Exegesis and Theology

The Blog of Brian Collins

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Allegory and the Church Fathers

June 16, 2011 by Brian

"There is a general failure in antiquity to make a clear distinction between allegorical expression and allegorical interpretation. What we call ‘allegorical interpretation’ in this context normally takes the form of a claim that an author has expressed himself ‘allegorically’ in a given passage. . . . There is never any suggestion that the goal of the commentator is anything but the elucidation of the intention or meaning (διάνοια) of the author. Neither does the interpreter normally feel compelled to justify his claim that the text under consideration ‘says other things than the obvious. His goal is to find the hidden meanings, the correspondence that carry the thrust of the text beyond the explicit. Once he has asserted their existence, he rarely feels the need to provide a theoretical substructure for his claims. If such a substructure is implied, it is often no more than the idea that a prestigious author is incapable of an incoherent or otherwise unacceptable statement, and that an offensive surface is thus a hint that a secondary meaning lurks behind."

Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition, 20.

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Sola Scriptura and Specific Applications

April 1, 2011 by Brian

How does God’s speech in creation relate to his speech in Scripture? In putting such a great emphasis on general revelation, are we not in danger of minimizing special revelation? Do we not thereby compromise the Reformation’s great principle of sola Scriptura?

This is a legitimate concern. . . . The analogy with ‘guidance’ can be helpful. It is certainly true that a preoccupation with ‘the leading of the Spirit’ in determining God’s will for decisions of everyday life can result in an undervaluing of Scripture, but that is not at all a necessary consequence of an emphasis on seeking God’s will in our daily lives. A sound approach to guidance will always stress the primacy and indispensability of Scripture as well as the exercise of ‘sanctified common sense,’ bit it will not thereby downplay the reality of a knowable and specific will of God for our personal lives. In fact, the Scriptures themselves by their insistent teaching of God’s lordship over all of our lives continually drive us to consider questions of guidance. Suppose John, a college senior has to decide whether // to go on to seminary or to pursue graduate studies in philosophy. Scripture does not decide that question for him. Instead it gives him certain indispensable guidelines: he must seek the Lord’s will in all things, he must be a good steward of the gifts God gives him, he must do all to the glory of God, God has a plan for his life and has been guiding him since childhood, he must subordinate his own wishes and desires to God’s, and so on. But these guidelines press him on to a consideration of what God’s will is in this situation, what gifts he has to be a steward of, what is most glorifying to God in this particular case, what God’s plan and guidance have been in his life to this point, what personal preferences must be downplayed, and so on. In considering all these individual questions he must continually check back with Scripture to make sure his bearings are right, but he would be foolish and irresponsible if he let a stray text decide the matter for him without considering available graduate schools, his own talents and temperament, specific historical needs, and so on.

Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 36-37

Filed Under: Bibliology, Christian Living, Dogmatics

God is most glorified in us when we are most conformed to His image

February 13, 2011 by Brian

“This is the prime way of honouring God. We do not so glorify God by elevated admirations, or eloquent expressions, or pompous services for him, as when we aspire to a conversing with him with unstained spirits, and live to him in living like him.”
Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, 453 cited in Beeke, Puritan Reformed Spirituality, 404.

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Dangers of Missional Thinking

January 6, 2011 by Brian

I do not think for a moment that the church should aspire to become irrelevant. There is always a need for Christians to speak the gospel into their own context. Rather, my concern is with the ever present danger of over-contextualizing. Consider what happens to a church that is always trying to appeal to an increasingly post-Christian culture. Almost inevitably, the church itself becomes post- Christian. This is what happened to the liberal church during the twentieth century, and it is what is happening to the evangelical church right now. As James Montgomery Boice has argued, evangelicals are accepting the world’s wisdom, embracing the world’s theology, adopting the world’s agenda, and employing the world’s methods. In theology a revision of evangelical doctrine is now underway that seeks to bring Christianity more in line with postmodern thought. The obvious difficulty is that in a post-Christian culture, a church that tries too hard to be relevant may in the process lose its very identity as the church. Rather than confronting the world the church gets co-opted by. It no longer stands a city on a hill, but sinks to the level of the surrounding culture."

Philip Graham Ryken, City on a Hill: Reclaiming the Biblical Pattern for the Church in the 21st Century (Moody Press, 2003), 22.

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Release of Robert Bell’s OTT

October 6, 2010 by Brian

Students of New Testament theology have the benefit of multiple New Testament Theologies written from many perspectives and utilizing many methodologies. Two recent New Testament theologies (Thielman and Marshall) proceed by examining the themes of individual New Testament books.

To my knowledge, there has been no comparable Old Testament theology. Walter Kaiser’s Toward and Old Testament Theology and his more recent The Promise-Plan of God move through the individual books of the Bible, but they do not examine them thematically. The Dallas Seminary compendium, A Biblical Theology of the Old Testament approximates this approach, but it deals with larger corpora: the Pentateuch, the Minor Prophets, etc. Paul Houses’s Old Testament Theology does move through the Old Testament book by book, but he does not examine these books thematically. Bruce Waltke’s acclaimed An Old Testament Theology, has a helpful introductory section, but it is heavy on Genesis and extremely light by the time it reaches the prophets.

Bell’s The Theological Messages of the Old Testament Books provides a thematic study of each of the books of the Old Testament. (The exceptions to this book-by-book approach are Judges and Ruth and the three minor prophets Obadiah, Joel, and Zephaniah. Intriguingly, Bell suggests that Judges-Ruth may have once been one book. Obadiah, Joel and Zephaniah are treated together because they share the common theme “Day of the Lord.”) In general, Bell discusses the structure of the book, he follows this with a thematic analysis, and he concludes with suggestions for pastoral application. He does not hold himself to following the pattern in every case (see explanation on p. 14).

Preceding the individual book theologies, Bell provides the reader with a brief orientation to biblical theology and to the method he employs in this volume. Regarding the nature of biblical theology, he contrasts Vos’s popular view that biblical theology and systematic theology are distinguished only by method with the view that the two disciplines differ in nature. Bell thinks a better approach limits biblical theology to studying what God revealed in Scripture (by which, I understand him to mean the primary messages that God intended each book to convey). Systematic theology, on the other hand, extends to investigating what is true about God using Scripture statements, implications from those statements, natural theology, and historical theology (4-5).

The introduction also reveals the two great advantages that Bell sees in biblical theology. First, biblical theology provides a way for the Christian to find relevance in the Old Testament without resorting to allegory or mere moralizing (1). Bell’s concern for enabling Christians to see the significance of the Old Testament is emphasized by the application sections that conclude each chapter and by two appendices which provide example sermons based on the methodology exhibited in this work. Second, while granting the “legitimacy of systematic theology” (5, n. 15), Bell believes Biblical Theology enables the Christian to see what God explicitly says. In his words, “It is very important for Bible students and pastors to be able to distinguish between what the Bible says and what the theologians have concluded, even when these conclusions may correctly reflect God’s truth” (5-6).

Bell notes that book theologies of the sort he proposes could easily match the dimensions of standard commentaries on those books. His work is therefore a starting point for deeper investigations.

The BJU Campus Store has the book available in the store and at their website. According to the website, books purchased before October 7th will received a signed copy. There is also a live book signing at the Campus Store on October 7 from 11:30 to 1:30.

Disclosure: I am an employee of BJU Press and I received a review copy from the BJU Campus Store.

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Sermon Listening and Pastors Who Watch for your Soul in the Digital Age

October 4, 2010 by Brian

Mark Ward has an excellent post summarizing an excellent message by our pastor last night.

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Hugh of St. Victor on a Liberal Arts Education

September 4, 2010 by Brian

Learn everything; afterwards you will see that nothing is superfluous.

Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon, 6.3

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Two Kinds of Questioning

August 28, 2010 by Brian

If the Manichees were willing to discuss the hidden meaning of these words in a spirit of reverent inquiry rather than of captious fault-finding, then they would of course not be Manichees, but as they asked it would be given them, and as they sought they would find, as they knocked it would be opened up to them. The fact is, you see, people who have a genuine religious interest in learning put far more questions about this text than the3se irreligious wretches; but the difference between them is that the former seek in order to find, while the latter are at no pains at all to do anything except not to find what they are seeking.

Augustine, On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees, 2.2.3.

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John Broadus on Drinking Alcohol

July 23, 2010 by Brian

The idea that the word wine in the Bible sometimes means an unintoxicating beverage is without any sufficient foundation. Some men have written to that effect, but no man who is a thorough Hebrew or Greek scholar, as far as I know, at all takes any such position. It seems to me a great pity that advocates of the great cause of total abstinence should take up so utterly untenable a position. The pure wine of Palestine, in our Lord’s time, taken as was the custom with a double quantity of water (a man who ‘drinks unmixed,’ among the Greeks, meant a hard drinker), and used in moderation, was about as stimulating as our tea and coffee, and was used by the Saviour and by others just as we use them. The case is altered now, for such pure and mild wines would be very hard to get, and they are not needed because we have tea and coffee, and their use would tend to encourage the use of distilled liquors, which are so much more powerful and dangerous. Therefore it is better to abstain from the use of wine for our own sake and as an example to to others.

J. A. B. to B. W. N. Simms on Nov. 28, 1894 cited in A. T. Robertson, Life and Letters of John A. Broadus (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1910), 426-427.

Filed Under: Christian Living

Alan Jacobs on Browsing a Dictionary

July 20, 2010 by Brian

“The great blessing of Google is its uncanny skill in finding what you’re looking for; the curse is that it so rarely finds any of those lovely odd things you’re not looking for. For that pleasure, it seems, we need books.”

Alan Jacobs, “Bran Flakes and Harmless Drudges,” in Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 38.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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