scriptures.

According to the traditional scheme, there are seven dispensations: (1) Innocence, (2) Conscience, (3) Civil Government, (4) Patriarchal, (5) Mosaic, Grace/Church, (6) Millennial Kingdom, and (7) Eternal State. Even those who do not accept all seven dispensations divide biblical history into three broad categories: the age of law covers the whole period of the Old Testament; the age of grace that occupies a brief parenthesis of the Church Age; followed by the age of the kingdom.

In the past, strict dispensationalists taught that there were even parts of the New Testament that are not applicable to believers in the Church Age. They hold that Christ offered his kingdom to the Jews but that they rejected it.

When he returns to establish his millennial kingdom, the Jews will embrace it; but for now there is no kingdom of Christ on the earth. In the meantime, the Church Age is a parenthesis between God’s dealings with the nation of 16 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

Israel. More recently, progressive dispensationalism has emerged, with more continuity between Old and New Testaments.

In spite of their differences, the tendency in both of these extreme positions is to treat the biblical plot as coalescing around the Sinai covenant that established the nation of Israel as a geopolitical theocracy.

Over and against both of these extremes, traditional Reformed (covenant) theology maintains that the principal covenant that runs through both testaments is the covenant of grace, especially as it was announced to Abraham. Both testaments give us the history of the church, from infancy to adulthood. It is the theocracy that was a parenthesis in God’s plan, pointing forward typologically to Christ and his kingdom. Although the old covenant is obsolete, having been fulfilled by Christ, the Abrahamic covenant continues in its new covenant administration.

There are obvious discontinuities, of course. Baptism has replaced circumcision. Females as well as males are given the sign and seal of the covenant. The Lord’s Supper has replaced Passover. Furthermore, we are no longer under the shadows of the law—its ceremonies and the civil laws that governed every aspect of Israel’s life in the land. There is no holy land, except Christ and his church spread throughout the world. There are therefore no holy wars to be waged; Christ has defeated the serpent and driven him out of heaven where he accused God’s people day and night. And one day, Christ will return to cast Satan and his angels, along with unbelievers, into the lake of fire. At long last, the whole earth will be filled with God’s glory, cleansed of everything that defiles, and the saints will be glorified in everlasting righteousness, justice, and peace.

So, on one hand, there is the continuity between Old and New Testaments. There is one covenant of grace unfolding from promise to fulfillment, from shadows to reality, from less clarity to greater clarity. It actually begins in Genesis 3, when God promises our fallen parents a Redeemer. It is this gospel that creates the church and sustains it throughout its history. On the other hand, there are differences that are evident within the Old Testament itself, especially between the old covenant (Sinai) by which the nation preserves its right to remain in the land and the promised new covenant (Zion) to which believers were directed in faith, longing for the Messiah’s arrival.

Whenever we come to the Scriptures, either as hearers or readers, we bring with us certain presuppositions about continuity and discontinuity. It’s pretty simple either to eliminate differences or to divide God’s Word into Old and New Testaments (law and grace, respectively). The challenge for all of us is to allow the cumulative evidence of many biblical passages to determine where these continuities and discontinuities lie. In that process, we cannot help but appreciate the nuances in the Scriptures through the different covenants that nevertheless serve the ultimate end of realizing the covenant of grace. The following are some important questions that help us think through these issues of continuity and discontinuity.

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Should we interpret the Old Testament in the light of the New Testament? es, on the grounds that this is the way that Jesus and the apostles preached and taught the Scriptures (Matt. 5; John 24). Peter in his Pentecost sermon interprets the Old Testament in the light of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. So does Stephen. All of the sermons in Acts reflect this pattern. In fact, at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, James interprets Amos 9 in this way: through the prophet God declared, “After this I will return, and I will rebuild the tent of David that has fallen; I will rebuild its ruins, and I will restore it, that the remnant of mankind may seek the Lord, and all the Gentiles who are called by my name, says the Lord, who makes these things known from of old.” In a dispensationalist interpretation, a prophecy like this that refers to rebuilding the tent of David and the ruins of Israel has to be taken literally as referring to the nation of Israel. James, however, interprets it as being fulfilled now, as justification for including Gentiles in the church without demanding that they first adopt the Jewish customs.

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Does the Bible emphasize continuity or discontinuity in God’s plans? his question is a little more complicated. Dispensationalists properly recognize that there are different covenants in the Scriptures. We dare not flatten out biblical history, treating it as a collection of timeless doctrines and principles. But these different covenants can’t simply be divided into discrete eras. For example, the Mosaic covenant was based on law (“Do this and you shall live”); it pertained exclusively to the typological land of Canaan and to the people of Israel.

God’s covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15 is quite different. God promises to bring blessing to all nations through Abraham’s seed. It’s not a conditional promise based on human faithfulness, but a divine oath that is fulfilled in the new covenant with the coming of Christ.

Especially Paul emphasizes that the Mosaic covenant, which came over four centuries later, cannot annul the earlier (Abrahamic) covenant, and that everyone who has faith in Christ is now a true child of Abraham. Moses was saved by grace, in the covenant of grace.

In fact, Paul and the writer to the Hebrews explicitly state that the children of Israel had the same gospel preached to them as we have heard, although we have heard it more clearly on this side of its fulfillment.

However, the promise of long life and blessing in the earthly land was conditioned on Israel’s faithfulness. So the covenant of grace runs continuously through both testaments. It is based on God’s enduring and unconditional promise to Adam and Eve after the Fall to send a Redeemer.

Dispensationalism interprets the Bible as distinct periods of law and grace, while Scripture teaches an unfolding covenant of grace throughout redemptive history—with the Mosaic theocracy added for a time. In

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other words, while dispensationalism sees the church as a parenthesis in a history that revolves around God’s relationship with the nation of Israel, we see the old covenant theocracy as a parenthesis in a history defined by the covenant of grace.

Does the New Testament treat the new covenant church as the expansion of Israel (the old covenant church) or as two separate entities with different programs? he prophets themselves tell of the day when a remnant from all the nations will be brought into Zion and its borders will be expanded to include the whole earth. They speak of Egyptians, Assyrians, and other former hostile enemies of Israel being united in a fellowship of salvation and worship. It was Ezekiel who prophesied an end-time sanctuary built without hands.

Paul says clearly that everyone who has faith in Christ is united to Abraham, that the earthly Jerusalem is actually now in bondage and is the heir of Hagar rather than Sarah. It is the heavenly Jerusalem that is free. Hebrews says that the new covenant has made the old covenant “obsolete” (Heb. 8:13). There is no longer a holy land or a holy people, apart from Christ and his body. There are no more sacrifices. The shadows have served their purpose and have vanished now that the reality has come.

So the church doesn’t replace Israel. All along, the church has existed in embryo to infancy to adulthood. All along it was God’s purpose to unite Jews and Gentiles into one family. The church is older than Israel and the new covenant people of God are called by Paul “the Israel of God” (Gal. 6:16).

Peter applies to the new covenant church the cherished designation of Israel as “a spiritual house/temple” and “a holy priesthood,” bringing “spiritual sacrifices” of thanksgiving through Jesus Christ. “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Pet. 2:4–10).

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Are we to expect catastrophe and then Christ’s kingdom, or is Christ’s kingdom present now in suffering and progress of the gospel to be consummated in glory at Christ’s return? here are good and bad versions of amillennialism.

Following the New Testament, the early Christians recognized the “already” and the “not yet” character of Christ’s kingdom. However, the fusion of Christ and culture since Constantine announced prematurely the consummation of Christ’s reign. Why long for Christ’s bodily return when we’re doing so well, when the church seems to be in charge of things?

Jesus and Paul explicitly invoke the distinction between “this age” and “the age to come” (Matt. 12:32; 24:3; 1 Cor. 2:6; Gal. 1:4). The contrast, however, isn’t as observably cut-

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and-dried as many had expected. With his triumph over the demonic forces, culminating in his death and resurrection, Jesus has inaugurated the age to come. And yet, it is breaking into this present evil age. There is a clash between the realities of the age to come and the bondage of this age.

There is an “already” and a “not yet” aspect to the kingdom.

John the Baptist announced that “the kingdom of heaven is near” (Matt. 3:2) and Jesus announced that it had arrived, as he healed the sick, raised the dead, and declared after the return of the seventy disciples from their mission, “I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning” (Luke 10:18). “But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons,” Jesus said, “then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” The strong man (Satan) has been bound, so that his house may be looted (Luke 11:20–22). Above all, sinners and outcasts are being forgiven directly by Jesus, without any connection to the temple machinery.

With Satan bound, the apostles are called to go into all the world and unlock the prison doors and free the captives.

They are given by Christ the keys of the kingdom, to bind and loose on earth what has been bound and loosed in heaven (Matt. 16:19; 18:18; John 20:23). The exodus is past, but now is the era of conquest through the witness of the gospel to the ends of the earth. Only when Jesus returns will the conquest be consummated as the kingdoms of this age are made the kingdom of our God and of his Christ.

Contrary to the expectations of most of Jesus’ contemporaries (including John the Baptist and his own disciples), this single event will not happen all at once. It will unfold in a series of fulfillments, and the space that we now occupy as the church today is the parenthesis in which the final judgment is postponed, so that the gospel of the kingdom can be proclaimed to the whole world.

So we must be careful not to fall into the same misunderstanding of the kingdom that was shared by Jesus’ contemporaries. Tasting morsels of that day, with various healings and victories over the demonic forces in the ministry of Jesus and his apostles, we want to see fully realized here and now the consummation to which these signs pointed. If necessary, we will bring about the consummation of this kingdom ourselves! This is a danger we have to resist, because it misunderstands that the most crucial vocation of the church in this present age is the proclamation of the gospel. “Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, [Jesus] answered them, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “There!” for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you’” (Luke 17:20–21).

The kingdom of God in this present phase is primarily audible, not visible. We hear the opening and shutting of the kingdom’s gates through the proclamation of the gospel, in the sacraments, and in discipline. Taking no notice of the kingdom of God, the nations will be going about their daily business, engaging in violence and immorality as in the days of Lot, “eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building” when Jesus will 18 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

return suddenly (Luke 17: 22–30). We, however, are called to repent and believe in Christ, to make disciples, to be disciples, and to proclaim this gospel to the ends of the earth. The kingdom is present, but not yet fully present.

Only if we hold in slight esteem the forgiveness of sins, rebirth into the new creation, justification, sanctification, and the communion of saints, can we fail to revel in these present realities of Christ’s reign. In his resurrection, Christ has inaugurated the final resurrection of the dead. Already, the verdict of the last judgment is being rendered in the present. Those who believe in Christ are already declared righteous, and those who do not are already condemned (John 3:16–19, 36). “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). The decisive verdict of the Last Day is already known for all who believe the gospel.

Everything that was promised through the prophets (including John the Baptist) is indeed part of the kingdom that Christ brings. In fact, it is true that they belong to one and the same event. It becomes clearer as the Gospels unfold, however, that the manifestation of this kingdom occurs in two phases. At present, this Spirit is raising those who are spiritually dead and giving them faith, uniting them to Christ for present justification and sanctification as well as future glorification. Yet believers, like unbelievers, still suffer common ills as well as blessings. They eventually die, but believers die with the hope of the resurrection in a renewed heavens and earth. By his Word and Spirit, Christ is now gathering a people for himself. Only when he returns, however, will the angel proclaim with a loud voice, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” (Rev. 11:15).

When we return to Jesus’ teaching and actions in the Gospels, we can see this already/not yet tension. No longer “at hand,” Jesus announces that the kingdom is “here” (Mark 1:15; Matt.11:5–6; 12:28; 13:1–46; Luke 11:5–6, 20; 17:20–23:15:4–32). The king is present, inaugurating his kingdom. At the same time, he speaks of its full realization in the future (Matt. 6:10; 16:28; Mark 9:1; Luke 6:20–26; 9:27; 11:2; 13:28–29). The kingdom is coming but also has come (Matt. 12:28–29; Luke 11:20).

How is the kingdom coming? he manner in which the demons respond to Jesus shows his authority over them, but it is not just a raw power: it is his coming in his kingdom of grace and forgiveness that they fear most. Satan and his emissaries are busiest not with plotting wars and oppression—these are symptoms of the sinful condition that human beings are capable of generating on their own. However, Satan knows that if the Messiah fulfills his mission, the curse is lifted, his head is crushed, and his kingdom is toppled.

All of Satan’s forces are deployed in this last battle for “all authority in heaven and on earth.” All of Jesus’ miracles are pointers to this saving announcement; they are not ends in themselves. The kingdom comes with words

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and deeds. In the miracles, it is said that Satan has bound these people (viz., Luke 13:11, 16). Christ is breaking into Satan’s territory, setting history toward a different goal, bound to his own rather than to demonic powers. This is why Paul’s call to spiritual battle in Ephesians 6 identifies the gospel, faith, the Word, and Christ’s righteousness as the armor and weapons. Satan’s energies are now directed against the church and its witness to Christ. The devil knows his house is being looted and his prisons are being emptied as the gospel is taken to the ends of the earth.

Whatever the salutary effects of this kingdom on the wider society, with Christians living as salt and light, this age cannot be saved. It is dying. Through his apostles, Christ declares to the churches, “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever” (Gal. 1:3–5). To be sure, the Spirit is also at work in common grace, restraining the spiritual entropy of this present evil age. However, the Spirit’s saving mission is not to improve our lives in Adam, under the reign of sin and death, but to crucify us and raise us with Christ. Paul reminds us that “the appointed time has grown very short.” We marry, live, and work in the world, but without anxious attachment to this present age: “For the present form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:31). Like God’s counsel to the captives in Babylon, Peter exhorts believers to “conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Pet. 1:17–19, emphasis added). Fully involved with the common life of our neighbors, we are nevertheless pilgrims who, with Abraham, are “looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God” (Heb. 11:10).

Instead of calling down God’s judgment and driving out the Gentile nations, Jesus commands us to pray for our enemies. “You have heard it said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ [Exod. 21:24; Lev. 24:20; Deut. 19:21].

But I say to you, ‘Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him your left’” (Matt. 5:38–39). God no longer sends plagues among the godless but “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous,” and he expects us to imitate his kindness (Matt. 5:43–48).

This is not the time to judge our neighbors, but to take the log out of our own eye (7:1–5), to diligently seek God’s good gifts (vv. 7–11), to enter through the narrow gate (vv.

13–14), and to bear good fruit (vv. 15–27).

In fact, when Jesus went to a Samaritan village preaching the good news and was rejected, James and John wanted to call for fire to fall from heaven in judgment upon them. “But he turned and rebuked them. Then they went to another village” (Luke 9:51–56). Nicknamed “sons of thunder,” James and John were clearly looking for a kingdom of glory all the way to the very end (Mark 10:35–

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45). They even asked Jesus if they could be seated at his right and left hand at the presidential inauguration, but Jesus told them that they had no idea what they were asking: namely, crucifixion with Jesus (vv. 35–40). As such, there is no holy land over which to fight. There aren’t even holy places, shrines, or sanctuaries, since Christ and his people together form the end-time sanctuary. Jesus was announcing the arrival of the new covenant, which he would inaugurate in his own blood (Matt. 26:28).

Confusing Christ’s kingdom of grace with the Sinai theocracy was precisely the error that Paul addressed especially in Galatians. The kingdom of God in its present phase simply is the announcement of the forgiveness of sins and, on this basis, entrance into the new creation. The signs that Jesus performed were evidence that the age to come had indeed broken in on this present evil age. That is why he told John’s disciples to return with the news of healings, but especially that “the poor have the gospel preached to them,” adding, “and blessed is the one who is not offended by me” (Matt. 11:5). In other words, this is his mission in his earthly ministry and blessed are those who are not put off by it, expecting something other than this salvation of sinners. God’s kingdom is all encompassing, yet it arrives in two stages with Christ’s two advents.

When Christ returns in power and glory, there will be no need for the proclamation of the gospel, no need for faith or hope. There will be only love, since the reality will be evident and fully realized for everyone to see (1 Cor. 13:8–13; Rom. 8:19–25). “At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. But we see him, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Heb. 2:8–9).

It’s not that the horizon of Jesus’ contemporaries was too broad but that it was too narrow. While they were settling merely for a messiah who would restore geopolitical theocracy, Jesus Christ was bringing a universal dominion—not just overthrowing Gentile oppressors but casting out the serpent from heaven and earth forever: “For behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you” (Luke 17:21). In the present era, his kingdom of grace is a reprieve for repentance and faith in Israel and throughout all nations before Christ’s return. It is a new creation at work in the world— a new covenant yielding new relationships with God and with each other based on forgiveness and fellowship rather than on judgment and exclusion.

Conclusion he late Paul Ricoeur, a philosopher and French Reformed believer, reflected on the Bible as a vast inter-text, weaving together diverse genres in service to one unfolding plot. Some of these reflections in Figuring the Sacred may be helpful as we think through this issue. “In effect, what progressively happens in the Gospel is the recognition of Jesus as being the Christ,” says Ricoeur. “We can say in this regard that the Gospel is not

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a simple account of the life, teaching, work, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but the communicating of an act of confession, a communication by means of which the reader in turn is rendered capable of performing the same recognition that occurs inside the text.”1 “The narrative of the life and death of Jesus is organized in such a way that the knowledge unveiled right at the beginning should be appropriated by the actors themselves and, beyond them, by the reader. It is the work of the text to do this.”2 The Bible is “one vast ‘inter-text.’”3 The laws and the narratives can’t be pulled apart, as is often done in higher criticism.4 The laws (and doctrines) keep the narrative from simply passing away into the past, while the narratives ground the laws and doctrines “in its theology of the covenant in speaking of God’s faithfulness.” The covenants give the narratives a “cumulative aspect” to biblical time and the identity of Israel’s God.5 The old is always at work even in the new, as the new covenant is still talking about “a new exodus, a new desert, a new Sinai, a new Zion, a new Davidic descendance, and so on....A few centuries later, the

early church will turn this procedure into a hermeneutic and find in it the basic structures of its typological reading of the OT”6—a retrospective and prospective dialectic already at work in the Old Testament itself. Prophecy and eschatology keep the history from standing still. ■

Michael Horton is J. Gresham Machen Professor of Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido).

Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1995), 162.

2Ricoeur, 162.

3Ricoeur, 171.

4Ricoeur, 172.

5Ricoeur, 173.

6Ricoeur, 176.

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William Tyndale’s Pathway into Holy Scripture

By Thomas Wenger Most know William Tyndale (1484–1536) as one of the most important figures in translating the Scriptures for the English-speaking world. But rarely discussed are his deep, pastoral concerns that all who read those Scriptures must understand the distinction between the law and the gospel. In fact, Tyndale saw this as so crucial that he wrote a lengthy Prologue for his new translation that focused on unpacking the importance of this distinction. Knowing that many of his readers would be handling the Scriptures themselves for the first time, Tyndale’s Prologue is an impassioned plea for them to understand the roles of the law and the gospel before they read the Bible so that they will divide it rightly from the very beginning. As he says at the outset: Nevertheless, seeing that it hath pleased God to send unto our Englishmen…the scripture in their mother tongue, considering that there be in every place false teachers and blind leaders; that ye should be deceived of no man, I supposed it very necessary to prepare this Pathway into the scripture for you, that ye might walk surely, and ever know the true from the false: and, above all, to put you in remembrance of certain points, which are, that ye well understand what these words mean; the Old Testament; the New Testament; the law, the gospel; Moses, Christ; nature, grace; working and believing; deeds and faith; lest we ascribe to the one that which belongeth to the other, and make of Christ Moses; of the gospel, the law; despise grace, and rob faith.

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Tyndale was so adamant about the importance of this understanding that at the conclusion of the work he stated: These things, I say, to know, is to have all the scripture unlocked and opened before thee; so that if thou wilt go in, and read, thou canst not but understand. And in these things to be ignorant, is to have all the scripture locked up; so that the more thou readest it, the blinder thou art, and the more contrariety thou findest in it, and the more tangled art thou therein....Herewith, reader, be committed unto the grace of our Savior Jesus; unto whom, and God our Father through him, be praise for ever and for ever. Amen.

As he unfolds his explanation he demonstrates an insightful grasp of redemptive history and couples it with such practical pastoral teaching, it is hard to believe this piece is not read and discussed more often. The Prologue, which scholars think is Tyndale’s first original work, was written no later than 1525, and such an early date makes it all the more intriguing. Tyndale later republished it in 1532, with a few minor revisions, as A Pathway into the Holy Scripture.

The brief portions quoted here are from that work.

Evangelion (that we call the gospel) is a Greek word; and signifieth good, merry, glad and joyful tidings, that maketh a man’s heart glad, and maketh him sing, dance, and leap for joy: as when David had killed Goliath the giant, came glad tidings unto the Jews, that their fearful and cruel enemy was slain, and they delivered out of all

danger: for gladness whereof, they sung, danced, and were joyful. In like manner is the Evangelion of God (which we call gospel; and the New Testament) joyful tidings; and, as some say, a good hearing published by the apostles throughout all the world, of Christ the right David; how that he hath fought with sin, with death, and the devil, and overcome them: whereby all men that were in bondage to sin, wounded with death, overcome of the devil, are, without their own merits or deservings, loosed, justified, restored to life and saved, brought to liberty and reconciled unto the favor of God, and set at one with him again: which tidings as many as believe laud, praise, and thank God; are glad, sing and dance for joy….

“The law” (saith the gospel of John in the first chapter) “was given by Moses: but grace and verity by Jesus Christ.” The law (whose minister is Moses) was given to bring us unto the knowledge of ourselves, that we might thereby feel and perceive what we are, of nature. The law condemneth us and all our deeds; and is called of Paul (in 2 Corinthians 3) the ministration of death. For it killeth our consciences, and driveth us to desperation; inasmuch as it requireth of us that which is impossible for our nature to do. It requireth of us the deeds of an whole man. It requireth perfect love, from the low bottom and ground of the heart, as well in all things which we suffer, as in the things which we do. But, saith John in the same place, “grace and verity is given us in Christ:” so that, when the law hath passed upon us, and condemned us to death (which is his nature to do), then we have in Christ grace, that is to say, favor, promises of life, of mercy, of pardon, freely, by the merits of Christ; and in Christ have we verity and truth, in that God for his sake fulfilleth all his promises to them that believe.

Therefore is the Gospel the ministration of life.

Paul calleth it, in the fore-rehearsed place of the 2 Corinthians 3 the ministration of the Spirit and of righteousness. In the gospel, when we believe the promises, we receive the spirit of life; and are justified, in the blood of Christ, from all things whereof the law condemned us. And we receive love unto the law, and power to fulfill it, and grow therein daily. Of Christ it is written, in the fore-rehearsed John 1. This is he of whose abundance, or fullness, all we have received grace for grace, or favor for favor. That is to say, For the favor that God hath to his Son Christ, he giveth unto us his favor and good-will, and all gifts of his grace, as a father to his sons. As affirmeth Paul, saying, “Which loved us in his Beloved before the creation of the world.” So that Christ bringeth the love of God unto us, and not our own holy works. Christ is made Lord over all, and is called in scripture God’s mercystool: whosoever therefore flieth to Christ, can neither hear nor receive of God any other thing save mercy.

In the Old Testament are many promises, which are nothing else but the Evangelion or gospel, to save those that believed them from the vengeance of the law.

And in the New Testament is oft made mention of the law, to condemn them which believe not the promises.

Moreover, the law and the gospel may never be separate: for the gospel and promises serve but for troubled consciences, which are brought to desperation, and feel the pains of hell and death under the law, and are in captivity and bondage under the law. In all my deeds I must have the law before me, to condemn mine imperfectness. For all that I do (be I never so perfect) is yet damnable sin, when it is compared to the law, which requireth the ground and bottom of mine heart.

I must therefore have always the law in my sight, that I may be meek in the spirit, and give God all the laud and praise, ascribing to him all righteousness, and to myself all unrighteousness and sin. I must also have the promises before mine eyes, that I despair not; in which promises I see the mercy, favor, and good-will of God upon me in the blood of his Son Christ, which hath made satisfaction for mine imperfectness, and fulfilled for me that which I could not do….

The right Christian man consenteth to the law that it is righteous, and justifieth God in the law; for he affirmeth that God is righteous and just, which is author of the law. He believeth the promises of God; and justifieth God, judging him true, and believing that he will fulfill his promises. With the law he condemneth himself, and all his deeds, and giveth all the praise to God. He believeth the promises, and ascribeth all truth to God: thus, everywhere, justifieth he God, and praiseth God….

For when the evangelion is preached, the Spirit of God entereth into them which God hath ordained and appointed unto eternal life; and openeth their inward eyes, and worketh such belief in them. When the woful consciences feel and taste how sweet a thing the bitter death of Christ is, and how merciful and loving God is, through Christ’s purchasing and merits; they begin to love again, and to consent to the law of God, how that it is good and ought so to be, and that God is righteous which made it; and desire to fulfill the law, even as a sick man desireth to be whole, and are an hungered [sic] and thirst after more righteousness, and after more strength, to fulfill the law more perfectly. And in all that they do, or omit and leave undone, they seek God’s honor and his will with meekness, ever condemning the imperfectness of their deeds by the law.

Tom Wenger is an assistant pastor at the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Annapolis (PCA) in Annapolis, Maryland.

In this article, the author has quoted from William Tyndale, “A Pathway into the Holy Scriptures,” in Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scriptures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1848).

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Reflecting Upon Scripture “You’re So Vain, You Probably Think This Text Is About You”

By Shane Rosenthal

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n their widely acclaimed book The Narcissism Epidemic, authors Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell document the slow and steady growth of narcissistic attitudes, behaviors, and assumptions in various aspects of American life and culture. Reality TV both encourages and normalizes self-centered behavior. Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook encourage us to post pictures and updates about our minute-byminute activities no matter how trivial, and child-centered schools reward kids merely for exerting effort, even if the actual work is substandard. And in the midst of all this, mega-best-selling books regularly flatter us with words such as, “You are the most powerful magnet in the Universe!”1 Unfortunately our churches have not been immune to this cultural virus, for according to Twenge and Campbell, American religion—which used to challenge narcissistic attitudes and behaviors—is now in many respects part of the problem. In today’s religious climate where churches compete for adherents as fast-food franchises do for customers, many religious groups simply “give people what they want. Because reducing narcissism is not always 22 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

pleasant, most people aren’t going to attend churches that demand humility.”2 The Narcissism Epidemic also includes an interesting account of a visit by one of the authors to a Southern California megachurch featuring numerous gourmet coffee huts, a Dave Mathews-like praise band, and a motivational speaker who told “a fantastic story with a personal life message.”

According to Twenge and Campbell, “You could watch the service from inside the stadium, from just outside, or in a coffee shop/bookstore on a flat-screen TV.” But in the end, they conclude that the service “demanded nothing.”

It was just “really entertaining.” The reason this megachurch was attractive to outsiders, they argue, was due to the fact that it had adapted to “today’s self-oriented culture.”3 It’s interesting to me how closely this parallels the world of television programming as described by Neil Postman in his widely acclaimed book Amusing Ourselves to Death. For in the effort to compete for an increasing number of viewers, networks simplify everything and demand nothing. According to Postman, “Perplexity is a superhighway to low ratings. This means that there must be

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nothing that has to be remembered, studied, applied, or worst of all, endured. It is assumed that any information, story or idea can be made immediately accessible, since the contentment, not the growth of the learner is paramount....Television teaching always takes the form of story-telling, conducted through dynamic images and supported by music.”4 But doesn’t that sound curiously like the visit to the megachurch as described by Twenge and Campbell? Is it possible that in our desire to reach out to people in new, relevant, and contemporary ways, we have functionally turned our churches into television shows? As interesting as that may be to think about, I believe there is an even more important question to ask: How have all these cultural trends affected the way we read and interact with Scripture?

The Spectrum of Sheilaism n the 1985 book Habits of the Heart, sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues traced the outlines of a new kind of American spirituality that was taking root. In particular, they interviewed a young nurse by the name of Sheila Larson who described her faith as “Sheilaism.” “I am not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.”5 According to the authors, “This suggests the logical possibility of over 220 million American religions, one for each one of us.” When asked to define her faith Sheila said, “It’s just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other.”6 In his book Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks accurately described this kind of religiosity as the “narcissism of the New Age movement,” in which “free spirituality” easily and frequently morphs into a kind of “lazy spirituality.” Brooks therefore argues that “the toppling of old authorities has not led to a glorious new dawn but instead to an alarming loss of faith in institutions and to spiritual confusion.”7 But Sheilaism may not be only a good description of the religious and spiritual lives of New Age types. As he was lecturing in a seminar on the topic of his book Habits of the Heart, Bellah further elaborated:

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The case of Sheila is not confined to people who haven’t been to church in a long time. On the basis of our interviews, and a great deal of other data, I think we can say that many people sitting in the pews of Protestant and even Catholic churches are Sheilaists who feel that religion is essentially a private matter and that there is no particular constraint on them placed by the historic church, or even by the Bible and the tradition.8 The point is that it’s easy to think of Sheilaism as something that’s going on outside the church walls. But the reality of today’s situation is that Sheilaism is alive and well in the beliefs and practices of America’s regular church goers. In other words, what if we begin to think of Sheilaism more

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as a spectrum rather than an on/off switch? In this case, the question would not be whether a given person is a Christian or a Sheilaist, but rather, to what extent have Christians themselves been affected by Sheila's way of thinking?

The most important dogma of this “new and improved” version of Christianity—or “Sheil-ianity,” as I call it—is Bellah’s point that religion is an entirely private matter without objective constraints from the outside such as history, tradition, or even Holy Scripture. This is why most of the contemporary and relevant churches (or what some have recently referred to as “contemporvant churches”) are not interested either in historic liturgies or traditional hymnody. And it’s also why the Bible, more often than not, is interpreted in me-centered and even narcissistic ways.

In traditional Sheilaism, the Bible is never even opened because its adherents generally listen to their own inner voices for spiritual guidance. But in the hybrid of Sheilianity, the Bible is frequently used, albeit in nontraditional ways. Formerly, it was viewed as God’s unfolding drama of redemption, but today it is thought of as life’s instruction book, or as a guide to self-fulfillment and inner peace. Sheila Larson listened to her own little voice and came to the conclusion that we should all try to love ourselves and take care of each other. But what is amazing is the fact that practitioners of Sheil-ianity often come to this same exact conviction through their reading of the Bible.

How is this possible?

Exegesis vs. Eisegesis rriving at the correct interpretation of a text is sometimes a difficult task, especially in the case of great books that challenge us to think and reason about abstract and difficult issues. Mortimer Adler—a tireless advocate of reading and profiting from great books— once observed that “the Word of God is obviously the most difficult writing men can read.”9 In fact, Peter came to a similar conclusion about Paul’s writings when he admitted, “There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction” (2 Pet. 3:16). For us, much of the difficulty of proper biblical interpretation lies in the difference in time, language, and culture, so that the basic grammar of the text is in some cases difficult to discern. In other cases, though the grammar and syntax are self-evident, the idea being communicated is challenging—especially to people like us who are used to being bottle-fed by our educational, cultural, and ecclesial institutions, and as a result we are unable to digest solid food of any kind (Heb. 5:12–14). But in either case, the interpretation of Scripture is seldom an easy task, and those who do not put the required effort into getting the proper meaning out of the text (exegesis) often end up reading their own ideas into it (eisegesis).

In his classic book Principles of Biblical Interpretation, Louis Berkhof cautions his readers by saying that “the word of God originated in a historical way, and therefore, can be understood only in the light of history.”10 In other

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words, Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians was not written to me and is not about me. Rather, it’s a letter written by the apostle Paul to Christians in the ancient city of Corinth. As obvious as that idea may seem at first glance, it’s actually the source of one of the biggest mistakes that Christians make today as they attempt to read and interact with Scripture. Berkhof goes on to say, “It is impossible to understand an author and to interpret his words correctly unless he is seen against the proper historical background.”11 We actually do the very opposite. Not only do we fail to set the words of Moses, David, or Paul in their proper historical context, but we also work hard to transport these ancient writers to our own time and place so they appear to speak directly to our own present day issues. For example, I recently ran across the following introduction to the book of Ezra: Who are you? I’m a sports fan. I’m the child of a politician. I’m a guitar player. I’m a teenager. I’m a CPA. I’m Asian. I’m Methodist. I’m in the top tax bracket.

Sometimes we identify ourselves through our interests. Other times we identify ourselves according to age ethnic background or income. Sometimes we identify ourselves through our professions, or our professions of faith. So who are you anyway? That’s the central question in the book of Ezra.12 You’ll notice the writer does not focus our attention on Ezra, the ancient Israelites, or the historical circumstances regarding the Babylonian captivity and the return of the exiles to rebuild and restore Jerusalem. Rather, he focuses directly on the reader who is apparently not all that interested in those historical details but is obsessed with his own guitar playing. This is not the central question in the book of Ezra! What we actually have here is a good example of textual narcissism, the chief hermeneutic employed by the practitioners of Sheil-ianity.

Books employing this approach to Scripture often top the charts of The New York Times Best-sellers List, featuring titles such as Become a Better You, It’s Your Time, or Maximize the Moment: God’s Action Plan for Your Life; while books on central biblical themes such as law and gospel, justification, or the atonement not only fail to sell widely but are actually hard to find, even in Christian bookstores. In fact, in such places it’s actually becoming difficult to find books about God. Think about it. When is the last time a serious book about the Trinity or the attributes of God (i.e., a book of theology) became a best-seller in Christian circles?

The inescapable conclusion to all this is that contemporary Christians are frankly not all that interested in God. They may be interested in using God as a resource to fix their daily problems, but studying who God is and what he’s done in history is a little too far removed from their own interests. What they are really interested in is themselves.

The only way out of this mess is for us to call it like it is. This is not Christianity, but Sheil-ianity. This is not a 24 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

proper handling of God’s Word, but is a fun, easy, and eartickling abuse of Scripture. Toward the end of his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul actually warned us about false teachers who used this sort of approach: “By smooth talk and flattery, they deceive the hearts of the naive” (16:18). This does not speak well of us, for if books and inspirational messages that flatter us are among the most popular in contemporary Christianity, then today’s church must, by the logical force of necessity, be incredibly naive.

Berkhof recommends that we avoid the danger of transporting a biblical author “to the present day and making him speak the language of the twentieth century.” Rather, the proper interpreter of Scripture should work hard to “transfer himself mentally into the first century A.D., and into Oriental conditions. He must place himself on the standpoint of the author, and seek to enter into his very soul, until he, as it were, lives his life and thinks his thoughts.” Finally, Berkhof warns that if a Bible reader fails to do this “the danger exists, as McPheeters expresses it, that ‘the voice he hears (will) be merely the echo of his own ideas.’”13 This advice, it seems to me, is the salve for the narcissistic soul. We need to confess that we have all used the Bible in inappropriate ways. We have all been influenced, more than we care to admit, by our own reflections bouncing off the pages of sacred Scripture. We have heard the echo of our own ideas in countless sermons and Bible studies. What we need is to be drawn away from ourselves, our interests, and our customs to a completely foreign world. We need to be regularly confronted with God and his grand rescue story as it slowly unfolds throughout the pages of biblical history. And we need to have this gospel story preached to us again and again so it becomes the central story that shapes everything else in our lives.

Conclusion arlier this year, I visited the campus of a large evangelical Bible college and conducted a poll of general Bible knowledge for a White Horse Inn “man-on-thestreet” segment. This was a very small survey consisting only of twelve students, randomly selected. At the time we were about to record a series of programs on the book of Galatians, so I asked these twelve “modern disciples” whether they had ever read this particular book of the Bible, and if so, what they thought it was about. The results were disturbing. Though most students had read the book, only two out of the twelve were able to correctly outline its basic message.

When I asked many of the students to tell me why they thought they were unprepared to give an answer about the message of Galatians, I received the following responses: “Churches today don’t go very deep”; “Churches need to have more in-depth Bible studies because a lot of the time it’s pretty shallow”; “Churches need to spend more time teaching us how to read the Bible, and less on the little topical lessons on how to do life.” All the students seemed to be saying the same thing.

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They had been raised in churches where the teaching was fun, dynamic, relevant and entertaining, and where the focus inevitably centered on “lessons for life,” rather than on God and his grand story of redemption in Christ.

“I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion,” Neil Postman poignantly reflected. But he went on to say, “When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.”14 I am inclined to think that a good name for this altogether new kind of religion is “Sheil-ianity.”

What this means for Christians is that we need a Copernican revolution in the way we approach and handle Scripture. It’s not enough to read the Bible. If we read this book with ourselves at the center, we will end up only feeding our inherent narcissism. Though the self-centered approach may initially excite us and hold our interest, in the end it will leave us empty, biblically illiterate, and spiritually malnourished. We will be “always learning and never able to arrive at the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7).

Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for their abuse of the Old Testament saying, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life” (John 5:39a).

How much more do we think he would scold those of our day who fail to focus on issues pertaining to eternal life and instead on having “Your Best Life Now!” The long and the short of it is that the Bible is not about you, your life, improving your marriage, managing your finances, growing kids God’s way, or helping you to realize your full potential. Yes, the Bible does contain instructions concerning how Christians are to conduct themselves in light of the gospel, but admitting that the Bible contains these instructions is not the same as suggesting that the Bible is about these life lessons. Jesus himself told the Pharisees what the Scriptures were about when he said that these

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sacred texts “bear witness about me” (John 5:39b). Now here is something that deserves our reflection! ■

Shane Rosenthal (M.A., Historical Theology, Westminster Seminary California) is the producer of the White Horse Inn radio broadcast. He lives with his wife and family in St. Louis, Missouri.

Rhonda Byrne, The Secret (New York: Atria Books, 2007), 7.

Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic (New York: Free Press, 2009), 246.

3Twenge and Campbell, 247–48.

4Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 2005), 148.

5Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 221.

6Bellah, 221.

7David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 227.

8Robert Bellah, “Habits of the Heart: Implications for Religion” (a lecture given at St. Mark’s Catholic Church, Isla Vista, California on 21 February 1986). This lecture is available online at Robert Bellah’s website: www.robertbellah.com/lectures_ 5.htm.

9Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940), 294.

10Louis Berkhof, Principles of Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1950), 113.

11Berkhof, 114.

12TNIV Audio Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005).

13Berkhof, 115.

14Postman, 121.

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Signposts of the Narcissism Epidemic You can have too much of a good thing, when it comes to self-esteem. In the past few years I’ve done a lot of speaking engagements at colleges and universities across the country, and I’ll say to students, “My research finds that your generation is very narcissistic; this is what the data shows. What do you think?” Almost universally they say, “Yeah, you’re right. We are narcissistic—you got us.” Then they say, “But we have to be narcissistic because the world is increasingly competitive.” That’s how they seem to see it because they’ve been taught that if a little self-esteem is good, then a lot of self-esteem and overconfidence is even better. And they see successful narcissists out there, such as celebrities and other people, who are vain attention seekers and so on. What they don’t see is that when you actually look at the data and look at who is really successful in this world, it’s not people who are narcissistic. It’s people who get along with others who are humble and hard working and give their teams credit. In general, that’s what studies have found, and that narcissistic people—say, in college—are more likely to drop out because they don’t have a realistic sense of their abilities, and they don’t think they have to study since they’re already smart! So it backfires on people. And when I tell young people this, they are shocked! Jaws literally drop when I say, “You don’t actually have to be really self-confident in order to succeed. Sometimes doubting yourself might make you work harder.” For most of them, this is an entirely new idea.

Jean Twenge, author of Generation Me and coauthor of The Narcissism Epidemic, from an August 2, 2009, interview on the White Horse Inn radio broadcast.

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Recovering the Message of Scripture In this special section of our “Rightly Dividing the Word” issue, nine pastortheologians help shed light on some popular texts of Scripture that tend to lose their true redemptive-historical significance in a culture of interpretive narcissism.

Also in this section are four sidebar selections from The Word of God and Preaching by Cornelis Veenhof (1902– 83), a professor and pastor in the Dutch Separated Reformed Church.

This text is translated by Nelson D. Kloosterman, associate pastor of Community United Reformed Church in Schererville, Indiana, and professor of New Testament and ethics at MidAmerica Reformed Seminary in Dyer, Indiana. This material is reprinted with Dr. Kloosterman’s kind permission.

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Noah: A Righteous Man?

By Bryan D. Estelle Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God. (Gen. 6:9b) Then the Lord said to Noah, ‘Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you are righteous before me in this generation. (Gen. 7:1)

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hese statements are shocking, or at least puzzling to Protestant sensibilities. How can any man be “righteous” before God? Did not Adam, our federal head, cast the human race into a state of sin and misery? Are the statements in Romans 3 and elsewhere about the wickedness of human beings true or not?

Let it be stated up front that no mere man of himself can render something meritorious before God of such a nature that it would earn one salvation or entitlement to heaven. As I stated in a book review in Modern Reformation four years ago: “Of course, after the Fall, a mere man is never able to merit anything whatsoever from God. Whatever good proceeds from us is anticipated by God’s work within us.” Indeed, these are confessional commitments from which we must not waver (e.g., the WCF XVI: 5–6 and Heidelberg Catechism #60).

Did Noah find standing before God, in the sense of getting into heaven or gaining personal salvation, by virtue of his righteousness? By no means! After all, it is immortalized in the biblical record that Noah became drunk, which probably contributed to other sins on the part of his family. Noah was a sinner. Noah is going to get into heaven only by grace and by means of faith in Christ. He is a son of Adam and as such there can be no communion with God apart from forgiving grace. However, on another level—a typologically instructive level—his family is going to get into the ark by means of his integrity, and his family is going to be delivered from God’s wrath. Therefore, Noah is a type of Christ in this sense: by his obedience he secures deliverance for his family. This is what the exegesis demands, which can be discussed only briefly in this article.

The Noahic flood cycle, a beautifully arranged literary masterpiece, teaches the people of God that judgment came due to sin. Remember, sin had waxed so strong that we are told, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Gen. 6:5–6). Even so, the Noahic flood narrative also teaches that God would deliver his own people by “shutting them in” safe and sound inside the ark to avoid his wrath that is going to be poured

out on mankind. Just as Noah safely delivered his family through that judgment, so also Christ will deliver all those who belong to him through the judgment of God’s wrath poured out upon mankind for sin. The writer to the Hebrews tells us, “By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith” (Heb. 11:7).

What’s the point? As Meredith Kline taught, this is an arrangement in which God was pleased to designate the exemplary righteousness of a human being to be a typological signifier of a greater deliverer to come. Another would lead God’s family through a greater ordeal of judgment wrath on sin, safe and sound out the other side, so to speak: the coming Messianic Servant-King would win and secure the kingdom for himself and for his people.

Now, how can we say that Noah is a type of Christ? Isn’t there a great disparity between his righteousness and Christ’s? Absolutely! Types and shadows in the Old Testament often occur through certain events, institutions, and people. With regard to people, nowhere are the differences more magnified between types (the shadow) and antitypes (the fulfillment) than in the degree of righteousness involved in the type (in this case, Noah) and the antitype (namely, Christ). Noah was a sinner. Christ was not.

Notice that there are other differences between Noah and Christ here. There is no imputation of righteousness between Noah and his family (unlike Jesus). Moreover, there is no sacrifice for sins between Noah and his family, which is unlike Christ who was the spotless lamb offered for sin on behalf of his people. Nevertheless, in Noah, we see prefigured the great Savior-King who will save his people from the judgment to come. Christ Jesus is the one who came and offered up on the cross his perfect atonement. As such, he took upon himself all of God’s deserved wrath on behalf of his own people. He won the kingdom for his people. Therefore, when you are reading that Noah was a righteous person, you are reading about Christ.

Bryan D. Estelle is associate professor of Old Testament at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.

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Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22): The God Who Provides

By Iain M. Duguid

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ow do modern people relate to a narrative about a man whom God called to offer his only son as a sacrifice? One way would be to identify ourselves with Abraham in this story and see the parallels between this test of Abraham’s faith and our daily struggle to put God first in various areas of our lives. Certainly Abraham is (in this case) a model for us in his faith. But Abraham’s faith is not the main point of the story. Otherwise, at the conclusion of the story the mountain would have been named “Abraham passed the test.” This story is about God and his ability to meet our deepest needs, which is why the mountain is named “The Lord will provide” (Gen. 22:14). This passage addresses us not by urging us to be people of faith like Abraham, but rather by pointing us to the way in which Abraham’s God provided for his (and our) profoundest need.

In Genesis 12, God called Abram to sacrifice his past by leaving his relatives and going in faith to the land God would show him; now, the Lord calls Abraham again to go in faith to the place God would show him—this time to sacrifice his future. In asking Abraham to sacrifice his only son, his beloved son (v. 2), God was rubbing in the enormity of what he was asking. Killing Isaac not only meant sacrificing a beloved child, but also emptying his life of everything he had dreamed of these past twenty-five years, for Isaac was the one through whom blessing was to come to the nations. With his death, all meaning and purpose would be stripped away from Abraham’s existence, leaving him without hope or future.

Yet Abraham responded by getting up early and setting about obedience immediately (Gen. 22:3). Did he have faith that God would somehow do a miracle? Strikingly, he told his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you” (v. 5). When Isaac inquired about the lamb, Abraham assured him, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering” (v. 8). Perhaps Abraham recognized that God could raise the dead, as the writer of Hebrews deduces (Heb. 11:19), but he had no commitment from God to that effect.

Indeed, God called Abraham to go to the very edge in his obedience. Father and son walked up the mountain together, with Isaac carrying the wood for his own funeral pyre. Isaac was bound and laid on the altar, ready to be sacrificed. But at the point when the knife was raised, about to descend on his beloved only son, the angel of the Lord called out to Abraham from heaven and told him to stay his hand. As Abraham looked up, he saw that God had indeed provided a lamb; there, trapped in the thicket, 28 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

was a ram he could offer in his son’s place. It was not only Abraham who passed the test that day; the Lord demonstrated that he was able to provide the offering necessary to atone for Abraham’s sin, without taking away his beloved son. Through his experience of offering his son, Abraham gained a unique insight into God’s plan of salvation—Jesus Christ (see John 8:56). God is always the one who provides the lamb that we need.

This lesson was played out in the lives of the first readers of Genesis, the generation who went into the wilderness with Moses. They too saw their beloved firstborn sons spared by the blood of the Passover lamb, daubed on the doorway of their houses, while the destroying angel struck down the firstborn of Egypt. They knew what it was for God to supply a lamb to take their place. Subsequent generations reenacted the key elements of the storyline each time they brought their own lambs to the temple in Jerusalem.

But all of these Old Testament sacrifices were merely pictures of the time when God himself would reenact this scene. God the Father filled the role of Abraham, bringing his Son, his only Son, the one whom he loved, and laying him on the altar. Jesus Christ became both willing son and willing sacrifice, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Only this time, there was no voice from heaven saying, “Stay your hand.” There was no angelic intervention at the last minute—only the spreading darkness of God’s curse that surrounded the cross and centered upon the mangled and twisted body of the dead son. There was no substitute for him, for he had come to be the substitute for us. Jesus had to drink the cup of God’s wrath to its dregs, if the promise of blessing to Abraham and his descendants was to become a reality. The knife descended; the cup was drained: that was the cost at which we were redeemed.

Just as Abraham’s willingness to take obedience to the ultimate point demonstrated clearly his love for God, so too God’s willingness to take his son’s obedience all the way to the agonies on the cross demonstrates the depth and reality of his love for us. It was not just the son who was paying the price of sin on the cross: the Father too paid deeply for our sin as he laid it all on his beloved Son, bringing down the knife of his righteous judgment upon his defenseless head. Here lies our confidence as we face the complexities and difficulties of life in a fallen world. As Paul put it: “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all— how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Rom. 8:32). Why then are you and I so fearful of the cost that may be demanded of us as we follow Jesus? The God who providentially ordains every aspect of your life is the same God who sacrificed his own beloved Son to provide the perfect righteousness you need. His grace has brought us safe thus far, and his grace will lead us home.

Iain Duguid is professor of Old Testament at Grove City College and pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Grove City, Pennsylvania.

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“If My People”

By Kim Riddlebarger

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t is common to hear Christians claim that America is a “Christian nation.” Because our Lord’s promise of divine protection is given to the church (Matt.

16:18), the temptation is ever present for Christians to mistakenly assume that our Lord’s promise extends beyond the church to that nation in which they live.

The claim that “God is on our side” usually comes to fruition when politically active American evangelicals see themselves in a “culture war”—contending with secular-progressives for the soul of the nation. In the heat of battle, Christians invoke covenant promises made by God to Israel, thinking these promises apply to the United States because they believe that the United States is a Christian nation.

This tendency to apply the covenant promises God made to the nation of Israel directly to America is one of the key indicators of the popular but erroneous assumption that America is a Christian nation because it was founded on “biblical principles” and therefore possesses some sort of unique relationship to God, just as Israel did under the old covenant.

But America has no national covenant with God, as did Israel under the covenant God made with his chosen people at Mount Sinai. This fact presents a serious problem for those who assume that the promises God made to ancient Israel somehow apply to the United States. Covenant promises of blessing and curse that were given to Israel in a particular biblical context cannot be applied to contemporary political issues given the role such covenant blessings and curses played in Israel’s unique history.

One such example of applying these covenant promises to modern America can be found on the website for the National Day of Prayer, where we read the following, Our goal is to see communities transformed across America. That happens one family at a time. We know lives are being changed. We see the reports and statistics everyday (read Answered Prayer). We pray in expectation knowing that God can and will make a difference if we seek Him, turn from our ways and repent (II Chronicles 7:14).1 The stated desire of the National Day of Prayer is the transformation of communities and individuals. Biblical support is taken from 2 Chronicles 7:14: “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” This passage is cited apart from any consideration of the redemptive-historical context in which the verse originally appears—the dedication of Solomon’s temple (2 Chron. 6–7)—which is specifically God’s private

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revelation to Solomon after the public manifestation of fire in the previous verses (2 Chron. 7:1–3).

Those who see themselves in the midst of a culture war, or who are seeking a national revival, often affirm that if only God’s people living in America would act upon the covenant promises God made to Israel in 2 Chronicles 7:14, then God would spare our nation from some impending calamity—usually the election of some disagreeable political figure, or the passage of some worrisome piece of legislation, or a high court decision that is perceived to undermine Judeo-Christian values. If God made this promise to Israel during the days of Solomon, then he is still making this promise to Christians who live in America today. Right?

The invocation of 2 Chronicles 7:14 closely parallels warnings made by certain dispensationalists who see the end times centering on God’s program for national Israel.

Biblical passages that speak of covenant blessings and curses coming upon Israel’s enemies (e.g., Gen. 12:3) are interpreted to mean that unless the United States supports the modern nation of Israel (specifically in terms of the land promise given to the physical descendants of Abraham), America risks coming under God’s judgment.

As one prominent evangelical in Congress contends: I am convinced in my heart and in my mind that if the United States fails to stand with Israel, that is the end of the United States....[W]e have to show that we are inextricably entwined, that as a nation we have been blessed because of our relationship with Israel, and if we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play....We believe very strongly the verse from Genesis [Genesis 12:3], we believe very strongly that nations also receive blessings as they bless Israel. It is a strong and beautiful principle.2 Although it is believed that God’s promise to those who protect Israel applies primarily to matters of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conundrum, biblical passages referring to Israel (or to Abraham) under the old covenant are applied to contemporary events without the slightest hesitation. In light of Israel’s quite unique role in redemptive history, this kind of application should give us great pause.

If by “Christian nation” we mean that America has some sort of theological charter or covenant with God as set forth in a biblical passage such as 2 Chronicles 7:14, we are sadly mistaken. 2 Chronicles 7:14 applied to Israel in the days of Solomon when God’s glory filled the temple he had just dedicated to YHWH. Passages such as this one are invoked the way they are because of a serious theological misunderstanding—the confusion of promises made regarding the kingdom of God with God’s providential purposes for the civil kingdom. Unless we are willing to rip the passage from its context, it cannot be invoked as a promise applying to modern America. In terms of our national relationship to God, America is every bit as “secular” as is Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, or even Israel for that matter.

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America is not a divinely ordained theocracy with either national promises or threatened curses as was true of Israel.

The reality is that the promise found in 2 Chronicles 7:14 has nothing whatsoever to do with a national revival or the current fortunes of the United States. It has everything to do with the dedication of Solomon’s temple nearly three thousand years ago.

From http://nationaldayofprayer.com/coordinators /getting-started/.

2From a speech given by Congresswoman Michele Bachman in February 2010 to the Republican Jewish Coalition: http://minnesotaindependent.com/55061/bachmann-america-cursed-by-god-if-we-reject-israel.

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Kim Riddlebarger is pastor of Christ Reformed Church in Anaheim, California, and a co-host of the White Horse Inn radio program.

The Word of God and Preaching

By C. Veenhof Translated by Nelson D. Kloosterman Law and Gospel We have just seen that the Word of God is the gospel. It is that above all else. It is that from start to finish. But there is still another aspect belonging to that Word. It is what in Scripture is called “law.” Gospel and law are two aspects of the one, indivisible Word of God. It is therefore a matter of the highest importance to see clearly the distinguishing features of these two aspects of God’s Word—both the difference and the mutual relation between them.

Time and again the church has taken a wrong turn in this regard, to the serious detriment of the life of faith.

We could characterize gospel and law as follows: the gospel is the Word of God wherein he says who and what he is for man. The law is the Word wherein God makes known how man must—and may!—live before his face. The gospel is the Word of God wherein he gives himself to humanity in Christ through the Spirit, along with the whole of salvation.

The law is the Word, in that by it God indicates how and wherein people may give themselves to him. The gospel is the “bestowing” Word. The law is the “requisitioning” Word—the demanding, commanding Word.

Now, in the Word of God it is the gospel, the evangelical aspect of that Word, that is predominant. The Word of God is before all else redemptive Word, gospel.

When God comes to man he does so especially as the gracious, all-loving God, the God who alone accomplishes everything and bestows whatever goodness mankind receives. That was already the case in paradise. For even in the state of righteousness, without God’s coming and giving himself in favor and love there could have been no fellowship between God and man. Even then God’s coming in love and goodness was the starting point and the basis of human living with God in the covenant.

The same thing is true now, in a very unique sense. For

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fallen man the reception of salvation and life is absolutely and solely dependant on God’s coming to him in guilt-forgiving favor or grace. There simply cannot be fellowship with God—no forgiveness of sins and deliverance—unless God is the Initiator, unless as Initiator God turns himself in grace to sinful, godless man. Neither can there be any religion, any covenant, unless in them God is and remains the Initiator, unless with inscrutable grace he absolutely and solely gives that which man receives in religion and covenant.

Now then, it is about God’s being and remaining the Initiator in his relationship to men whom God adopts as his children that the gospel speaks. In its being spoken by God as such, in its coming to man, the gospel is the most convincing proof of that.

At the same time the gospel is also the “means” through which God in a concrete way is and remains the God of all grace, the Initiator in the life of man. For the gospel is the “means” by which he dispenses to men his grace and the gifts of his grace—of which forgiveness of sins and eternal life are foremost! Throughout the gospel God bears witness with the greatest possible emphasis that out of pure grace he bestows forgiveness of sins and eternal life in Christ to the godless, and thus incorporates them into his fellowship.

But at the same time it is the case that by and in the gospel God bestows grace and the gifts of grace, and thereby brings to full realization the fellowship of grace, the covenant within which he desires to live with his own.

On the basis of this gospel and in unbreakable unity with it God now speaks and gives his law which makes plain his will or precept according to which man must and may live. Or, in other words: by the gospel God gives himself to men and places himself in a relationship of grace with them, a relationship within which they as his children must and may live according to his will and law.

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David and Goliath

By Keith A. Mathison

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n the 1986 comedy The Three Amigos, Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Martin Short play three silent-film actors who portray gunfighters in a series of western adventure movies. Through a series of misunderstandings they end up being recruited by the small Mexican village of Santa Poco to help fight a ruthless villain named El Guapo. Near the end of the film, Steve Martin’s character Lucky Day makes an impassioned speech to the villagers: “In a way, each of us has an El Guapo to face. For some, shyness might be their El Guapo. For others, a lack of education might be their El Guapo. For us, El Guapo is a big, dangerous man who wants to kill us. But as sure as my name is Lucky Day, the people of Santa Poco can conquer their own personal El Guapo, who also happens to be the actual El Guapo!”

I cannot hear this speech without immediately being reminded of sermons on David and Goliath. I suspect the screenwriters may have heard a few of the same sermons themselves. Many of us have. After reading the story of David’s battle with Goliath, the preacher asks, “What is the moral of the story?” He then asks whether we have ever encountered a “Goliath” in our lives. What is a “Goliath”?

A “Goliath” is an obstacle in your life that seems impossible to overcome. It is a huge problem that is causing you to consider giving up. To paraphrase Lucky Day, “For some, shyness might be their Goliath. For others, a lack of education might be their Goliath. But with faith, you can conquer your Goliath.” However well intentioned such preachers may be, handling the Scriptures in this manner conditions people to treat the stories of the Bible in a way not much different from the way they might treat Aesop’s Fables.

In order to understand the story of David’s encounter with Goliath, we must dig a little deeper. If we recall, as early as the first chapter of Genesis, Scripture indicates that God’s ultimate plan is to establish his kingdom on earth.

With man’s fall into sin, the serpent usurps the dominion God gave to man. God then promises that there will be perpetual conflict between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. Satan will not thwart God’s purposes.

He will be overthrown, and God will establish his kingdom on earth. If we move beyond Genesis 1 and take a look at the entire Pentateuch, we see several key passages pointing forward to a king who will come “in the latter days” to bring peace (cf. Gen. 49; Num. 24; Deut. 32–33. See John Sailhamer, The Pentateuch as Narrative and The Meaning of the Pentateuch). God has not abandoned his original plan.

The historical books also reveal that God is providentially moving redemptive history toward his goal, namely, the establishment of his kingdom. Joshua describes the conquest of the Promised Land. Judges, then, describes a period of spiraling degeneracy ending in near anarchy.

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This is the context in which we read the books of Samuel.

Samuel narrates the establishment of the monarchy in Israel and the establishment of the Davidic covenant. But how does the story of David and Goliath contribute to this larger redemptive-historical narrative? Space constraints prohibit an exhaustive examination, but we can at least point to some of the major themes that develop here.

In 1 Samuel 2, we read the prayer of Hannah after the birth of Samuel. She looks forward to the rise of God’s anointed king and to his victory over God’s enemies. She declares that the adversaries of the Lord will be broken and that his king will be exalted (cf. v. 10). In 1 Samuel 5, God himself faces the demonic Philistine god Dagon. In this conflict, Dagon ends up face down on the ground with his head separated from his body (1 Sam. 5:4). Not long afterward, the people of Israel clamor for a king like the other nations—a king who will go out before them and fight their battles (1 Sam. 8:20). God gives them Saul to be their king (1 Sam. 9:1–2; 10:1). Because of Saul’s disobedience, God ultimately rejects him, and Samuel promises that a new king will be raised up in his stead (1 Sam. 13:13–14; 15:10, 26, 28). David, a shepherd from the tribe of Judah, is chosen by God and anointed as king (1 Sam. 16:13).

We see, then, that 1 Samuel 17 is set in the context of the transition between the reign of the physically imposing Saul and the reign of David, a youth who was not as impressive to look upon. The Lord has already warned Samuel against looking on outward appearances (16:7).

The story of Goliath will drive that point home. The transition of leadership is hinted at when David tells Saul that he will fight Goliath, and Saul says, “Yahweh be with you” (17:37). The ongoing spiritual warfare between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman is revealed in the speech of the two fighters. Goliath’s speech drips with spiritual defiance, while David’s speech reveals faith and trust in the Lord. The principle that we become what we worship is graphically demonstrated when Goliath, like his god Dagon, winds up face down in the dirt with his head removed from his body (17:49, 51).

In the larger context, this story foreshadows the victory of David’s greater Son, Jesus the Messiah, who through the cross lands the fatal blow to our greatest enemies, death and the devil (cf. Heb. 2:14). Through his work on the cross, the transition to God’s kingdom begins. This kingdom, planned from eternity, foretold throughout the Old Testament, has now been inaugurated. Jesus has been enthroned at the right hand of the Father. On the last day, this kingdom will be consummated. At that time, our Redeemer and King will have put all enemies under his feet (1 Cor. 15:25–27).

Keith A. Mathison is director of curriculum development for Ligonier Ministries and an associate editor of Tabletalk magazine.

Among his books is From Age to Age: The Unfolding of Biblical Eschatology (P&R, 2009).

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Truth or Dare (to be a Daniel)

By Jady Koch

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here are few Old Testament accounts that better highlight the pastoral necessity for properly distinguishing the law from the gospel than that of Daniel in the lions’ den. It is a beautiful and powerful story of God’s faithfulness to his servant and, by extension, to his chosen people during foreign occupation and oppression. This account of God’s specific fidelity to Daniel, however, is often flattened out into a series of general principles for living. In sermons that are more suited for a Rotary Club meeting than the pulpit, treatments of the lions’ den almost invariably encourage you to “dare to be a Daniel” and face down the lions in your life.

This type of moralizing, this tropological reading of the Old Testament—one that Luther and the other Reformers explicitly critiqued—replaces the Christian message of hope and redemption with a perhaps well-intended but nevertheless misguided attempt to motivate and inspire people with morality tales rather than allowing the law and gospel to kill and make alive. The story of Daniel provides a wonderful way to make this distinction between the law and gospel in the Old Testament and clearly points to Christ and his redeeming work. Unfortunately for me, in order to understand this, it took me many years of failing to “dare.”

Between college and seminary I worked for a student ministry called Fellowship of Christians in Universities and Schools (FOCUS), and my job consisted primarily of working with high school guys, helping to connect their lives with the truths of the Christian message. As I saw it at the time, Jesus offered the way to have your best, most purposeful life now, and it was my job to motivate, encourage and lead these students on the paths of righteousness.

Often centering my teaching on “Great Men of the Bible,” the strategy was always to examine the lives of these people, point out their failings and then show how, with enough faith and effort, God could and would redeem them. I loved the humanizing aspects of these heroes; the accounts when Abraham introduces his wife Sarah as his sister, or Jacob and his wrestling match with God, were always favorites. Give me Moses and his reluctance, Paul and his murderous zeal, Peter’s denials, Thomas’s doubts, and, of course, let’s never forget David—thank God for David—but I never touched the book of Daniel.

Perhaps it was because I was too aware of my own irregular prayer life to find much comfort in studying Daniel and his insufferably devout (three times daily) routine (cf. Dan. 6:10). Or maybe I was intimidated by his intelligence (Dan.1:4), his self-control (1:8), or his forward-thinking eco-friendly sustainable vegetarianism (1:12). Whatever the case, I was always more comfortable studying almost anyone else. Daniel was too perfect, too faithful, too much for me to teach about with any sense 32 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

of integrity—not only was his example too much to handle, but also the rewards of his faithfulness were too painful. I was acutely aware of “lions in my own life”—as well as times when I cowardly failed to stand up to my Nebuchadnezzar—and Daniel stood as a constant rebuke.

What I was missing was a clear picture of the gospel, a way of incorporating the message of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection into my appreciation of the Old Testament. What I needed was what C. F. W. Walther would have called “the proper distinction between law and gospel.”

Rightly distinguishing the law from the gospel, more than understanding terminology, is about always keeping the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus front and center. As the apostle Paul endeavored to “know nothing but Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2), so the distinction between law and gospel assures that the cross will always be the lens through which the entirety of Scripture is read. By maintaining this distinction, we see that the law, in this respect, is what we could not fulfill—the judgment of our unbelief and what necessitated Jesus’ substitutionary death. Like a diagnostic tool, the cross reveals the extreme depths of our need for both forgiveness and redemption; it puts the question of sin in the starkest, most dramatic relief. The gospel, on the other hand, is the message of Jesus—our Advocate with the Father (1 John 2:1)—being “crucified for our transgressions and raised for our Justification” (Rom. 4:25); it is the proclamation of the good news that God has reconciled us to himself in Christ and “by his stripes we are healed” (Isa. 53:5).

This brings us back to Daniel. When this account is read outside the lens of the cross, we are tempted to view Daniel as more of a fictional role model than a real human who was given the faith to trust and rest in the promised fidelity of God. True, Daniel was delivered up out of the lions’ den by God’s faithfulness, but when we view this as a pattern to be emulated rather than a promise that we’ve seen fulfilled in Christ, then we are tempted to read Daniel without any reference to the cross at all! When we see that faith in the hoped-for redemption that fueled Daniel’s fidelity has been accomplished in Christ, then we can fully appreciate the message of Daniel, not as a way that God works through general principles, but as a testimony to how he worked then and a promise of his continued involvement now. In this respect, the idea behind “Dare to be a Daniel” is not altogether off the mark, but daring to be a Daniel is nothing more than, in the words of 1 Peter, “always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.” Our hope lies not in our faithfulness to God but in his faithfulness to us in Christ; he is the one who did not come to instruct or to guide but to “lay down his life as a ransom for many.”

The Rev. John D. “Jady” Koch, Jr., is a doctoral candidate in systematic theology at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. An avid Schnitzel eater, he lives with his wife in Vienna, Austria, where he is curate at Christ Church Anglican.

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Jonah and the Whale: Salvation Is of the Lord

By Richard Downs And this is the tragedy of the Book of Jonah, that a Book which is made the means of one of the most sublime revelations of truth in the Old Testament should be known to most only for its connections to a whale. —G. A. Smith1

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artin Luther said once in a sermon that even after twenty years of preaching the gospel he still felt “the old clinging dirt of wanting to deal so with God” that he could contribute something, so that God would have to give him grace in exchange for holiness.2 He captures a basic human instinct for legalism or moralism. Sin’s most blatant form is in the assertion of autonomy. A more nuanced application is to claim a contribution. Such an instinct is disastrous for reading and understanding the Bible. It requires that a story have a moral, that the good guy is rewarded and the bad guy punished. This also means that being good or bad is readily identifiable by discrete acts. Good people obey God, bad people disobey, and one had better be good. Every story in the Bible becomes a warning against bad behavior or an exhortation toward good behavior. The remarkable thing about Luther’s comment is that he reported the struggle continuing through twenty years of ostensibly faithful preaching. One doesn’t get past the impulse to self-justification upon conversion. It’s an ongoing battle.

When one gets to the book of Jonah, this desire for a story with a moral has Jonah as a bad prophet, an antihero who stands as a warning to those who would shirk their duty to God. An anonymous source on the Internet makes the following comments on Jonah: There could have been no city less likely to repent than Nineveh, but when Jonah was finally willing to do as he was told, they did repent!...This same issue is with us today....Miracles can happen in people’s lives when we share the Word of God with them. By withholding the Word, we are failing in our responsibility.3

In the worst way, the readers are commanded to shape up but with no gospel to propel obedience. And, seemingly without realizing it, the writer repudiates Jonah 2:9.

In fact, the book is far more interesting, far more delightful, far more convicting. Jonah’s flight is surprising if not mysterious. The pagans are more sensible to God than he is. He sings of gratitude for his salvation from the belly of the whale. He flees the presence of the Lord, then rejoices in it, then becomes angry at God’s mercy. There is not a linear trajectory in which the bad guy becomes good or the fool becomes wise. There is good news in the account of Nineveh’s repentance and in God’s determina-

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tion to pity them. How will we get to a fuller understanding of this good news?

It is a good idea to imagine the Bible studies Jesus led in Luke 24. As “he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself,” what happened when he got to Jonah? Actually, we know the answer to that question in fairly straightforward terms. Jesus had elsewhere spoken, when he was pushed for a miracle, of “the sign of Jonah.” He would be in the grave as long as Jonah was in the whale, and Nineveh would provide voice to God’s judgment against the generation that missed “one greater than Jonah” (Matt. 12.38–41). Jesus places the story into the much larger picture of God redeeming the world.

There can certainly be peripheral points in any biblical narrative to make us wise. Eugene Peterson’s meditation on vocation that uses Jonah as a springboard has been of benefit to many.4 But such treatments tend to miss Jesus’ point when he spoke of the fulfillment of what was written about him in Jonah. The peripheral have a tendency to become central because, again, our instinct is always to find a way of obtaining some kind of moral status that will gain God’s favor. The pursuit of wisdom is universal. Every religious system contains wisdom and ethics. Something much greater is happening in Jonah. We would do well to pay attention to the bigger picture—the whole history of redemption. Jesus fulfills Jonah, blatantly in his death and resurrection, but also as he embodies God’s love for the nations. God’s concern for the Ninevites is the precursor to Jesus’ interactions with foreigners, his marveling at the faith of the centurion, which of course paves the way for Acts 10 and the apostle Paul’s calling to the nations in fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham. Jonah 2:9 now comes into view, a verse that some have said is the key verse to the whole Bible: Salvation is of the Lord!

Then we also notice in Jonah that it’s pretty easy to juxtapose sinners and saints—sinners can surprisingly repent and saints can be pretty faithless. Maybe believers are simultaneously justified and sinful. That observation can get personal. Phillip Cary, in his commentary on Jonah, captures well the amazing grace in this smallest of books: Jonah is a comic figure: he does everything wrong, almost, yet through him the Lord God of Israel does everything right. All’s well that ends well, as another great comedian once put it, but of course in the middle of the story things can get to be quite a mess.

Jonah is a ridiculous excuse for a prophet—the holy man as screwup—and we’re just like him. Why Jesus would want to identify with him is a deep mystery, as deep as his love for the rest of us.5 Do you remember how new faith spurred great energy for Jesus and his kingdom? Do you sometimes wonder how that zeal and love dissipated? Remembering the love of God, especially as it becomes surprising, puts one in position to ponder God’s love for the Ninevites—not as a S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 33

stimulus for guilt and groveling but as a means of connecting with God’s heart and finding resonance.

Richard Downs (M.Div., Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia) is a pastor at Christ the King Presbyterian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

(Downers Grove: IVP, 2003), 128.

2Martin Luther quoted from Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 375.

3The anonymous Internet quote was gleaned from www.essortment.com/all/jonahwhale_rsug.htm.

4Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1994).

5Phillip Cary, Jonah (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2008), 17.

G. A. Smith quote cited in Rosemary Nixon, Message of Jonah

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The Word of God and Preaching

By C. Veenhof Translated by Nelson D. Kloosterman Scriptural Testimony on Gospel and Law Everywhere the Scripture speaks very clearly about this.

In God’s call of Abraham what resounds in that summons is primarily the evangelistic assurance that God chose him in grace to be his friend, and would bless him and make him a blessing. Immediately after that summons and in connection with it God called the first patriarch to walk before his face and to be blameless (Gen. 12:1–3; 17:1).

When the Lord established his covenant with Israel his first words were, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the house of bondage,” an expression of his gracious love. Immediately after those words God gives his holy law as something flowing directly from them (Ex. 20:1f; Deut. [5:6f.]).

And when Jesus Christ came in the flesh, the cry that the kingdom of God had come echoed more loudly than any other. And on that basis the summons to repent went out to all who heard it, the call to start living according to the will of God (Matt. 3:2, and parallels).

The gospel materially precedes the law; it has a material priority in relation to the law. But this does not mean that gospel and law, the evangelical aspect and the legal aspect of the Word should exist apart from each other. On the contrary, they constitute a wonderful, inseverable unity of life. They are so closely tied to each other and depend so entirely upon each other that to separate them would be to lose them both. Without the law the gospel is a vain dream, a fiction, intoxicating people but afterward leaving them in greater misery than before. Without the gospel the law becomes a power hostile to the gospel, becoming the preeminent means for arousing human pride to the extreme. Pharisaism, the religion of the law-without-the-

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gospel, is perhaps the most universal, dangerous and repugnant manifestation of this arrogance. The despair of the man who tries in vain to keep the law in his own power is another manifestation of that same evil.

How closely gospel and law are related is shown to us clearly through all of Scripture. The passages already mentioned speak of it.

In a particularly clear way this is displayed in the ark of the covenant, as Dr. Woelderink has repeatedly suggested.

The ark of the covenant is the sign of the fellowship, of the covenant fellowship, between God and his people. The covering of the ark is the covering of atonement. Upon it atonement comes into being, in the symbol of sprinkling with the sacrificial blood. In this way it is a sign, a proclamation and the visible gospel of atonement. But the two stone tablets of the law are kept in this ark. In quite a telling manner we are hereby shown that in the covenant of the Word of God’s grace and atonement—the gospel— is tied inseparably to the Word of the law (Ex. 20:1f; Deut.

[5:6f.]). The covenant even obtains concrete shape in the twofold unity of gospel and law, or said another way: in the twofold unity of promise and summon. Therefore these may not be separated from one another for a moment. To do that would be to tear God’s covenant asunder in a fundamental sense.

Moreover, gospel and law are intimately united. One could say that from start to finish every gospel-word is also law-word. For the gospel as such is always a passionate summons to faith. For God proclaims the gospel so that it may be believed. The preaching of the gospel to the Philippian jailor sounded like this: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31). Here is full gospel preaching. In these words of Paul Jesus Christ draws near to the jailor and offers himself as his Savior. But at the same time these words are a penetrating summons to believe, a powerful proclamation of the summons, the law of faith.

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The Sermon on the Mount

By Brian W. Thomas

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n the past decade numerous studies have highlighted the sad demise of biblical literacy, a fact well known to regular listeners of the White Horse Inn. Many Christians can no longer recite the basic tenets of the faith, including the Ten Commandments, let alone answer the question, “What does this mean?” This is not to say that moralism has fallen on hard times; you can rest assured it continues to flourish. The problem lies in our inability to distinguish the law from the gospel as we read the Word of God that both kills and makes alive. Nowhere is this more prominent than in popular treatments of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7) where monographs and sermons perpetuate the problem with titles such as “The Keys to Success” and “Blueprint for Building the Christian Life.”

From this perspective, Matthew’s “mount” becomes shorthand for Sinai with Jesus reprising the role of Moses to offer the spiritually devout a better life now by doling out moralistic tips. By making the law the terminal point, many unknowingly fashion a Jesus who is more akin to a life coach than a Messiah. In what follows, we will briefly sketch how a law/gospel hermeneutic might correctly divide this critical passage.

The law is not difficult to locate in this periscope. “You have heard that it was said...but I say to you” (Matt. 5:22– 48). Throughout this discourse, many interpreters find Jesus expanding the ethical horizon of the moral law as he pulls back the curtain on the issues of anger and murder, lust and adultery, marriage and divorce. But in light of Jesus’ announcement that he has not come to abolish the law and the prophets in the least (5:17), it is perhaps better here to see Jesus illustrating the moral perfection the law has demanded all along, overriding previous distortions that sought to dull the law’s sharp edge. Jesus is not enlarging the circumference of the Torah but demonstrating how it judges the thoughts and intentions of the heart. The law is more than a list of do’s and don’ts—it is the perfect will of God for man that describes his relationship to God and his fellow man within the context of a covenant relationship. (See Peter C. Bender, Lutheran Catechesis.)

The gospel of the sermon rings most loudly when Jesus reveals the reason for his coming; he has come to fulfill the law and the prophets (Matt. 5:17). These are the most comforting words of the entire passage. The law is holy and inviolable, leaving us with no place to hide as it brings its penetrating indictment (lex semper accusat). Jesus’ purpose is not to abolish but fulfill (pler sai). Since he is holy and perfect, he does not need to fulfill the law for himself, but does so that his perfect obedience may be imputed to those who are unable to keep what the law demands, which happens to be perfection (cf. Lev. 11:44; 1 Pet. 1:16). As David

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Scaer notes in The Sermon on the Mount, “The message of the Sermon is not a demand, driving the Christian to an impossible moral perfection, but it comes to the Christian as a demand fulfilled already in Christ and which is now made possible for believers, since it has first reached its demands in Christ.” Jesus not only fulfilled the law by actively keeping its moral obligations, but also passively by receiving the judgment we deserved for failing to keep it—for the wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23). From this approach, the law’s requirements are not flouted but fulfilled; and in their fulfillment we confess that Jesus is the Messiah—the One to whom the law and the prophets were pointing all along (John 5:46).

The thought that one’s righteousness must exceed that of the Scribes and the Pharisees in a first-century context would have been devastating (5:20), for these two groups were thought to have reached the height of holiness; but from Jesus’ vantage theirs was a righteousness that fell well below what God would accept. Those who teach that people merit God’s righteousness by works of the law commit the worst of errors; for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified (Gal. 2:16). The righteousness of which Jesus speaks is qualitatively different from that of the Scribes and the Pharisees; it is a gift appropriated by faith alone.

(See William R. Farmer, “The Sermon on the Mount,” SBL Seminary Papers.)

The Sermon on the Mount must be interpreted in light of its primary recipients, the disciples (Matt. 5:1). Likewise, this discourse must not be torn asunder from the rest of Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus not only fulfilled the Law of Moses, but also the promises of Abraham, David, and the prophets. While Matthew certainly includes Mosaic typology throughout his record, it is reductionistic to think of Jesus as simply a new lawgiver or a second Moses.

Jesus did not come in the flesh to sit on the sidelines of life, cheering us on like some kind of spiritual Phil Jackson.

This view leads to pietism (legalism) or antinomianism (licentiousness). Rather, Jesus took the field in our place because we have utterly failed and fouled out. By faith we share in the fulfillment victory he accomplished on another mount called Golgotha, and on account of this, we are freed from the law’s tyranny and able to walk by faith in the Spirit bearing good fruit (Matt. 7:20). As the King’s disciples we must always look to Yahweh’s provision, not our personal performance. Our obedience never affects our relationship with God; it merely reflects the relationship God has graciously bestowed in Christ. May God continue to teach us by the Holy Spirit in the school of experience the high art of rightfully distinguishing the law and the gospel as we handle the precious Word of truth.

Brian W. Thomas is vicar of Grace Lutheran Church in San Diego, California, and is a graduate student of the Cross-cultural Ministry Center at Christ College, Concordia University in Irvine, California.

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The Word of God and Preaching

By C. Veenhof Translated by Nelson D. Kloosterman Preaching Gospel and Law From this example it is also clear that genuine preaching of the law is at the same time full preaching of the gospel. For as Paul sounds forth this preaching off the law and holds this summons before the jailor, God in Christ stands before the jailor. In and with these words Christ stands before him as Redeemer. In fact, he is basically saying: “I am the Lord your God.” Moreover, that proclamation of the law is the guarantee that God will give what he asks. For God asks only for what he gives. And we can give only what he has first given us and what we’ve received from him. But if God actually, earnestly asks of us what he alone can give to us, then does not the guarantee of God’s really giving it lie already in his asking? God doesn’t play frivolous games with men, certainly! (In this connection one thinks of Augustine’s well-known words: da quod jubes et jube quod vis [Give what you command—and command what you wish].) A commandment like the well-known “This is his commandment, that we should believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ” is therefore fully gospel (I Jn. 3:23). In the giving of this “law” lies the absolute certainty that Jesus Christ desires to give himself, along with all the treasures and gifts that he embodies, to whomever this demand of faith comes.

Therefore, we could and should put it this way: just as the gospel is totally permeated with the law, so too the law— truly!—is fully evangelical. In view of this state of affairs we would therefore rather speak of an evangelical aspect and a legal aspect of the Word of God, rather than simply of gospel and law.

When one has learned to understand the Word of God as the indivisible unity of gospel and law, it is impossible to posit that the preaching of the law must precede the preaching of the gospel in order to lead men to discover their sin and guilt. Law and gospel proceed simultaneously from God’s mouth, so that as a result the law can be heard, understood and believed in no other way than in its unbreakable unity with the gospel. Especially the demand of faith presupposes the gospel and its proclamation. To be sure, this demand is embodied in and flows out of the gospel and as a consequence can be heard and obeyed in no other way than in and with the gospel.

When we learn to understand God’s Word as the intimate unity of gospel and law, then it also becomes clear what the heart of this law is. It is nothing else than the law of summons to faith, the call to believe. Whenever the speaking God directs himself to men he addresses them with the gospel, and then the immediate priority reaching men is the summons to accept the gospel in faith.

The Catechism quite accurately defines the first commandment of the law of the Lord as the commandments of 36 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

faith. The exposure of sin which God so obviously desires to effect before everything else is the exposure of the sin of unbelief.

The Jews on Pentecost and Saul on the Damascus road were not exposed on this or that transgression of this or that commandment. Rather, the realization began to live in them that they had rejected him whom God had given them as a Savior. That is to say: they were exposed in their unbelief. But at the same time, intimately involved with that was the opening of their eyes to see Jesus Christ as the Messiah who had come, as the living Savior. Yes, from the law comes the knowledge of sin. But this law is so interwoven with the gospel that we must simultaneously assert that their eyes were opened through the gospel, that through it they came to believe in Christ and were made alive. The gospel embodies and maintains the law this way so that we who know our sins should accept God’s grace in order to start living out of it.

According to its origin and nature God’s law is holy, righteous and good (Rom. 7:12). It is the expression of God’s fatherly will with regard to people whom he has created. It is the guide for how people may live as his children. In the Old Testament it was called “instruction.” The longest psalm is a sustained hymn of praise to the law of the Lord. According to its nature the law does not coerce.

It summons people to love him who has first loved us and gave himself in love to people who are the image of God as well. To live completely according to the law is salvation. It is also to stand in perfect freedom. The law of God is the law of freedom (Jas. 2:12). For the godless alone is the law full of threat; for them alone the law demands fulfillment with the penalty for failure of eternal condemnation. Moreover, in those who despise the law it causes sin to break out more and more strongly.

Finally, we must mention that talking about “gospel and law” entails a serious danger. The unintentional consequence of this way of talking is that the evangelical and law aspects of God’s Word are still viewed as two independent entities that must be brought together and held in balance. Often the expression mentioned above is evidence and proof of the fact that one views gospel and law in that kind of a relationship.

With this way of talking and this conception of gospel and law we are then risking the same misunderstanding and danger that threaten us when we talk about “Word and Spirit.” Those too become, when designated in that way, two entities which can be separated from each other and which can operate independently of each other. What is forgotten is that in the Word we are dealing with an utterance of the Spirit, which simply cannot even exist without the active, speaking Spirit. The fact is overlooked that when the Spirit comes somewhere, he always comes speaking, which is to say: he comes in and through the Word.

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The Prodigal Son

By A. Craig Troxel

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hen I heard the news on New York City’s WFAN that Michael Jordan was coming out of retirement to play basketball again, the voice said, “The ‘prodigal son’ of the NBA has come home.” Here was a sports radio station in “unchurched” New York City assuming that its listeners possessed sufficient religious literacy to catch the biblical allusion as well as its meaning and significance. The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11– 32) is one of the most well-known passages in the Bible, among both Christians and non-Christians alike. Everyone knows this parable and everyone knows what it means.

People, however, have “discovered” meaning and layers of meaning in this parable that are not there. As the illustrious Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield noted, commentators have been tempted to say that the message of this parable communicates the essence of the gospel, when in fact the “heart of the Gospel” is not in it at all (B. B. Warfield, “The Prodigal Son,” The Saviour of the World [1912; reprint, Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1991], 3–33). Surely this is a surprising if not alarming statement. And yet it is true.

Both scholars and laypeople have sought to read the essence of the gospel into the parable, and thus they have successfully read out of the gospel all that is not in this parable. For example, Warfield observed that if this parable is meant to convey the core of the gospel, then where does it teach the sacrificial death of our Lord? It is absent. That is why the Socinians seized upon this parable to defend their heresy that the Father demands no satisfaction of the Son. Modern liberals could undoubtedly make similar sport in order to peddle their bloodless Christianity. Also notice that there is no trace of the work of the Holy Spirit in the parable. There is nothing here to suggest that God’s Spirit moved the prodigal son by granting him the grace of repentance through a regenerate heart so that he would “come to himself.” If a modern evangelical missed this, the old Pelagians did not. Here is proof, they said, of one who moves toward God by his own power. Furthermore, we do not see a father who seeks out and pursues his wayward son. In the two preceding parables—the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin—the shepherd and the woman earnestly seek out what was lost; but in this parable the father does not seek out his son. The parable of the prodigal son was not meant to convey this point, because as Warfield notes, “What is the essence of the Gospel if it is not the seeking love of God?” Again and again, through the manhandling of the parable’s sublime message, its simple point has been dulled.

The parable of the prodigal son teaches the same point that the two parables preceding it make: there is great joy in heaven when a sinner repents (Luke 15:7, 10). This point grows in its significance when one considers that the tax collectors and other “sinners” were coming to Jesus and that this greatly offended the sensibilities of the Pharisees and

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Scribes. They disparaged this teacher who was willing to receive and associate with such sinners. So we are told in verse 3 that Jesus spoke these parables in response to their attitude. And yet, to the astonishment of his listeners, Jesus did not tell them explicitly why he receives and associates with sinners. Instead, he told them how heaven responds to the recovery of lost sinners. In other words, Jesus was saying, “The reason I receive repenting sinners is because heaven rejoices over repenting sinners. Your quarrel is not with me. It is with God and his angels in heaven.”

The parable provokes the question of why the religious authorities would not rejoice with the father when his lost son returns, particularly when he returned penitent and humbled. Why would they not revel in what God “will not despise,” namely, a contrite heart? And if one is not drawn to this father in love or to the son in sympathy, then one is cornered and forced to keep company with the older son. Of course, this is exactly where these religious authorities are.

Here then is the appropriate place to consider a lesser, corollary point of the parable, which bolsters its primary message. The older son cannot understand his father’s acceptance of his brother who has squandered a large share of the family’s wealth. He cannot see how so much fuss can be made over his rebellious sibling, especially when he, the more responsible son, would never dream of committing such scandalous acts. And though he has lived righteously in obedience, he has never received such a party. No, he cannot join in the festivities. It is indecent. So what will the father do?

The father leaves the house and the festivities in order to seek out this son whose heart is also wayward. He pleads with his older son who has retreated into a smug selfishness.

The father explains the family’s celebration and why all should rejoice similarly. His son was truly lost and even dead in his former wayward life, and his return is nothing short of a miracle. Here is the searching love of the father seeking out his older son’s heart. And this is the attitude of Jesus.

Just as the father reaches out to his older son and pleads with him to adopt a heavenly attitude, so also is Jesus reaching out, as he speaks this parable, to these obstinate “older brothers” who need to rejoice in the recovery of sinners. He does not ignore them but rather invites them into heaven’s mercy, which is available even for them if they will “come to themselves.” And for each of them that do repent, the angels of heaven will rejoice.

Heaven still rejoices over each sinner who repents. Jesus still accepts those who turn from their sin and turn to him.

The point of this parable is simple, but it is not simply a parable. It speaks not just to us but about us. It reminds us that we are unworthy to be sons, but we are regarded as such in heaven. It speaks about how we who trust in Christ are and will be received in heaven by the angels, by our Father and by our Lord—with much rejoicing.

A. Craig Troxel is pastor of Bethel Presbyterian Church in Wheaton, Illinois.

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The Good Samaritan

By Nick Lannon

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ould you cross the street to help someone you didn’t know? How about to help a rival? A sworn enemy? These are the sort of questions often asked at the beginning of sermons about the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37). A man is beaten, stripped, robbed, and left by the side of the road. A priest and then a Levite coming down the road see him and cross to the other side, not wanting to defile themselves. It was a Samaritan who gets involved, who takes it upon himself to care for the beaten man, to bandage him, and to pay for his rehabilitation.

Jesus tells this parable to an expert in the law who asks him what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus gets the expert to give the answer: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and, love your neighbor as yourself” (v. 27). The expert in the law, though, wants clarification: “And who is my neighbor?” It is in response to this that Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan.

It is Jesus’ conclusion to the parable that leads to its common misinterpretation. Jesus asks the expert in the law which of the three men (priest, Levite, or Samaritan) was a neighbor to the injured man. The expert in the law replies, “The one who had mercy on him.” And Jesus finishes it off: “Go and do likewise.” This forms the structure of much of the preaching on this passage: Which man was the righteous one? Which was obedient to the command of God? Go and do likewise. In other words, be like the Samaritan.

This interpretation (be like the Samaritan) falls prey to the single greatest error of such exhortational preaching: the lowering of the bar of the law. When a preacher or biblical interpreter divines a set of marching orders from Jesus’ teaching, he or she must necessarily modify them until they are possible. As noted atheist Christopher Hitchens said in a recent Vanity Fair article (“The New Commandments,” April 2010), “Wise lawmakers know that it is a mistake to promulgate legislation that is impossible to obey.” Preachers, should they ask their congregations to do the impossible, will soon find themselves preaching to empty pews. Like the rich young man (Mark 10:17–22) who asks Jesus the same question as the expert in the law, people will “go away sad” when the law is presented to them in its full, merciless form. So, feeling this weight, preachers lower the bar.

“Love your neighbor as yourself” becomes “be charitable.” “Sell all you have and give it to the poor” becomes “volunteer in a soup kitchen.” While still being “good deeds,” these requirements are pale shadows of God’s law, and as such cannot be the answer to the question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Musician Derek Webb asks in his song “A New Law,” “What’s the use in 38 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

trading / a law you can never keep / for one you can / that cannot get you anything?” Indeed, when Jesus’ command to “go and do likewise” from the parable of the Good Samaritan is turned into a lowered-bar exhortation by preachers and biblical interpreters, we trade a law we can never keep (love your neighbor as yourself) for one we can (be charitable and helpful) that cannot get us anything.

So what, then, is the proper interpretation of this parable? What is Jesus’ goal in telling it? In the same way that he tells the rich young man to sell everything he has in order to show him his avarice, Jesus commands that we emulate the Good Samaritan in order to show us our resistance (and ultimate inability) to do just that. The true paradigm of Christianity is one of death and resurrection, not of hard work and improvement. In Romans 5:20, Paul claims that the law was added, not to keep humans from sinning or to provide a path to betterment, but “so that the trespass might increase”! Jesus’ command, his law-giving, is not designed in the first instance to show us how to love our neighbor. It is designed to show us how short we fall of God’s “love your neighbor” standard! We must submit to the crushing weight of the law, die, and be resurrected (Rom. 6:3–4). It is this new creation clothed in Christ’s righteousness that can “love our neighbor as ourselves.” In the aftermath of the rich young man’s interaction with Jesus, the disciples are horrified. They ask each other, “‘Who then can be saved?’ Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God’” (Mark 10:26–27).

The disciples might well have had the same reaction to Jesus’ parable of the the Good Samaritan. Who on earth can live up to this standard? Be a neighbor to people who have culturally rejected you? Called you an outcast? This is more than turning the other cheek—this is actually crossing the road to help! This parable is the second of the great commandments in narrative form: Love your neighbor as yourself. As we interact with it, we cannot lower the bar of its requirement. If we do, we create a new law—one we can keep but cannot get us anything. We must recognize that it is beyond us—that with man, with us, it is impossible. This is the true nature of the law in its first use.

It is impossible and was added so that the trespass might increase. With God, though, we are promised that all things are possible. This is the gospel: that Jesus Christ gives his righteousness, his law-keeping, to us, and takes our sin, our law-breaking, onto himself. Jesus is the Good Samaritan because we cannot be. Hearing this word of grace, we can go out into the world, secure in our righteousness that comes, not from effort expended to “go and do likewise,” but from the Savior of the world.

The Rev. Nick Lannon is curate at Grace Church Van Vorst (Episcopal) in Jersey City, New Jersey.

The Word of God and Preaching

By C. Veenhof Translated by Nelson D. Kloosterman The Gospel Word In a pregnant way the characteristic redemptive nature of the inscripturated Word is brought to expression when it is qualified as gospel. Gospel is literally: good news, a joyful message, glad tidings. That is generally known. But when “gospel” is employed to describe God’s inscripturated Word, its specific meaning and range was and often is obscured in Reformed circles.

In order to understand the characteristic and rich meaning of the biblical word “gospel,” we must note that in the Bible’s thought-world an intimate relationship exists between a thing and an event, and the words or account by which those are described.

The words by which things or events are often equated, even identified, with the things or events themselves.

Events are sometimes simply called words, just as the reverse is true: words are also taken as events. The wellknown expression “and it happened after these things” sometimes sounds, if translated literally, like “and it happened after these ‘words’” (Gen. 15:1; 20:8; 24:66; passim on the O.T.). According to the biblical conception a past event continues, so to speak, in the words by which it is related; it gains new actuality; it becomes present again.

And renewed in the “present” as a living thing, the past event exercises efficacy.

What is now special is a message, a word, an account in which the thing related becomes present and real. In a message the thing related inescapably enters into the life of those whom this message is directed, and in fact becomes therein a living power which decisively governs their lives. For a message “is” in reality that about which the message is a message. The message about a victory IS that victory. The message about a defeat IS that defeat. A joyful message imparts or realizes that which causes the joy, in those to whom the message comes. Therefore it “is” what that joy effectuates. And a sad message “is” the sorrow which pierces people’s lives and pours out misery upon them. The connection between a particular event and that message about it—a connection that is a virtual identification—appears especially in the fact that in former times, the one who brought good news was often richly rewarded. For he was in fact the cause of great rejoicing.

By contrast, the one who brought bad news was punished, sometimes even killed. For he was in reality the cause of the misery.

The Gospel as “News” God’s inscripturated Word, and then especially the Word that Christ spoke, is now the gospel, the joyful news, in a unique, exclusive, absolute sense. For it is the Word wherein Christ and the whole of salvation obtains concrete form, entering into the life of those who hear the Word;

it is bestowed upon them and governs their lives.

The gospel involved in the Scriptures is the gospel of Jesus Christ (Mk. 1:1). In this expression Jesus Christ is described not only as the “subject” but also as the “object,” the “content” of the gospel. Jesus Christ speaks, brings, and gives the gospel. But at the same time he “is” the gospel. The expressions “gospel of the kingdom” (Matt.

4:23; 9:35; 24:14) and “the gospel of God” (Mk. 1:14) have essentially the same meaning. For the kingdom “is” in Jesus Christ. He is the personification of it. In him it is “among” us, “in our midst” (Lk. 17:24). He is, to use Origen’s pregnant expression, the autobasileia. And the gospel is, in the last analysis, the gospel of God, since both Jesus Christ and the kingdom are given by him.

In the letters of Paul the multi-colored riches of the gospel appear in their full light. According to Paul’s testimony the “content” of the gospel is Jesus Christ, in his person and work. That is to say, Jesus Christ and his birth, suffering, death, resurrection, ascension, session and work in the glory of his Father (Rom. 1:3–4; I Cor. 15:1f). Along with this Paul emphasizes that the gospel does not signify a break with the Old Testament (Rom. 16:26; I Cor. 15:3).

On the contrary, already in the Old Testament the gospel was fully present. For the gospel in the New Testament does not introduce new “doctrine,” it does not have a new “content.” The “new” of the New Testament with respect to the gospel is simply this: in the gospel proclamation salvation becomes a reality. For Jesus Christ actually atones for sin, actually brings redemption, and actually breaks the power of Satan, sin and death. In him the gospel is “fulfilled.” And in the New Testament dispensation that fulfilled gospel is now proclaimed.

Paul therefore characterizes the gospel above all else as the gospel of Jesus Christ or the gospel of God (Rom. 1:1; 15:9 passim). For the gospel is the “message” of the living God who in Christ bestows mercy on the world, and it is the gospel of Jesus Christ who has come in order to redeem sinners, to justify the godless and to save the world.

But Paul also speaks of the gospel as a gospel of salvation and a gospel of peace (Eph. 1:13; 6:15). What he wants to say by that is now clear. For the reality and the truth of both of these are present in the gospel and are bestowed upon us as they are contained and reach us in the gospel. Paul expresses this when he says that through the gospel Christ Jesus has brought life and immortality to light (II Tim. 1:10). Moreover, in the gospel believers have received a share in the hope, that is, in an eschatological redemption, reserved for them in heaven (Col. 1:15). In the gospel that eternal glory penetrates our world and our time, and believers share in it. Thus the gospel also has a totally eschatological meaning.

In addition, Paul emphasizes that God calls men through the gospel so that they “may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ” (II Thess. 2:14). This calling takes place with great power. For the preaching of the gospel takes place not only “in word” but also “in the Holy Spirit” S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 39

(I Thess. 1:5). The gospel is a word, a power, an operation of the Spirit.

Moreover, Paul characterizes the gospel also as a power of God. For in the gospel God’s righteousness, his desire to justify the godless, comes to light and becomes real (Rom. 1:16). The kind of power and effect possessed by the gospel is expressed very clearly when Paul says almost uncouthly that he has begotten believers through the gospel (I Cor. 4:15). The gospel is the kind of power of God, the kind of word of the Spirit, which gives new birth. It is “the seed of regeneration” [I Pet. 1:23].

At the same time Paul insists with great emphasis that the gospel is preached in order to be obeyed (II Thess. 1:8).

In this connection he speaks of the faith of the gospel (Phil.

1:27). By that he means that the gospel’s purpose is faith, to push for a decision of faith, and conversely, that faith is totally and completely directed toward the gospel. Faith comes into being from and through the gospel and has the gospel as its “content.” And the gospel proceeds to its redemptive effect through faith, in the way of faith. To believe is ultimately nothing else than to be conquered, governed and renewed by the gospel.

One can similarly disobey the gospel (Rom. 10:16). For those who are disobedient—they are those who are perishing—the gospel is veiled. That happens only because the god of this age has darkened the “packagings” with which the gospel must be received. As a result of this these people do not perceive the splendor, the radiance of the gospel wherein the glory of Christ is revealed—the glory and power which

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he received as the Resurrected One (II Cor. 4:3).

One more remarkable feature of Paul’s speaking about the gospel is that he so often characterizes it as “his” gospel (Rom. 2:16; 16:25; II Tim. 2:8). Naturally, he doesn’t intend to say by this that he preaches a “different kind” of gospel than his fellow apostles (Gal. 1:6–7). There is but one gospel. Rather, with the expression “his gospel,” i.e., the gospel brought by him, Paul wishes to focus attention on two aspects of the gospel which came to the fore especially in his apostolic ministry. These two aspects are, first, that there is no room for people meriting anything with God, and thus salvation comes by grace, apart from the works of the law. And secondly, that the gospel, and thus also the redemption revealed in the gospel, is intended not only for Jews but also for Gentiles.

In summary, we can describe the gospel of Jesus Christ as a word—a spoken word— whose content is Jesus Christ and the full salvation merited by him. It is a word spoken by the Holy Spirit and as such is a living power of God unto Salvation. It is the kind of word that doesn’t merely speak about a previously realized central moment of redemptive history, but the kind that, precisely as a word about that previously realized central moment of redemptive history, is itself a redemptive event. It is never an empty, ineffectual word. On the contrary, it creates fellowship with Christ, and in him with God, and in this way it is an instrument in the realization of the salvation and the formation of the church. It is and bestows God’s grace or it effects, in the case of its rejection, everlasting judgment.

INTERVIEW f o r

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An Interview with Timothy Keller

Belief in an Age of Skepticism Timothy Keller is the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City and author of a number of books including The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith and Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex and Power and the Only Hope that Matters. In fall 2009, White Horse Inn co-host Michael Horton talked with Reverend Keller about his best-selling book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.

Your subtitle suggests that we’re living in an age of skepticism. First of all, why do you think that is; and secondly, do you think it’s necessarily a bad thing, especially in the light of a civil religion where everybody assumes that because we’re Americans we must be Christian?

In some ways, belief in an age of skepticism is a Manhattan perspective, because I don’t think you can necessarily look at the entire country and say we live in a skeptical place, that belief in the orthodox Christian faith in such a skeptical culture is difficult, or that this is what it takes. But I think you can say that Manhattan is a skeptical culture, so I was really talking about those center city/university areas where people are very skeptical about Christianity. When I arrived in Manhattan twenty years ago, I was expecting evangelism to be more difficult. It actually has not been— humanly speaking—more difficult, because people are so overtly skeptical; whereas other places I’ve lived, such as Pennsylvania and Virginia, there was the veneer of civil religion and it was harder to get traction with people.

Do you think a lot of people in New York—perhaps the most virulent or the most unlikely to give Christianity a chance—were raised in a kind of unreflective, unthink-

ing, don’t-ask-questions Christian background?

A large percentage of the most virulent anti-Christians come from conservative backgrounds. I couldn’t prove it—it’s anecdotal—but most of us here in the city find that when you’re talking to someone who is furious, very often their father was a Baptist minister or something.

You also write that the world is getting more religious and less religious at the same time. How can that be?

I’m glad some of the studies that have come out in the last couple of years since I wrote the book have proven this to be the case—that you have stronger, more orthodox kinds of faiths and evangelicalism growing. There are growing percentages of people saying, “I have no religious preferences.” What’s actually going away is the mushy mainline middle. When I think about my in-laws, for example, they went to a Presbyterian church all their lives, and they would never think of not going. They had generally conservative, traditional Christian morality, but their own beliefs were very nebulous. They went because it was expected. That mushy middle is going away. I still see it everywhere. So people are either more conservative or more liberal. They’re more into orthodox

faith or they’re more secular.

Things are polarizing, and there’s a fair amount of evidence of this with the studies on people’s religious preference.

If that’s the diagnosis, what’s the cure?

By and large—and nobody at the White Horse Inn has paid me to say this!—I think the church does need to be the church. In New York—a very skeptical place where there’s more anger and anti-Christian sentiment than in most places—when people have tried to set up what I call a traditional megachurch with a slickness or a consumer orientation, it just has not flown here.

There needs to be more theological rigor and liturgy. Non-Christians are fascinated with listening to somebody expound the Heidelberg Catechism—because it’s old, it has roots, and it’s brilliant in many ways—rather than just being given a short talk on how they can overcome worry. Honestly, this sounds very strange. I believe in contextualization, but I also feel that if there is an answer it’s frankly getting back to confessional evangelical Christianity and not thinking that you can somehow engage the culture with the latest, more shallow versions. Nobody paid me to say this—I just want you to know that!

But there is a kind of sit-on-yourlaurels confessionalism that doesn’t actually talk to nonChristians.

That’s what I meant by contextualization. You’re really trying to engage the baseline cultural narratives and answering questions

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they’re asking and so forth. It’s not just that you don’t have anything like a traditional evangelical megachurch in New York City; you don’t have anything like that in the metropolitan area. The traditional megachurch we think of—with a certain kind of music and presentation—just hasn’t worked here.

Why do you think that is? Is it just aesthetic—the slickness and pop culture rather than high culture? Or do you think it’s more than that?

I think they feel as if they’re being sold something. Honestly, a lot of these folks are hardened to the idea of sales. They really don’t like the polish. It’s also true, by the way, that this is a place where people go to the theater rather than to a movie. In our church we have no screens or overhead projectors—we don’t have a big screen picture of me preaching next to me being there. There are some theological reasons why I wouldn’t do it anyway; but certainly culturally, it would never connect here. People do not go to great big screens; they go to the comedy club, to the theatre, to off Broadway. They eat out on the street. It’s not a suburban culture, and the megachurch model is incredibly suburban.

So someone might say, “Don’t try to sell me anything; but if you have an honest response to some of the biggest questions of life, then I want to hear it.” What are the big questions you have been hearing as a pastor?

Questions about evil and suffering of course. Pluralism: How can you make such exclusive truth-claims?

Freedom: Isn’t Christianity a straitjacket; isn’t any kind of confession a straitjacket; don’t we have to be free to figure out our own beliefs and our own path? Then there’s the problem of Christians being involved with injustice. And there’s another one that says you can’t trust the Bible. In the last four years, I’ve heard people say you can’t be a good citizen in a demo4 2 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

cratic society if you believe your truth is the only truth.

That basically you’re going to have a Christian version of the Taliban and terrorism?

For fifty years, the big enemy against our way of life was atheistic Communism, so the average American saw secularism and atheism as attached to a hostile force.

Now the forces arrayed against our way of life are religious—militant fundamentalism. Now the average person in our society attaches the idea of religion with being antidemocratic. That has really gained a lot of traction with the average non-Christian in a place such as New York since 9/11.

What do you say to that?

I think the answer is rooted in my first chapter of The Reason for God where I respond to the statement that if you say Jesus is the only way, that makes you narrow. I try to show that everybody has exclusive beliefs; that if you say that all religions are relative, then that is an absolute belief. Everyone who makes any claims in the public square is basing them on unprovable faith assumptions about human nature and spiritual reality and therefore, frankly, everyone is basically exclusive in their truth-claims.

Everyone has religious underpinnings to what they’re saying.

In your chapter on resurrection, I like especially your comment: “I sympathize with a person who says, ‘So what if I can’t think of an alternate explanation? The resurrection just couldn’t happen.’ Let’s not forget, however, that first-century people felt exactly the same way. They found the resurrection just as inconceivable as you do.

The only way anyone embraced the resurrection back then was by letting the evidence challenge and change their worldview, their view of what was possible. They had just as much trouble with the claims of the resurrection as you.

Yet the evidence, both of the eyewitness accounts and the changed lives of Christ’s followers, was overwhelming to reconsider.” How important is it for us to say, let’s not start with what’s relevant; let’s let the resurrection create its own relevance and overwhelm objections?

There are three things going on in that paragraph. One is I’m trying to strike a blow against “chronological snobbery,” according to C. S. Lewis— this idea that somehow we feel ancient people were superstitious, and they didn’t have problems with all this religious stuff, and we do; so I’m trying to say that they had as big a problem.

Secondly, it’s a way of saying: I don’t care whether you think this is relevant or not. If this happened, it changes the way in which you’ve got to live. That’s one of the reasons why the resurrection is a great way to show people what Christianity is about. It’s not about self-improvement. It’s about God breaking into history and now I have to adjust to him. It’s not as if he’s going to adjust to meet my needs. You now have to adjust to deal with the fact that he’s here.

However, the resurrection also is an awfully hopeful thing. On the one hand, you’re being tough, and you’re saying you’ve got to believe it because it’s true, and we’re not here to meet your needs. And yet the resurrection gives us a hope. It’s hope for the world. It’s not just going to heaven someday; it means this world matters. So it’s actually both a stick and a carrot. The carrot is that if this is true, then we don’t have to be afraid about the future; God is really going to do this. But if the stick is that this is true, then you’ve got to change. You can’t just expect God to come and meet your needs.

It works both ways.

The whole idea is that you have two worldviews: The world is just sort of giving in to entropy and ultimate catastrophe versus this world is going to be transfigured

one day and the resurrection is the first down payment on that. Which worldview actually affirms and gives meaning to our lives?

It gives you a basis for caring about justice and things like that. But the reason the resurrection is so wonderful is that it is hopeful and, at the same time, it is challenging.

Because if it’s true, that now you finally have this fulfillment of your deepest desire, which is to see a world in which sickness and death will be gone, and disease and injustice and poverty will be gone— that’s the good news. But that also means now I can’t live the way I want, because Jesus is Lord and the resurrection shows that Jesus is Lord. It’s a one-two punch.

How do you explain the sacrifice of Jesus for our sins in a culture that looks at this as a holdover from primitive crude cults of blood sacrifice?

I was very, very careful here, but in the earlier part of the book, I defend the idea of judgment and hell. One of the chapters is, “I can’t believe in a God who would judge people and send them to hell.” I make my case that if you care about a world that is unjust, how could you even want a God who includes and loves everyone? I make my case there for the wrath of God and for the fact that anyone who loves gets angry. Because God loves his own glory and loves his creation, he gets angry at what destroys his creation and what dishonors his glory. If you’re a loving person, you will get mad. If you never get mad, you’re not a loving person.

When I get to the cross, I’ve found there is this caricature of Jesus as the Son whom the Father crucifies—child abuse, etc. What I do in this chapter is stress the idea of unity of God, because if you don’t, you do have this idea of a helpless son and a vindictive father. Instead, you say it was God substituting himself, not just the Father substituting the Son. Both of those are true, but I’m just trying to get my foot in the

door with an unbeliever. I just think it’s easier for them to see immediately that God substituted himself.

That’s a John Stott statement: God substituted himself.

metaphors and other ways of doing it—but, at least for my secular listeners, that’s my way in, and later on I can fill them in with the rest of the whole counsel of God.

Westminster Seminary professor Robert Strimple rocked my world with something he once said, with tears in his eyes, “Please don’t ever get out there and preach John 3:16 as if you have an angry abusive father who is taking his anger out on his son. God was, in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.”

Yes, and I absolutely stay true to that in that chapter. There’s another chapter at the very end that I call “The Dance of God” in which I bring out the Trinity and the fact that God is three, not just one. But in the chapter on the cross, I stress the oneness.

I also give the example of forgiveness; that if you forgive someone who has wronged you, you have to absorb the debt rather than make the person that wronged you pay it. I use a very simple illustration: if somebody knocks over your lamp and ruins it, you can ask them to pay for it or you have to forgive them; but if you forgive them, you have to replace the lamp yourself. I’ve found this has worked very well with nonChristians. When a wrong has been done, either the perpetrator pays for it or the forgiver pays for it, but the debt does not go away. So when someone asks, “Why can’t God just forgive us? Why does he need a sacrifice?” I say that there’s no such thing as just forgiving. When you forgive even small things like a lamp, you absorb the debt or you make the perpetrator pay, but the debt doesn’t go into thin air. What you see on the cross is God absorbing the debt for our sin. This is something you do even in the smallest of transactions when someone wrongs you, so you shouldn’t be surprised that this is just the way it is.

So in that chapter, I stress the unity of God and I stress the debt.

As you know, there are other atonement models—biblical models and

Do you find in your ministry that justification is an alien term that people just can’t get their arms around?

No, I work awfully hard on that, because I love to preach justification. And it’s true that I can only go so far in the book, and therefore I don’t actually treat justification much in there.

It comes through throughout.

That’s a good way of putting it.

Somebody once asked J. I. Packer why there wasn’t a chapter on election and the sovereignty of God in Knowing God. And he said: Well, you know what? It’s like salt. You don’t have your peas and your mashed potatoes and your steak, and then your salt. You put the salt on everything, so it’s there—it’s just scattered through everything else. So, he said, I didn’t have a chapter on that, but it’s all through there. It’s the same with justification. I actually think the idea of righteousness, though, is something you can get across to people.

As long as you work on the right relationship, it’s not that hard.

Having been a pastor for so long, you have seen all kinds of tragedies— being a pastor during 9/11 and also just seeing what any pastor in America sees in any given week.

How do you counsel somebody who’s struggling with evil and suffering, not just existentially but really wrestling with how this could possibly allow for God? The first thing I do pastorally is say: I want you to know that God is pretty patient with us when we are angry and upset over this subject.

Psalm 39 and Psalm 88 end on a terrible note, with the psalmist basically saying to God, “Look away from me so I can have a little bit of peace before I die.” So it’s obviously

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very despondent. Derek Kidner, in his little book on the Psalms, says that the presence of such psalms shows the patience of God with us.

He says, “He knows how men speak when they are desperate.” That’s a wonderful statement. The fact that they’re in the canon shows that God says, “Look, I know that sometimes people pray and pray, and they don’t land on their feet like most of the psalmists do.” Kidner says, “I want you to know that you’re not saved by your patience, and you’re not saved by your perfect prayers and perfect attitude.

You’re saved by what Jesus Christ has done for you. So if you’re struggling with this and feeling kind of guilty—like, ‘I should trust God, but I’m mad at him, I don’t understand’— he’s patient with you; you don’t have to have perfect feelings.”

They’re kind of used to ministers sitting there listening and then giving the right theological answers; the impression they get is, “Unless I have my attitude just right, God’s going to get me.”

I’m actually talking about justification, saying that we’re not saved by right attitudes. But then I do what I do in the book. I say there’s a philosophical answer to the problem of evil: if you have a God big enough to be mad at for not stopping evil, then you have a God big enough to have reasons why he hasn’t stopped evil that you can’t conceive of. In other words, if you’ve got a God who’s that infinite, that omniscient, that he’s big enough that you’re mad at him for not stopping it, then he’s got to be able to have reasons for letting these things go that you can’t think of—you can’t have it both ways. I know that’s a philosophical judo move, and I know it’s not really doing anything other than to say that you can’t disprove the existence of God from evil. The premise is that, because I can’t think of any reason why God would let this happen, therefore there can’t be any. Look at that syllogism—that can’t be, and because I can’t think

of a reason therefore there can’t be any—that’s a non sequitur. But then you very quickly have to say that in other faiths, God is apart from suffering. All we know is that although we don’t know what reasons God does have for allowing evil and suffering to continue, it can’t be that he doesn’t love us or care, or he wouldn’t have actually, through the incarnation, become enmeshed in it himself. Whatever the reasons are, it can’t be that he doesn’t care, because he’s proven that by the incarnation and the cross. And that’s what we’ve got in Christianity—not an answer, but a personal involvement.

So the gospel’s not just about one question that we have in our existence, but we go back to the gospel for all of these big questions that we have.

Don Carson has a paper on the Gospel Coalition website where he looks at 1 Corinthians and shows that every time Paul deals with a problem—whether it’s ethnic strife, or questions of sex and marriage, or partisan strife inside the church— he uses the gospel on everything.

He doesn’t just say, “Here’s a rule” or “Here’s something out of the law.” Obviously, adultery is wrong because of the law. But adultery is also wrong, because in the gospel Christ is our spouse; he was completely faithful to us, and now we need to be faithful. Don shows how the gospel affects absolutely everything.

I encourage people, if they haven’t already, to get The Prodigal God because you especially emphasize that point. It’s a parable that a lot of us are familiar with—the parable of the Prodigal Son—but it’s really God who becomes flesh for us, and all of us elder brothers who are in as great a need of redemption as the prodigal. Can you give us a little bit of taste for why you wrote The Prodigal God? Again, in a sense, this is a way of trying to get the idea of justification

across—the idea that both the younger brother, who is an irreligious person, and the elder brother, who is a religious person, are equally alienated from God, just as the brothers are alienated from the father. As different as they look on the surface, underneath they really don’t love the father; they were just trying to get his money. One person tried to get the money and get control of his own life by being very bad; and the other one tried to get control of the money by being very good. This is a way of understanding that the most moral, religious people—those who think they’re saved by their works—and the most irreligious, licentious people—those who are out there living any way they want—are both actually trying to be their own saviors.

They’re not letting Jesus be their savior. As different as they are, they’re exactly the same.

This is my way of deconstructing legalism, which then makes justification the only answer. I’ve found that in New York, even though we don’t have a lot of legalists around, the average person who has rejected Christianity is a person who cannot distinguish Christianity from legalism. And so unless I deconstruct legalism, if I just say, “Invite Jesus into your heart as your Lord and Savior, and then live for him,” they’re going to think I’m simply inviting them into a moral paradigm. Unless I actually tear apart the legalistic paradigm, they’re not going to know what I’m inviting them into. I actually now say to pastors, “You can’t just say, ‘Receive Jesus as your personal savior’; you have to actually do a law-gospel distinction.” This is my version, by the way, of law-gospel.

It’s my way of saying, “Do you see the difference between the law and the gospel?” That’s what the whole book is. It’s basically taking the parable as a way of getting across, in a very vivid way, the difference between law and gospel that a seeker would understand right (continued on page 51)

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REVIEWS w h a t ’ s

b e i n g

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A More Christian Reading of the Bible

I

n recent years, numerous theologians have begun advocating an interpretive

ars advocating theologically informed biblical interpretation. His approach to Scripture that purposefully foregrounds dogmatic commitments and principal aim, however, is to commend “the wide range of practices” concerns. The call for theologically informed biblical interpretation comes in reaction involved in theological interpretation to an audience beyond the to post-Enlightenment academy (xii). Billings rightly recognizes that many conseracademic trends that vative Christians engage Scripture with interpretive strategies encouraged biblical scholthat mirror those employed by liberal heirs of Enlightenment ars to free themselves thought; if dogmatic preconceptions are acknowledged at all, from a priori judgments attempts are made to eliminate or bracket them when readabout the book(s) they ing Scripture (cf. so-called “inductive Bible study” methstudy, chiefly on the ods). Those unaware that dogmatic convictions necessarily basis that prior assumpinform biblical interpretation—or at least unsure what contions about Scripture— victions inform their interpretation—are perhaps most prone assumptions regarding, to adopt essentially un-Christian assumptions about God say, its inspiration or and Scripture when they read sacred texts. Many Christians, instrumental role in the Billings suggests, embrace a basically deistic framework in economy of salvation; their own reading, even when the text confronts them with assumptions rooted in the person of the Son or that of the Spirit. Such a framework ulterior convictions about becomes apparent where readers approach the Word not as divine existence and the divine means by which they will be incorporated into the agency—necessarily saving work of Father, Son, and Spirit, but as a sourcebook serve as obstacles to of instructions for moral self-improvement in a legalistic proper understanding process best described as self-salvation. Billings offers this of Scripture’s meaning. work, then, to help Christians recognize the value of The Word of God for Proponents of “the theapproaching Scripture from a carefully defined dogmatic the People of God: An Entryway to the ological interpretation perspective; in other words, this book is calculated to help Theological Interpretation of Scripture,” as it has Christians become more intentional—even, one might say, of Scripture come to be called, insist more Christian—in their reading of the Bible.

by J. Todd Billings not only that prior asIn his opening chapter Billings highlights the “inescapaEerdmans, 2010 sumptions about God bility” of theology by showing how all human activity nec256 pages (paperback), $18.00 and Scripture are essarily presupposes certain ideas (“functional beliefs”) about inevitable but that certain convictions positively illumine, God, humankind, and the world. Given the existence of rather than obscure, the meaning of biblical texts. The such beliefs, and so the opportunity of recognizing and movement has generated scholarly books (cf. suggestions for refining them, Billings advises Christians to adopt the “rule further reading in the work under review), an academic of faith”—defined as “a summary of the received teachings journal (Journal of Theological Interpretation), a series of bibof the Christian church” (17)—as an initial guide for readlical commentaries (Brazos Theological Commentary on the ing and interpreting Scripture. The rule of faith, substantially Bible), and new degree programs in institutions of higher exhibited in the church’s early creeds, does not dictate exact learning (cf. the M.Litt. in Theological Interpretation of meanings but indicates “the center and boundaries of a Scripture at St. Andrews University, Scotland).

Christian interpretation of Scripture” (22).

In The Word of God for the People of God, J. Todd Billings, Chapter 2 aims to show how insights gained from general associate professor of Reformed Theology at Western hermeneutical theory and biblical-critical studies can be Theological Seminary, adds his voice to the chorus of scholincorporated into a practice of theological interpretation.

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While such studies must, significantly, neither “set the starting point nor the ending point for a Christian reading of Scripture” (37), they might foster close readings of the Bible—readings characterized by careful attention to grammatical and historical aspects of texts. Proper appreciation for Scripture’s human authors and their historical particularity permits a liberal, if guarded, use of general hermeneutical theory and biblical-critical studies in the interpretation of a book that is, ultimately, a divine product and instrument of divine activity in every age.

In chapter 3, Billings resumes his central task of clarifying convictions that should undergird interpretation of the Bible. Drawing further attention to a “functional Deism,” which informs much that passes for Christian worship and practice today, Billings presses readers to approach Scripture with a more intentional “Trinitarian theology of revelation” at work, a theology in which “our lives and the knowledge of God are caught up in the triune activity of God” (88). A proper Trinitarian perspective should norm not only the meanings discovered in biblical texts, but also the way Scripture is read: “We should read Scripture as food and nourishment for our growth by the Spirit into our God-given identities in Christ” (90).

Billings advances arguments for reading Scripture with the worldwide church throughout time in chapters 4 and 5.

Possibilities for “mutual enrichment” follow from “the Spirit’s work of indigenizing the Word” in diverse cultures (109). And the biblical exegesis of pre-modern (patristic, medieval, and Reformational) Christians in particular constitutes “a rich and varied feast” offering much nourishment and delight to the church today (149). Engaging Scripture with the church in diverse times and places should alert contemporary Christians to their own cultural prejudices and how these distort Scripture’s meaning. But Billings’ endorsement of cross-cultural and pre-modern biblical interpretation is not unqualified. Careful discernment—and a specific reluctance to let religious experience determine the validity of interpretative claims—is required when reading Scripture with the church around the world. The warning label on pre-modern exegesis is less pronounced; Billings does, however, draw attention to “frequent anti-Jewish polemic and patriarchal attitudes” resident in biblical interpretation of past ages.

In his final chapter, Billings explains more concretely how Scripture functions in God’s saving purpose and details reading practices that follow from proper recognition of Scripture’s role in the economy of salvation.

Scripture is much more than an informative book about God. Scripture is the means by which God, in the power of his Spirit, actually addresses (and so acts upon) sinners—warning them, judging them, consoling them, and ultimately justifying them—in the great drama of his reconciling work. Implications for how we read Scripture in light of this are plentiful; and Billings provides something close to a summary of this reality’s practical import when he notes: “Biblical interpretation for Christians involves nothing less than a worshipful consecration of our prac4 6 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

tical lives to participate in the triune God’s work, so that we may be mastered by the living Christ who speaks through Scripture” (197).

Reformed Christians will likely sympathize with the argument of Billings’ book. Indeed, the theological framework he suggests believers bring to holy writ—though broad enough to appeal to Christians from various traditions—is largely reflected in the Standards of Reformed churches, especially in confessional statements on the Trinity, Scripture, and the role that law and gospel play in judging and justifying sinners. Of course, Reformed Christians recognize a biblical basis for these confessional claims; they also, however, believe that these (and all) confessional claims should, in turn, inform their reading and interpretation of Scripture.

Catechesis in Reformed communities is specifically calculated to equip believers with theological convictions that will make their reading (and hearing) of the Word most fruitful, situating them—so much as lies within the church’s power—to be continually enveloped by the drama of the triune God’s redemptive and reconciling work.

One place where Reformed Christians might feel some reservation about Billings’ book is in his blanket approval of pre-modern exegesis. Perhaps hoping to maximize the catholic appeal of his work, Billings shows little if any preference for Reformation exegesis over patristic and medieval.

Indeed, he purposefully seeks to alleviate (Protestant) concerns over loose allegorical interpretations of preReformation exegetes by situating allegorical interpretation on a spectrum with typological; the latter, of course, figures prominently in classical Reformed exegesis. Billings does have some warrant for softening the divide between Reformation and pre-Reformation readings of the Bible; Calvin’s “literal” approach to Scripture was a far cry from contemporary biblical literalism. I’m not sure, however, that Billings’ treatment does justice to Calvin and company’s explicit rejection of certain interpretive practices of their late-medieval predecessors and Roman contemporaries. Reformed scholars, then, may wish to develop a model of theological interpretation that takes more serious account of positive exegetical/interpretive insights gained in the Reformation; after all, the Reformation involved a fair bit of wrangling over how Scripture is read in addition to what it says.

This quibble should not, however, be permitted to overshadow the great value of The Word of God for the People of God. Christians would do well to digest Billings’ work and let their practices of reading Scripture be challenged by it. Self-identifying conservative Christians in particular might discover— through Billings insightful probing into how Christians engage Scripture—that their own reading and interpretive practices are rather derogatory of the Bible, no matter how “high” the doctrine of Scripture they profess.

Dr. Aaron Clay Denlinger is a teaching fellow in church history at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. He has published articles in Calvin Theological Journal, Nova et Vetera, and Refor-

mation and Renaissance Review, and a monograph in Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht’s Historical Reformed Theology series (Omnes in Adam ex pacto Dei, Göttingen: V & R, 2010).

Handling the Word of Truth: Law and Gospel in the Church Today

By John T. Pless Concordia Publishing House, 2004 128 pages (paperback), $13.49 It has been well over a century since C. F. W. Walther’s classic The Proper Distinction between Law and Gospel was written. While it continues to be reprinted and is familiar among conservative Lutheran clergy, it is written in a scholarly tone for seminarians, bearing the marks of its age. Like an old family heirloom, Walther’s volume of lectures has unfortunately collected a lot of dust, remaining shelved in the pastor’s study, never really gaining traction outside Lutheran circles, which is why Professor John Pless’s monograph Handling the Word of Truth has to be commended. In just over one hundred pages, Pless provides a much-needed introduction to the Reformation hermeneutic of properly distinguishing the law from the gospel in our reading, preaching, and understanding of the Bible. While some things have certainly changed since Walther’s day, some remain the same; sadly, the confusion and conflation of the law and gospel is one of those constants that continue to plague Christ’s church and therefore requires attention in every generation.

Handling the Word of Truth is divided into thirteen short, readable chapters—each beginning with a quotation or two from Walther’s original twenty-five theses. By engaging the Scriptures, Luther, the confessions, and more contemporary scholars such as Bo Giertz, Gerhard Forde, and Oswald Bayer, Pless offers great insight from his pastoral experience in showing just how relevant and vital the subject continues to be for the church’s ongoing mission.

In the introductory chapter, he clearly distinguishes and defines both the law and the gospel. While both are from God, Pless is emphatic that Christians must understand that they are dealing with two very different doctrines. The law can only make demands; it tells us what we ought to do but is insufficient to redeem us from its demands when they are trespassed. The gospel, however, contains no demand, only the gift of God’s grace and truth in Christ (13). “The purity of the Gospel,” he argues, “hinges on this distinction” (12).

Why should we be so concerned with this distinction? Citing James Nestingen, he answers: “When the Law and Gospel are improperly distinguished, both are undermined.

Separated from the Law, the Gospel gets absorbed into an

ideology of tolerance in which indiscriminateness is equated with grace. Separated from the Gospel, the Law becomes an insatiable demand hammering away at the conscience until it destroys a person” (12). Thus, when both are understood and distinguished properly, both are established and able to function together as intended in the Scriptures.

Throughout the following chapters, Pless gives numerous examples supporting the law/gospel hermeneutic, showing myriad ways the church has erred by confounding the distinction throughout her history. Chapter 3’s title, “Making Christ a New Moses,” describes one of the most persistent of these errors. Whether it is the Church of Rome, Socinianism, Rationalism, or even the attitude spawning the popular WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) phenomenon, the temptation to press Jesus into the service of Moses is always present. Pless is not advocating lawlessness as some critics of this hermeneutic have charged—far from it! He is quick to state that the church must proclaim God’s law: “The Law of God orders and curbs our sinful impulses, keeping life genuinely human in this world. More than that, the Law unerringly exposes the darkness of our unbelief, our failure to fear, love, and trust in God above all things” (29). Jesus is certainly the perfect example of a life lived in obedience to his heavenly Father, but the important point Pless makes is that Christ as example still leaves us under the law and helpless. Jesus does not come as a reprised Moses, parsing out new and improved moral norms. “Jesus comes as the friend of sinners. He comes as the Savior from the condemnation that the Law pronounces and delivers” (29).

Getting not only the distinction right but also the order of the law and gospel is critical, because when the law is mixed with gospel it transforms the pure gift into personal achievement. Pless warns: “Such mingling of Law with Gospel dilutes the precious promises of God with demands for works. In short, the Gospel is polluted and rendered impotent” (35). To reverse the arrangement, to insert the gospel into the law “creates the illusion that the Law offers hope,” which again encourages sinners to place their confidence in self rather than in the finished work of Christ alone.

While the opening chapters lay a strong foundation, they do prompt the reader to ask several important questions. For example: What about repentance? Faith? The struggle with ongoing sin? How do the church’s liturgy and sacraments support this way of understanding the Bible? Thankfully, Pless answers each of these questions and more in later chapters.

While some readers may not enjoy the frequent and long quotations from Luther and Walther, they are nevertheless a helpful means of wading into their works without drowning in the volumes of sources from which Pless cites.

Overall, Handling the Word of Truth is the best introduction to the subject presently available. It is short enough to not overwhelm a reader unaccustomed to reading works of theology, and it would provide an excellent supplement to a church Sunday school or midweek Bible study as each chapter concludes with questions for reflection and discussion. Preachers must give this a careful read, as ministers of the gospel are the most prone to commit and perpetuate the S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 4 7

errors the author confronts. Like Timothy, pastors are to be workers who rightly handle the word of truth (2 Tim. 2:15).

Pless’s book will only help us fulfill our high calling, ensuring the gospel gets the last word.

Brian W. Thomas is the vicar of Grace Lutheran Church in San Diego, California. He is a graduate student of the Cross-cultural Ministry Center at Christ College, Concordia University, in Irvine, California.

Just Do Something: A Liberating Approach to Finding God’s Will

By Kevin DeYoung Moody Publishers, 2009 128 pages (paperback), $10.99 What is one of the most commonly asked questions by restless teenagers, fearful young adults, successful businesspeople, lonely single parents, and frail grandparents? The answer is: “What is God’s will for my life?” Much of pop evangelicalism gives advice often mystical, ethereal, and downright Gnostic in seeking God’s will. That is why Kevin DeYoung’s book Just Do Something is a breath of fresh air. DeYoung gives profound insight as well as biblical wisdom to struggling pilgrims living a life filled with emotional and physical suffering in this present evil age.

The problem, as DeYoung states, is that “our search for the will of God has become an accomplice in the postponement of growing up, a convenient out for the young (or old) Christian floating through life without direction or purpose.

Too many of us have passed off our instability, inconsistency, and endless self-exploration as ‘looking for God’s will,’ as if not making up our minds and meandering through life were marks of spiritual sensitivity” (15).

DeYoung’s answer to this problem is that God is not a magic eight ball, a cosmic genie, or a divine butler. Rather, “We have no promise in Scripture that God will speak to us apart from the Spirit speaking through His Word” (69; Heb. 1–4). What a comfort to rest in God’s providence, which is “the almighty everywhere present power of God, whereby, as with His hand, He still upholds heaven and earth, and all creatures; and so governs them, that leaf and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, food and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, indeed, all things come not by chance, but by His fatherly hand” (Heidelberg 27).

Any discussion about God’s providence must be grounded in three different uses of the term “the will of God.” First, 4 8 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

God’s immutable, fixed, and sovereign will of decree cannot be thwarted. God’s will of decree is not accessible to finite humans (Deut. 29:29), which humbles us as we realize we are not the center of the universe! God has perfect, archetypal knowledge, while we as Christians have the ectypal, revealed knowledge of pilgrims as given to us through Scripture. We should not try to climb into the secret things of God in an effort at divinization.

The second use of the “will of God” is God’s revealed will as delivered in his law. This is God’s will of desire, or “the way things should be.” God is not the author of sin, but in his will of decree God sometimes ordains for things to happen that he disapproves of in his revealed will, such as the crucifixion of Christ (Acts 2:23; 4:27–28). DeYoung says, “The most heinous act of evil and injustice ever perpetrated on the earth—the murder of the Son of God—took place according to God’s gracious and predetermined will” (20). So any discussion of the will of God must be grounded in the cross of Christ.

The third use of the term “the will of God” is God’s will of direction. Many Christians dive into endless anxieties as they seek to figure out God’s will of direction for them in finding a spouse or choosing a career. DeYoung wisely says that God does not have a secret will of direction for us to find out before we proceed with making a big decision. We are to make decisions without dreams, casting lots, or liver shivers as we seek the Scriptures for biblical principles, pray for wisdom, and seek the advice of wise, mature Christian friends. DeYoung says, “Trusting in God’s will of decree is good. Following his will of desire is obedient. Waiting for God’s will of direction is a mess” (26).

A biblical understanding of the three uses of the “will of God” will help to free us from indecision. For example, we don’t have access to God’s secret will of decree in order to determine who to marry, nor do we wait around for God’s will of direction to decide who to ask on a coffee date to Starbucks. Rather, we see that God’s revealed will, as given to us in his law, tells us to look for a godly woman. This means there are a number of possible Christian girls to marry. So guys, get off of the couch, turn off the Wii, and pursue a Christian woman with whom you are compatible.

And pray less that God would show you who is the right wife and pray more to be the right kind of husband (106).

Then, get married, have children, and love, serve, and sacrifice for her as long as you both shall live.

So, what is God’s will for our lives? DeYoung says we are not given step-by-step instructions in life, but we are to look to God’s Word for guidance and wisdom. In the Bible, we see that God’s will is for us to rejoice, pray, and give thanks (1 Thess. 5:16–18). Colossians 1:9 says we are to bear fruit and know God better by hiding his Word in our hearts that we might not sin against him (Ps. 119:11). God’s will for his people is our sanctification (1 Thess. 4:3), so we ought to pray we will make decisions based on “faith, hope, and love—and not the praise of man and greed and selfish ambition.” That is, we should pray that we will follow God’s will of desire, as revealed in the law, rather than praying to figure out his will of direction (102).

Once we understand that God speaks to us through his inspired, infallible, and inerrant Word, our anxious hearts can find comfort. God’s will for our lives is his law, which slays each one of us. God’s good news is his gospel, which is the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Now that we have been justified, we are continually being sanctified through the means of grace. As justified sinners, the law is now a guide for us in gratitude, not a checklist on how to become acceptable to God. Just Do Something helps to show us that the Christian faith is not first and foremost a mode of behavior, but a message to be believed. It is through a fundamental understanding of the law-gospel distinction that we find answers to the most important question we should be asking: How can I as a wretched sinner be acceptable in the sight of a holy God who demands a righteousness as perfect as his own? That question is much more important both now and for eternity than asking, “Should I ask Jane or Jill to dinner?” or “Should I attend Wheaton or Westmont?” By understanding the law and the gospel, we also realize the world doesn’t revolve around us! God’s Word isn’t about how to live my best life now, but rather about how God has condescended to us in the person of Christ to save a people for himself through the blood, merit, and righteousness of the God-man.

Just Do Something is an encouragement to the church. The saints at the United Reformed Church here in Boise, Idaho, have been greatly edified by this book. In particular, our teenagers were challenged as we discussed it together. High school kids often wonder about whom they should marry, where they should go to college, what they should study, where they should live, and what job they should pursue.

DeYoung helped me to help our kids seek biblical wisdom rather than a crystal ball, and to live as pilgrims by faith in Christ rather than striving to live the purpose-driven life in an effort to control our future.

By reading Just Do Something, God’s people are sharpened so we might know better “what we believe and why we believe it.” This book provides comfort for Christ’s suffering, confused, and discouraged sheep. I heartily recommend reading Kevin DeYoung’s book Just Do Something. I believe it to be a great encouragement and blessing to Christ’s flock.

Ryan Kron is an associate pastor at Cloverdale United Reformed Church (URCNA) in Boise, Idaho.

Aquinas: A Very Short Introduction

By Fergus Kerr Oxford University Press, 2009 127 pages (paperback), $11.95 Few Protestants spend time with Thomas Aquinas. He is verbose, antiquated, and “Catholic.” He left us over eight

million words in print, so the interested may quickly become the intimidated. He did write long ago in a specific milieu, and his theology fits the context and thus requires some knowledge of the era in order to grasp the doctrine.

Finally, he is both a doctor of the whole church as well as the chief theologian of the Roman Catholic Church, so reading Thomas as a Protestant involves negotiation of some ecumenical questions. Put these all together, and we must say that reading Thomas Aquinas is not easy. Yet we are the worse off when we ignore this great theological master.

Fergus Kerr has helped make him more accessible now by penning this Very Short Introduction to Thomas. Like other volumes in this series from Oxford University Press, a snappy little volume introduces the reader to a figure, topic, or movement by offering an expert’s guidance and commentary. Indeed, Kerr brings a wealth of knowledge to the task, having already written a remarkable scholarly volume called After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism. That volume stands at the forefront of Thomistic scholarship, offering a magisterial treatment of recent debates among those claiming to represent Thomas today. Here that same scholarly rigor is paired with accessible writing in the best possible way, offering a remarkably clear and brief entry into the life and thought of this learned theologian. Interested readers should take note and gain familiarity with a famed doctor of the church.

Kerr’s book includes six chapters: his biography (chapter 1), his literary works (chapter 2), the three parts of his magnum opus (chapters 3–5), and Thomism (chapter 6). Kerr helpfully describes the key phases in his life and work, and he walks the reader through the various texts of his literary oeuvre. The real center of the book is the discussion of Thomas’s Summa Theologiae, a work that has dominated theology for several centuries. The ST comes in three parts (with the second part itself having two parts), and its macrostructure reflects Thomas’s reading of redemptive history. Kerr ably explains the major sections of each part, and he shows how the broader project fits together. These three chapters serve as a very brief synopsis of Thomas’s approach to most every tenet of Christian theology, and they always point the reader to specific places where they can read more in the ST. Especially helpful discussions include Kerr’s unpacking of the claim that “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it” (33), the practical reasons for knowing the Trinity (50–1), the relationship of human purpose to happiness (67–8), the relationship of virtues to Christian character and growth (71–3, 78–85), natural law (75–8), the function of the sacraments (96–7), and the doctrine of transubstantiation (98– 100). In all these places, he exposits Thomas clearly and succinctly. He concludes the book with a wonderfully accessible account of recent debates regarding the place of metaS E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 0 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 4 9

physics in theology: Why should we talk of “being” (and a number of other metaphysical terms such as “simplicity”) in thinking about God? Kerr describes the approach of Adolf van Harnack and others in rejecting metaphysics as a “Hellenizing” of the gospel, and he then depicts the Thomistic argument that the gospel requires us to think about the world in metaphysical categories (113–19). In a world where various classical attributes of God are being disputed left and right, this historical sketch alone is worth the price of the book. Perhaps here Thomas can be of most help to children of the Reformation, showing us the exegetical roots of creedal and classical Christian language for describing God’s character.

The book might have been made stronger by an explanation of the microstructure of Thomas’s ST, which is divided into three parts—each made up of a number of questions and each composed of various articles. Such a discussion would better prepare readers to engage Thomas themselves. In other words, Kerr is especially strong in showing the macrolevel form of the ST, namely, how his doctrine of creation relates to his doctrine of law or his teaching on virtue; yet he is less helpful in showing how the book functions from page to page—that is, explaining how counterarguments, replies, and rebuttals work in Thomas’s theological rhetoric.

Both aspects of Thomas’s work are unfamiliar to most Christians today, and so introduction is really needed to help us read as well as reflect on the work of this theologian.

Thomas was not a Protestant, but he was a father figure of the Protestants. Many doctrines held dear by Luther and Calvin were best described by Thomas (for example, predestination and providence, on which see Kerr’s illuminating exposition of “divine government,” 62–5). Later Reformed theologians such as John Owen and Herman Bavinck make special use of Thomas in thinking about God and creation; for example, Bavinck ruminates on the implications of the Thomistic principle “Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.” This has shaped the ongoing development of Reformed eschatology and soteriology against the strong Gnostic trends of our culture. In our own day, some of the finest work on the doctrine of God has been written by modern-day Thomists (Gilles Emery or Matthew Levering), in ways quite agreeable to the theology of the Protestant churches. These contemporary theologians are trying to express the central impulses of Thomas in a new day. While we will have disagreements about soteriology and other issues, we cannot turn our back on such careful thinking about the nature of God in the Thomistic tradition.

We believe Thomas is our father, and we must seek his wisdom. Laypersons in Reformation churches now have access to the basic structures of his thought, the key patterns of his exegesis, and the lingering debates among his pupils. In the best sense, Kerr has given us a very short introduction to a very major theologian.

Michael Allen is assistant professor of systematic theology at Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

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POINT OF CONTACT: BOOKS YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE READING Millennium Trilogy Bundle: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

By Stieg Larsson Knopf, 2010 Three volumes (hardcover), $81.85 Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s crime thrillers have built an enthusiastic worldwide audience, selling more than 35 billion copies to date. The anticipation leading up to the recent release of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the third in his Millennium Trilogy, is impressive. In fact, only the readers of Charles Dickens and J. K. Rowling pass him in clamoring for sequels.

Many readers credit the chemistry between Larsson’s protagonists for propelling his narratives. Larsson‘s two main characters are a womanizing journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, and his tattooed, computer hacker sidekick, Lisbeth Salander. In Larsson’s first best-seller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, published in Sweden in 2005, we meet Blomkvist, a divorced thirty-something with an estranged teenage daughter. He works for a Swedish magazine called Millennium and faces jail time for libeling a corporate executive. While this smart and articulate journalist will do his time, he will not give up on his quest to clear his good name.

Salander, on the other hand, is harder to figure out. Clearly, she has serious emotional baggage. She rarely speaks and sulks around like a skittish feline.

The plot is set in motion when Hendrik Vanger, a corporate executive, hires Blomkvist to write a biography of his family and their business. He hooks Blomkvist by telling him he has the goods on Hans-Erik Wennerstrom, the corrupt billionaire who brought the journalist to trial. However, the family biography is only the pretext for a more important assignment. Vanger wants Blomkvist to investigate the fortyyear-old missing person case of his favorite niece. The uncle comments clumsily, “Harriet was the apple of my eye….She had both morals and backbone.”

Enter Salander, the Goth freelance hacker, who won’t let legalities stand in the way of a good computer find. Trouble

is, she can barely grunt a full sentence—even during a job interview. Through a memorable introduction, however, Blomkvist realizes she’s perfect for the Vanger assignment.

And Larsson’s “Nordic noir” plot is off and running.

Together, the dynamic duo travel to city and countryside attempting to break open the case. And the plot has many thematic threads—corporate greed, serious family dysfunction, sexual perversity, and murder are just a few of the themes/sins explored. Larsson keeps his reader turning the pages well into the night with his plot hooks and foreshadowing. For instance, he writes at the close of one chapter: “People always have secrets. It’s just a matter of finding out what they are.”

But why has this series captured the imagination of so many readers? Frankly, I’m still scratching my head. Certainly, Larsson deserves credit for mapping out complicated plots. He also offers a wealth of details on themes ranging from the inner workings of a major corporation, to the beauty of small town Swedish life. He also builds suspense by sketching a variety of colorful secondary characters and suspects.

And, in one sense, he delivers in the end, bringing all the threads together. (I would love to see the outline for his first book.) More impressive, Larsson wrote all three manuscripts of the Millennium Trilogy before submitting anything to a publisher. Yet, this reader is more than ambivalent about his first novel, and I don’t plan to finish the trilogy. Life is too short. Just do the math. An average reader can comprehend fifty pages an hour. That means I have spent more than twelve hours in Larsson’s world already finishing his six-hundred-plus-page first novel. And that fictional world lacked a great deal. The novel was almost entirely plot driven. His characters are not sufficiently developed. They don’t grow or change much. And I didn’t feel I understood what motivated them.

Then there is Larsson’s literary style—or lack of it. The writing is uninspired and at times downright clunky.

Devotees of these works blame the translation from Swedish to English. I’m not so sure. Some sentences were so bad, I

Interview with Timothy Keller (continued from page 44) away, and that a Christian who is confused would understand. What brings revival is when Christians— who are still living in a kind of moralistic paradigm—get the gospel of grace, they understand it, and all that spiritual deadness that comes from the insecurity and moralism of their life falls off. Seekers see the gospel more clearly, and they become Christians— then you have a revival.

couldn’t resist underlining them and adding exclamation points in the margins. For example, “You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that these events were somehow related.” Even if this cliché was overlooked in Larsson’s revising, where was his editor?

Most importantly, I did not feel I trusted the author.

Larsson introduces provocative subjects but fails to give them the weight they deserve. For instance, each major section begins with a shocking statistic about how badly women are treated in Sweden. “Forty-six percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man,” or “Thirteen percent of women in Sweden have been subjected to aggravated sexual assault outside of a sexual relationship.”

Yet these alarming statistics seem to be exploited to create several darkly kinky episodes that shock or repulse without explaining or educating.

Reading about the author makes me expect better. By day, Larsson worked as the editor of Expo, a leading antiright-wing extremist publication in Sweden. His convictions ran deep and enraged certain political groups to the point that he received death threats. For this reason, you might imagine his novels to offer political profundity. You would be wrong. Even the references to Nazism give little context or illumination.

Stieg Larsson reportedly bragged to a friend, while drinking too much whiskey, that he would write a couple of books and become a millionaire. His novels consequently include all the bells and whistles of a commercial success—though not a literary one. Tragically, Larsson died of a heart attack in 2005 at age fifty. He will not have the opportunity to set his sights higher or enjoy his millions.

Ann Henderson Hart lives in Philadelphia and is a regular contributor to Modern Reformation.

And that’s what we need to be communicating week in and week out, not just assuming that people already know it.

Yes, and in fact weirdly enough, several people in my church read your book Christless Christianity and The Prodigal God together. They said, “Hey, these two books are saying the same thing.” I find this kind of interesting, though I have read your book and you say a whole lot more. My book is very short and is trying to say just one thing. But

they understood that the core of the two books is really the same.

Thank you for helping us figure out that wherever we are— whether we’re in a nursing home in South Dakota, in a Midwestern church, in Southern California, or in New York City—the gospel is the same. People’s deepest needs are the same.

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FINAL THOUGHTS f r o m

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Letting God’s Word Draw Us Out of Our Hole

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his issue has focused on interpreting the Bible correctly, especially as God’s story. The

renewed by his gospel.

Now we are free at last to law drives us out of hiding, bringing us into the open place where God judges us, come out of our hole, no longer fearful but living in puts a stop to our spin, and leaves us without any hope in ourselves. Through the open field of God’s church and world. At last, the gospel, God speaks peace to our hearts and unites us to we are free to embrace God and our neighbors. his Son for justification and renewal.

This issue has focused on shifting our attention from the One of the points I’ve been making ad nauseam of late reader to the speaker, from ourselves to God. When God is that the three persons of the Trinity—the Father, the Son, speaks, you don’t have to make it relevant. It just is. Of and the Spirit—are the writer, central character, and castcourse, none of us denies that we bring our own presuppoing director of redemption’s drama. Here we are with our sitions, hopes, fears, social location, and upbringing with us dead-end plots and “nowhere man” characters, trying to in hearing and reading God’s Word. Christians trying to surmake God a supporting actor in our life movies. Instead, we vive genocide and extreme poverty in Rwanda see things in need to have the character we’ve invented for ourselves Scripture that people like me often miss. That’s why we need killed off so that we can be rewritten as children of God and to read and hear Scripture together with all the saints in all times and places. An abused daughter will need help acceptcoheirs with Christ. The Bible is an unfolding story that ing God’s fatherhood as a positive rather than a painful image. yields doctrine, doxology, and discipleship.

And yet, God’s concrete act of adopting and gradual process Our backyard is littered with gopher mounds. You watch of fathering his children through his Word will do far more in these creatures pop up every now and then, nervously this regard for all of us than scads of pep talks. peeking and then grabbing whatever snack they can find We talk like experts when we really should “be still and and dragging it down into their hole before they’re spotted. know that [he] is God.” Nothing new ever happens, nothing We’re kind of like that. We want to be private, autonomous, learned, nothing lost along with something greater gained— anonymous, and in control. Basically, we are afraid of getas long as we are in charge of the conversation. When God ting caught, being told by someone else who we really are, speaks, however, we find ourselves caught off guard in a and being at the mercy of the One who can destroy us. world we don’t know much about and in a relationship in If we come to the preaching and reading of the Bible that way, we can’t help but use God’s Word for our own inner lives which we are certainly not the ones in charge. This is why instead of expecting it to challenge, unsettle, overturn, and the creed God gives his people comes in the form, “Hear, O destroy our lives in order to raise us as new creatures in Christ.

Israel….” In biblical faith, hearing is believing. When God Better reading of and meditation on the Scriptures happens approaches and opens his lips, we fall silent. We’re not in through better preaching that we receive week after week. A control. As the book of Job marvelously demonstrates, it’s not wonderful line in the Westminster Larger Catechism teaches God but we who are put to the question. that the preaching of the Word is “an effectual means” of salThere is a time to speak, but first comes listening. Not telling vation by “driving them out of themselves and drawing them God what we’re looking to get out of religion and spirituality, unto Christ” (The Westminster Larger Catechism, Q. 155, Book of but to expose our religion and spirituality—along with everyConfessions [PCUSA]). It is just this event of being driven out thing else—to the author of truth and the one who has made of ourselves that we resist, preferring immediacy precisely his own Son our righteousness, wisdom, and holiness. So let’s because it overcomes the otherness that puts us in question. get out of our hole of the inner self and surrender to the light This is what Merold Westphal has called “ontological xenoof day. Let’s expect our hearing and reading of God’s Word to phobia”: “the fear of meeting a stranger, even if the stranger unmask and dethrone our inner self—that little tyrant who preis God” (Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-theology: Toward a tends to sovereignty but is inwardly fearful and lonely. When Postmodern Christian Faith, Fordham University Press, 2001). we do so, we will find a new world—one truly alive, fresh with The paradox is that even though the Bible is not about us, springs and mountains, with treasures under each tree, and it is for us. When we are drawn out of our little hole in the friends we never would have chosen for ourselves. ground—hemmed in by the narrow confines of our intuition, experience, piety, and assumptions—we are judged Michael Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation. and saved. Condemned by God’s law, we are justified and 5 2 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G