Hello and welcome to Deep Roots, conversations about theology and ministry brought to you by Oak Hill College.
We took a month off for Christmas over December but it's very nice to be back again.
My name is Tim Ward and I'm joined here by my colleagues David Shaw and Alden McCray.
Alden is consistently one of the sharpest dressed members of faculty.
Alden, thank you for keeping the standards high.
Well, in Chris's absence I suppose I'll have to.
Now, Alden, you're nominating the topic that we're going to go at for the next 40 minutes or so.
So tell us what you've chosen.
So I thought it'd be great to revisit the topic of the theological interpretation of scripture,
perhaps more broadly just how theology and scripture interact.
Over recent decades people from all sorts of different walks of the Christian faith have been
looking at how theology might shape our scriptural reading.
In particular, going back to previous generations of Christians for how they read the Bible,
how their practices might help and guide us, how they might correct us in particular ways,
how we might learn from them, how what they describe might ably describe where we're doing things well.
So that's part of a sort of broader movement of retrieving aspects of faith and practice
and theology from previous generations that I think is gaining a lot of attention,
it's got a lot of traction, can be very helpful.
So I thought it'd be great to talk about that with you both.
Great. Well, I think we agree with that.
This is something I continue to think about and we co-teach a module, don't we, that gets into some of this.
You say revisit the issues under theological interpretation of scripture.
I guess you're thinking it was 18 months ago, wasn't it?
We did a school of theology here on this, but we continue to think about it,
people continue to talk about it, it remains significant.
So I want to dig in a bit further.
Absolutely.
I mean, you talk about retrieval and David, you're going to say something about this in a moment,
but is this something, I mean, learning from the past,
people might think isn't that something Christians have always done?
But this is particularly arisen, hasn't it, in recent years in scholarship?
Yes, I think so.
So over the 20th century, there were different groups within the church
who were wanting more deliberately to have better conversations
with earlier generations of Christian theologians, exegetes, pastors, preachers,
and to be much more deliberate about the way they could draw on those
conversations as that sort of movement of retrieval has expanded into different areas
of the church that's gained more energy, more importance for how people have gone about
various tasks.
And I think perhaps it's even accelerating within evangelicalism at the moment,
as people want to give more and more attention to what do we learn, what do we learn well,
and where has there been genuine progress?
Where do we not, where and how do we not simply try to repeat the past,
but genuinely sort of retrieve the past for contemporary application?
So I think that all of those are parts of the...
When we say earlier generations, we're thinking about a broad sweep here.
I mean, like the first 1600 years of the church, we're talking about the early church fathers,
medievals, and then into the Protestant reformers too.
Absolutely.
Great.
We got a lot to talk about, and I'm excited by this stuff.
David, you've recently put together a paper that you delivered at a conference
on this border issue of retrieval.
Just help us set the scene a bit more by talking a bit more about that.
Yeah, gladly.
So Alden kicked us off thinking about theological interpretation of scripture.
Often that would be a kind of overlapping idea to the idea of retrieval.
And if I try to describe it, you'll see areas of overlap already.
So retrieval built into that word is the idea that there's something to recover from the past,
something to retrieve.
The thought that before the last 300 years or so, there was a healthier relationship
between the ways that we read scripture, the ways that we thought about Christian doctrine,
and theology, and those were better integrated than they've become.
And that there were a set of not just theological conclusions, but ways to read the Bible,
and also a vision of the Christian life.
All of those things in some ways are seeking to be retrieved.
The thought that there are, yes, theological judgments, theological ideas that we've lost
contact with and don't talk much about, or that we've actually discovered that there's
something to recover from the past, we've actually decided we don't think they're in
the Bible and we've rejected them.
So there are some theological ideas that for a long time have been very stable within the
Christian tradition, but more recently we've not been persuaded of.
So ideas like the eternal generation of the sun, for example.
Alden can explain that to us in a moment.
Ideas, concepts, doctrines, but also that idea that if we go back into the early church,
into the medieval period, into the reformers, then we find ways of reading the Bible that
aren't quite like the way that we are taught to read the Bible now and how we teach people
to do that.
So what we think about theology, how we read the Bible, and then also our vision for the
Christian life and a number of people looking at the ways that the hope particularly of
knowing and experiencing God, contemplating him and his beauty, that is something that
people have identified as a missing element in a lot of our spirituality and one that
we'd really helpfully retrieve.
I'll say one more thing and then I'm going to throw you a question.
Of which I don't have advance notice in case anybody's wondering.
You absolutely don't.
So that's the freefall.
If I've had it straight back to Alden, you'll know I don't know.
There we go.
So the one comment I want to make is that at its best this idea of retrieval, as Alden
mentioned a moment ago, isn't about simply trying to recreate the fourth century, 15th,
16th century.
So this is not some kind of, oh, there was a golden age, if only we could get back there.
Exactly.
At its best, the movement want to speak about creative archaeology or retrieval for the
sake of renewal, genuinely thinking that there are resources here that are going to help
the church fulfill its calling and to equip pastors to teach and lead God's people well
and so on.
So there's a real advantage, there's a real heart for the church behind a lot of this.
That's the comment I wanted to make.
The question I'll send back to you is how much it's right to see something of a kind
of story of crisis.
So Alden a minute ago said, this is really about us trying to make improvements and trying
to think more carefully about the relationship between theology and scripture.
Often it's told as much more of a story of crisis, that things have gone quite badly
wrong and we need much more of a course correction.
Does that ring true to you?
I don't think I want to call it a crisis.
I think that feels to me like an exaggeration.
I prefer the image that you gave of course correction.
So not as an, oh my goodness, 180 degree turn, but oh look, it appears that in some ways,
in a lot of evangelical interpretation of scripture, a lot is going well.
The ship is heading in the right direction, but you know, you need to be steering a ship,
driving a car.
You can't just hold the wheel in a fixed position.
Things are going to throw you off and there's times when you need to correct.
And I'm not too worried about haggling over whether the kind of correction that we think
is needed is a tweak or a real kind of, whoa, lurch the wheel.
We may feel differently about that according to where we stand and the kind of issues we see
in this very complex, it seems to me that's fine.
I'd be a bit nervous of the language of crisis because that might sound a little bit like,
I think almost everybody else has gone wrong and I'm an iron people who agree with me on
how the savior, I think that's pretty unhelpful.
This is not like let's have another reformation.
So there's a sense of, let's calm down a bit, but equally let's not think all we need is one or two
minor tweaks.
Yeah, let me throw this in, I could say a lot more, but this for now.
And the thing that leads me to think that increasingly is the more biblical interpretation
and preaching that I read from the first 1600 years of the church, so fathers, yes,
medievals, yes, but crucially, I guess, for people like us, also mainline Protestant reformers,
the more of that I read, the more it strikes me that some of the fundamental things they are
doing with the Bible, not just around the fringes, but again and again and again, utterly centrally
bread and butter for them, are not always central and bread and butter for us, for contemporary
evangelicals.
And some of it we've even been warned against.
So that is, as it were, if you could plonk Calvin down in one of our churches, I mean,
there's a lot that he might not like, depending on the kind of church that it is, but I think one of
the things that he would find weirdest is some of the central things we do and or think we
shouldn't do with scripture.
I think he'd find some of our handling of scripture kind of weird.
Okay, so let's focus on that then.
So what do you think are some of those bread and butter things to them that aren't quite
so natural to us or what would cause Calvin most discomfort?
Yeah, that's, I mean, it's always a slightly tricky game to play because who really knows
it can get a bit anachronistic.
But as you look at the, you've described things happening in the early church, the medieval
period, particularly in the time of the Reformation, things that are bread and butter ideas and ways
of reading the Bible, what there do you find most helpful that you think?
Yeah, as I've tried to think more about this very, very broad movement, we've already named
check to it, the theological interpretation of scripture, TIS, as we know, massively broad,
done by Roman Catholics, done by evangelicals, done by people who are quite liberal.
So it's going to be really selective.
It's a broadly shared set of interests.
As far as I can see, it revolves around three convictions.
And you've mentioned these, but the way I headline them is doctrine, biblical interpretation,
for doctrine, seeking explicitly to see doctrine come out of our biblical interpretation and
biblical interpretation in light of doctrine, the assumption that doctrine is going to illumine
fundamentally.
Some parts of evangelicalism, people would go, that's not news.
For others, that's something people have wanted to move away from.
That would be one.
Second would be the actual practice of interpretation.
Again and again, what you see, I think, in older interpreters is that it's deliberately
canonical and therefore figural.
That means just the assumption, the full canonical context of any Bible passage is going to be
absolutely crucial and fundamentally determinative in its meaning.
Now, again, for some evangelicals, they go like, thanks for the
fact that I already knew that.
For others, there'd be a nervousness of going, quote, going there too quickly.
But early generations seem to me to be going there quickly an awful lot of the time.
And related to that would be interpreting figurally or, these terms are difficult,
might call that allegorically.
And I'm going to have to spend some time defining what we mean by allegorical because it can mean
different things.
But a much greater contentment with that, seeing figural or allegorical or the fathers would say
spiritual meanings.
So doctrine, canonical and figural interpretation.
And the third would be, and you've already mentioned this, interpretation very much done in
and for the church, meaning in the light of Christian experience.
I find Puritan exegesis is doing that again and again.
Contemporary evangelical preaching, not always.
That will mean that godliness is thought then to be absolutely crucial for biblical interpretation.
What I find interesting with students is when you put godliness on the table in relation to
exegesis, what Meyers commonly says, we guess of course biblical interpretation should lead
to godliness.
That's where they go.
Of course, everybody's always thought that.
But what I find students don't easily say, first of all, is godliness is going to be crucial for
discerning well what is in the scriptures.
Now, when you put that on the table, no evangelical is going to disagree with that.
But if you look at, I don't know, popular courses in how to interpret the Bible or
a typical little training course in a church on training Bible study leaders, at least in my
experience, courses I've been in and previously put together, it's not been common to headline.
Godliness is absolutely crucial for discerning what God is saying in his word.
So yeah, those would be my headline areas where Calvin might look at us and say,
in some parts of contemporary evangelicalism, those three things in light of and for doctrine,
canonically, figurally, in the church, in light of and out of Christian experiences and
sanctification, that's where you locate biblical interpretation. Those things have not always rung
very loudly. And I think that would raise a Calvinian eyebrow.
Very good. Very good. To lay out those three things, I find really helpful because there you
can start to see where some of that course correction that we mentioned might be helpful.
So the idea that we want to read the Bible, we want to read the Bible, we want to read the
Bible. So the idea that we want to read the Scriptures to be able to make theological
conclusions and judgments. We have often been told that theology is something of a framework
and a straight jacket that mustn't be imposed on the Bible, that it somehow threatens the
Bible rather than emerging naturally from it. That's the sort of idea that you do sometimes
here. The idea that we want to read the Scriptures in light of the whole canon and to see
the connections, the very strong emphasis on a kind of redemptive historical reading.
I read, to understand a passage, I need to think at what point in history are we, what's
been revealed up to that point. And you will find some writers saying the only information
I should really be thinking with are the ideas that are already present at that point in
redemptive history. And I'm not really allowed to look on for spoilers.
And then, yes, that last one about the importance of godliness in the interpretation of Scripture.
We think of much more objective, these are the rules to follow in order to get a right reading.
And you might read Shakespeare in just the same way as you read the Scriptures
and succeed in the same ways. We've not so much spoken about the enabling of the Spirit,
the community of faith within which to read the Bible.
Yeah. Yeah. Just on that latter one, in terms of spirituality and godliness for Bible reading.
Of course it is true, and pastors find this again and again, that when they teach people
some, as it were, simple method and rules, if you like, for interpreting the Bible,
that's massively helpful. Here is how the genre of narrative works. Here's why it's important
in the epistle, you see a therefore, ask what it's there for. You're struggling with a particular
passage, well, have you read the context it's in, the chapter before? To teach those simple
exegetical rules method, if you like, is massively right and helpful. And you can find Christians
all through history, just taking it for granted that that is good and right and should be believed
and practiced. It's absolutely that. But if I look back on my years as a pastor and think about
the Christians in the church and their own reading of the Bible,
one of the things that I wonder if I did as well as I could, which is a very English way of saying,
I really don't think I did, is whether the, if you like, the person who's known and walked with the
Lord for many years loves the Lord steeped in his word. But for whatever reason, he's not
a person who's been to the Lord, steeped in his word, but for whatever reasons of background or
gifting, they don't have a mind that naturally takes in rules of linguistic comprehension.
And even if they can take them in, they can't easily articulate them back in a way that's
satisfying to someone with a mind like mine. I wonder if a person like that felt, that their
weren't a great reader of the Bible. But I think as the Lord's opened my eyes on this over the years,
both in the classroom and in church, I think I've again and again met people who,
for whatever reason, may not have been academic high flyers in our education system.
And they couldn't quite articulate to you what they were doing with the Bible, but again and
again they found the Lord in his word, in rather profound ways. Sometimes in ways that went beyond
a method I could describe, but if I look down, honestly I thought, you know, you're right.
And one of the things I would want to do in the church I'm in now, one of my ministries in churches
I help oversee, the life groups, midweek Bible study groups, is trying to find a way where we
combine. Yes, let's teach each other some basic, as it were, exegetical method. How do you interpret
prophecy and how would that be different from apocalyptic? We want to help people with that.
But to do so in a way that encourages people, you know the Lord, his spirit is in you,
it's through the spirit that the Lord breathed out the word, that sounds like quite a good setup
for getting the Bible right and seeing the Lord in his word and being very encouraging of that.
And I think it is true that in a number of evangelical circles
the moves in biblical interpretation which happened, you know, through historical criticism
18th century and onwards, which made method a big deal, and that's part of a much bigger picture
than in the modern West. If we can only get the method right it'll all be fine.
That there is a truth in that but it ought to be seen I think as a very very qualified truth.
I think when we look at how Christians have read scripture down the centuries,
that sort of balance is one of the things that I find really confirming about the sort of
conversations we're having. So you go back to something like Augustine's On Christian Teaching
which is this terrific handbook for interpreting the Bible and it's something that we look at in
that module on hermeneutics. Sometimes called the first primer on preaching ever written.
Absolutely. So there he's got a section dedicated to exactly the sort of rules
for interpretation exegesis that you're talking about. Ask how the language works, figure out some
grammar, look at some different translations, maybe learn some geography. Knowing some of that
help you to recognize some unfamiliar things. He's absolutely clear with no hint of apology
that that's an important part of how we should be reading scripture. But I'm really struck
when I come to that work what a small proportion of the overall comment that is. There's so much
more that he wants to talk about as well. So that's absolutely there and it's assumed and it's good
and right and shouldn't be obscured and that should give us great confidence that those sorts of
skills and techniques are good and we should continue to teach them and continue to look for
fresh ways of doing that. But there's so much more going on as well and when he comes to talk about
how the reader scriptures should prepare themselves for reading the Bible. One of the first things he
says is the fear of God and that I think is so important in the context of understanding why is
it that there are those in our churches who've walked with the Lord for so many years who love
the Lord dearly and from whom we would expect to have much to learn because this is someone who
loves the Lord and has walked with him for a long time and that has given them a special vantage
point to read and to hear particular things well. So this yeah thank you this is the book that used
to by Augustine used to be translated often on Christian doctrine. That's right.
Day Doctrine of Christiana but now increasingly on Christian teaching because it's not a handbook of
doctrine it's about the teaching. Yeah that's right. Of scripture. So you just tell us a bit
more what are the things that are in that that you might not find in a 21st century evangelical
primer on how to teach the Bible? Sure that's a great question Tim. Two or three things that
that you might not find. One of the first things is a discussion of how things and signs relate
about how we all use words as signs of things to communicate and that's a normal part of our
conversation and normal part of how language works because he's wanting Augustine's wanting
to talk about how does biblical language work. This lies behind the sort of
figural interpretation that you mentioned earlier and so he says things like logs or stones are
things and we use the word log or the word stone for those but he says there's actually something
else going on when scripture comes to the log that Moses threw into the water to make it
potable. There's something else going on with the stone that Jacob rests his head on and those are
things which God is using as a sign of something further. So that's a whole discussion that he gets
into. The serpent that's raised up, the brass serpent, isn't merely a thing. God has
orchestrated that event such that it's also a sign to us and therefore there are layers of
ultimately of Christ. Exactly. So that's one thing that you find in that book, a question of signs
and things. You find a lot too about the moral dimension of interpretation like we were saying
a moment ago about the importance of the fear of God and the broader context of what is scripture
doing? What's God using scripture to do? And ultimately for Augustine that means placing,
interpreting the interpretation of scripture and the reader of scripture within the broader
context of God drawing his people to know and enjoy him. So that's an important part of the
work and especially the very special nature of enjoyment of God. We enjoy God in a way which is
to be unique. God is to be loved and enjoyed. His beauty is to be
desired for its own sake in a way that's really special. And so that's the
really important in terms of a context of tracing back what's happening when we read the Bible.
It doesn't just go back to me and to me as a reader with particular tools. Actually if I trace it back
further it goes back most primitively to God and what God is using scripture to do in his world.
And that's important I think. Yeah, yeah.
And I haven't thought about this much recently but one of the things that I have appreciated
and I want to think more about in the book is in the fourth section Augustine talks about rhetoric
and he talks about, and this was his bread and butter, so this is what he was raised on. He was
trained to be a professor of rhetoric. This is what he did as his day job for a long time until
his conversion. And he talks about the fact that he was a professor of rhetoric and he was a
professor of rhetoric for a long time until his conversion. And one of the observations he makes
there, which I'm increasingly interested by, is that you can have different sort of levels of
rhetoric. You can have quite sort of gentle normal rhetoric suited and then you can have
sort of slightly grander rhetoric. And even more than that you can have the sort of the biggest,
most profound sort of rhetoric. There are these different sort of layers and that those layers
are suited to particular, to communicating particular sorts of things. And so that,
and so the importance or the depth or the profundity of what we're talking about should be
matched by our rhetoric. And I think there's quite, there's something quite special in that.
And one of the areas I want to think about that more is, and what does that mean for,
for how we communicate well and for the sorts of illustrations we use.
Does that push me to want to look for particular kinds of illustrations suited to particular kinds
of points that we're communicating, for example? So those would be a few of the things that I
appreciate. Okay, fantastic. That is a, you can have it for free potted summary of Augustine's
on Christian teaching. Tremendous. I'd love to spend the rest of our time actually just
working through those three ideas that you've just drawn out. Cause I think that takes us in
really helpful directions. The first one that you mentioned was, so there were three things as I
heard them. The idea that actually the world is charged with signs that things signify things.
And so we'll think about that. And then the idea of experiencing and drawing near to God
in reading the scriptures and then think about how we communicate these things.
The world charged with signs. I remember sitting in a library in Cambridge and someone,
an older scholar saying to me, you need to realize that not every blade of grass is eaten
and not every stone a temple. He was wary that the sort of things that you're describing
generates a kind of maelstrom, a free for all of that reminds me of that. I think that might mean
that. How do you not open the door to that in ways that become thoroughly distracting and
uncontrolled? That's one of the big questions around theological interpretation retrieval.
I think what's becoming increasingly clear to me, as you know, I'm about to have study
leave and this is what I want to get into more. What's becoming increasingly clear to me in
reading the primary, older literature and also later recent writing on it.
That's an issue that Christians have consciously grappled with and seen as an issue
from the very first. Early centuries origin from Alexandria, widely thought to have gone off the
deep end on that one and be far too to use a more contemporary word uncontrolled. He's seeing
meaning in detail after detail, which leads many modern readers scratching their heads.
There are certain contemporary theologians who have attempted to rehabilitate him a little bit
and say not as crazy as you think if you really think about it. I think they've succeeded to a
certain extent but the Calvin still raises an eyebrow. There's more than an eyebrow.
Potentially a mob, I think, if someone's doing it in his church. If you're trying it into what
origin is doing, there is a kind of method in the madness, but it's still a madness.
Lots of people thought origin was bonkers in his own day. I mean, Chrysostom and lots of others.
So he was thought to be a bit of an outlier. The reason he was thought to be a bit of an outlier
was he was finding spiritual or figural or allegorical detail in a particular word and
was doing so without paying sufficient attention to the sentence and the paragraph and the chapter
and the book in which that detail was found. And so the crits of him from contemporaries
would be very like what you heard from this contemporary person in Cambridge. So it's not
a modern insight to think some of the ancients went a bit loopy here. And all through the middle
ages, people were debating how do we see the fullness of meaning that God has put in his word
without authorizing anything meaning almost anything or stereotypically going, oh, look,
there's something read in the Bible. That'll be about the blood of Jesus.
Now, they didn't always get it right. And there was massive debate. But that I mean, it's increasingly
clear to me that I think the story that historical critics from the 18th century onwards told about
biblical interpretation was, and this is not to exaggerate very much, that there was 1500 years
of relative lunacy. And then the reformers began to see the exegetical light. I think that story
has been pretty successfully debunked as not right. Better to say, if there's a big turning point in
the history of biblical interpretation, it doesn't start with the reformers. It starts with
after the reformers, the historical critics. And what the reformers were doing was basically
engaging in a conversation that had been going for 1500 years. Now, things moved on. They had
their own insights. There were improvements. Yes, of course there were improvements. It wasn't just
more of the same old, but they were largely when Calvin says of Oregon, he's basically lost the
plot a lot of the time. But I think some allegorical interpretation is quite good. So I'm going to do
it. That's just engaging within the parameters of a conversation that had been happily happening.
For quite a long time. So you can find Aquinas in the middle ages, I mean, very influentially
solidifying what had often been said previously. There were four senses in scripture. Often
you get other people like, I just need to dig into more of this. There's a character called Nicholas
of Lyra who thinks that that opens the barn door a bit too wide and would rather talk about two
kinds of literal sense. So the standard story, the Medieval's had this settled system, which allowed
them to see multiple, sometimes rather fanciful meanings in scripture. And we've really got to
put the lid on that. And the reformers helped by beginning to do that is significantly untrue,
merely as historical description. I think what you've got is the church for 1600 years saying,
in one way or another, there is often a richness of meaning in any scripture,
but it must not be allowed to be a free for all. The additional meanings in this debate,
what do we call those? Do we call them spiritual? Allegorical, tropological,
anagogical and all these technical terms come out. Do we call them a rich multiple place?
A rich multiple plain sense, which seems to be Calvin's preferred way of talking.
And what we will we allow ourselves in that. But common note, all of these additional senses must
all constantly be grounded in the literal historical. You just find that in writer after
writer after writer. And I'm increasingly persuaded that a right way forward for us
to seek an ongoing renewal of our biblical interpretation would be consciously to join
that conversation. Knowing the parameters within which it was conducted, working from within that
in light of the developments in biblical interpretation that we now have that they
didn't have. I mean, I mean, narrative would be one example as far as I can see. There are
there are tools that have been developed in how narrative works, which you don't find on the
surface of lots of older biblical interpretation that I think are genuinely helpful and relatively
new. So a sense of grounded in the older conversation, acknowledging that there is
new light that's been shared. So I've now entirely forgotten what the question was that provoked that
rather ranting manifesto. But that's what I'm feeling. We are with Augustine's first point about
how we write the interpret scripture and the significance of signs of meanings, however we
express those. That was wonderful. I want to ask, let's imagine somebody's thinking,
I just don't know anything about this whole story. I've just I've never heard someone tell the story
of how people have read the Bible over the centuries. Or maybe someone is familiar with
the idea that everything was wrong until the reformers came along and then the reformers
introduced grammatical, historical, sober exegesis. And from that point on, things are reliable.
What for you guys would be the best thing to read as a kind of introduction to that,
to for a kind of balanced take? I've just been talking. Do you want to have a go? Then I'll come in.
One of the pieces that we read together in that module we teach is there's a chapter from Keith
Stangland's book, The Spirit and the Letter, or something to that effect. And that sets out,
it's a chapter on sort of the medieval period, if I'm remembering it correctly,
starting kind of with Augustine, moving through that fourfold pattern, taking in Thomas Aquinas,
who wants to say the literal historical sense of scripture, the way their words run,
is the foundation for any layers of those richer meanings. And then leading up towards the
Reformation period, I find that a very good, accurate, accessible summary of that period.
That would be one place to go, perhaps. Yeah, I'm slightly wary. I will answer.
I can remember when I was a pastor, and people who weren't pastors would say,
now clearly the book you must be reading is, and I'd think, yeah, and when will I?
And when will I? Have you seen my unread pile? If someone wanted to read at one volume,
I think the best is Todd Billings's book, the title of which I've now forgotten. Help me out.
The Word of God for the People of God. Thank you. It's a great book.
It is a great book. The Word of God for the People of God by J. Todd Billings.
I like it because it's sober and it's sensible. It doesn't sound like I've got the answer to all
your problems. It's careful and thoughtful and judicious and very, very clear.
I suspect many pastors would read that and feel, I just think I was already doing this.
It may be, at most, this is giving me language to describe what I've always done and had a sense
of what is right. So I can remember banging on about this stuff to someone who's a
thoughtful pastor and he looked at me and he said, all this figural allegory,
I just would call that rich typology and I've always thought that's right to do.
And I think Billings knows that. Craig Carter in the introduction to another book on this
that does the rounds says basically, if you're an evangelical preacher, you've probably already
been doing all the stuff I'm talking about. It may be that it just gives you a language for being
really clear why this is good to do in ways that you can now spell out and maybe that has a value
of its own. But I have found others who, when they encounter this, have a sense of, okay,
that this is telling me why it is good and right to begin to explore doing one of two things which
my existing method, as I'm aware of it, suggests to me is a bit iffy. And this is suggesting to me
where my existing method might need some supplementation or some flax. The other
thing I'd suggest reading, if someone had time or inclination, and a preacher could well do this
around sermon preparation, I guess. Calvin's sermons, increasingly being published in excellent
English translations. You'll know more about which ones are out, but there's Genesis, there's Samuel,
there's Job, infancy narratives I've enjoyed. Pastor Epistles as well. Of course, Pastor Epistles.
Recently retranslated. Ephesians has been a well-loved volume for a long time. Galatians is available,
like I say, the infancy narratives. A small volume on the death of Christ from Isaiah.
Another one from Banner of Truth recently on the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension
of Christ. Lots to enjoy. It's not that he got everything right. We don't have a pope. That's
all fine. We're allowed to think that wasn't a great sermon. He probably thought he preached some
iffy sermons. But as I've been reading those, I've just been building up a picture of what he thought
it was entirely legitimate to do with the Bible. And I found that sort of opened up new areas for
me to think about and explore. Lovely. Two anecdotes from me that I think have just helped
crystallize things for me. One is, what do you do in that moment in a Bible study when someone puts
their hand up and says, oh, this reminds me of, and they want to take you to another Bible passage.
I think there was a point in my kind of training in Christian ministry where that was a kind of
an alarm bell ringing because my job was to study this passage with these people, and we didn't want
to get distracted. And I think a lot of what we've been saying so far about God's authorship of his
scriptures, a right reading of them is going to have all that God has says in view and expect
connections. There was just a lovely moment in family Bible reading a couple of years ago where
I realized I'd learned to relax because my kids were just starting to spot connections between
things that they'd been reading or they'd heard in Sunday school with what we read that morning.
And when they were putting their hands up and saying, this reminds me, we're reading about Jesus,
this reminds me of what happened to David. That's a thrilling moment where you're actually starting
to see something of a kind of, of an imagination to be ready to see those connections and reflect
on them. That was my first anecdote. What was my second one? It's gone entirely from my mind.
Never mind. Where should we go next?
Well, actually, just a thought on that. I think there's a rightness to the,
to feeling potentially a little bit alarmed if in a Bible study someone keeps going,
this reminds me of, because that can be a strategy for avoiding listening hard to what the
Lord is saying in the particular passage we're looking at. I'm not, I think I'm not, I hope I
wouldn't jump on people immediately. But if I can see that what we're effectively doing is
lightly skimming over a number of passages and not listening hard to the Lord in any of them.
I think if I'm the leader, I'd want to say, well, that's interesting, but show, before we go there,
shall we just see well what's being said in this particular passage? But the kind of this reminds
me of that you're talking about with your incredibly well-taught children is, is effectively
spotting what we might call typological or figural links. I see something in this passage about
Jesus. We have looked hard at this passage about Jesus, and I just cannot help thinking of another
passage, which is about David. And I now draw on careful reading of that passage, when that's
what's going on. Yes, absolutely. Let's encourage that all the more.
What about then, so we started with Augustine and that idea of the, the ways that the Lord
has designed to signify and refer to other things and sometimes more than one thing.
That idea of enjoying God through his word. So we've said in a couple of points already,
of course, every Christian would say yes to that, but are there other particular ways that
we could make that a little more central or learn a bit more about it?
That's a good question. I suppose one of the things that does is it helps to remind us
about what the, what the ultimate intention of scripture is. At what point have you
finished really engaging, really understanding scripture? It's not simply when you've understood
the original meaning of a biblical passage. Actually, the passage itself, scripture itself,
wants to accomplish something further than that. It's drawing you in, it's leading you towards
the better knowledge and enjoyment and love of God. And this is one of the things that Augustine
draws out really well in that volume is, he says, you haven't really understood a passage
until you understand how it is that it builds up love for God or love for neighbor. If that's the
summary of the law, if that's a function, a purpose of the Bible, then that's one of the goals that we
have as where we ought to be trying to get to in our reading. So perhaps that would be one way of
seeing how we can benefit from that. Tim, what would you add?
Oh, yeah, it's a great question. A couple of slightly random things occur. Just thinking about
small group Bible study, but perhaps this relates also to how we help people with individual
Bible reading. At least in the little circles I inhabit, I think I see increasingly recommendation
that Bible studies begin with a question like what strikes you in this passage? So rather than the
first question being, I don't know, something sort of that tees up the application, you know,
when was the last time you found yourself losing your temper or beginning with just a straight
observation? What does verse three say about Jesus or something? Not beginning there, but beginning
with a kind of almost a whole person response. What strikes you? People could answer at all sorts of
levels. It could be what strikes me is when you read that out, I simply didn't understand anything
about that passage at all. All the way through to what struck me was this extraordinary thing about
Jesus that made me rejoice. But it invites a whole person response. And when I see a question like
that used, I think that that can open up just the expectation that what this will be about is me
and the Lord, me as a person responding to the Lord in and through this word.
So I think there are good anthropological as well as theological reasons why something like that
as an opener very much sets the tone for what are we actually doing as we
gather to do this thing we call study the word. And that broadens our pool of applications in a
sense as well. It's about me and the Lord and responding to the Lord or us responding to the
Lord. It gives a real richness to the different ways we might be enjoying the Lord and appreciating
his beauty through the word. Actually that in and of itself is an important application.
The other thing that occurred to me, this kind of comes from somewhere else, but I think it's related
in terms of helping ourselves and others have a sense of enjoying the Lord in his word,
is to take our own thinking and directly thinking of other Christians to the just to the reality of
where do we see this theological reality or this spirituality. Where do we see the Lord already
doing it in us. That is I think relatively common in Puritan sermon application as I'm beginning
to explore that. I think it's relatively uncommon in evangelical preaching as I've heard it in the
circles that I've been in. There's on the whole there's a tendency to want application to land
on a and here's something to do better. Here's an area in which to be better and of course it's not
that we exclude that. That must be right. We must keep pressing on to the goal that's been set for
us. But if every application is basically let me identify an area in which you are not yet
doing well enough. It's going to be quite hard for scripture reading to be, to be honest,
enjoyable except in some somewhat masochistic sense. And it comes back to that point that
Alden was making about the rhetoric idea. Worst case scenario if your application is about things
you should be doing better you will deliver that in an authoritarian aggressive way. Best case
scenario it's a tentative suggestion but if the content of those minutes in the sermon is let us
rejoice in either the beauty of who God is and how he's revealed here or how wonderfully in his mercy
and grace he's doing these things amongst us then your actual rhetorical register is going to be
very different. It's going to sound a little more joyful. And the people's experience of the
sermon and of preaching and reading scripture is going to be different and more varied and
more textured and it's not going to have that same feeling.
I mean this would be a whole other part. I think there's a whole bunch of theological issues that
play in. Where this doesn't happen I think there's a whole bunch of theological issues that kind of
drive it below the surface to do with how we think about salvation. Is it essentially to do with
is it essentially to do with justification? Is it essentially to do with having been raised with
Christ? And I know there are debates around this but I think if a certain kind of justification is
frankly the controlling centre of our understanding of salvation I think that's going to lead us more
to primarily you must do better. But if there's a strong sense of we have been raised with Christ
I'm inevitably going to look it's going to be obvious to me that the Lord must be doing the
things that I see instructed in the passage. The Lord must be doing among us. If he weren't we might
not be Christian. So he must be. So let's point those out as well as exhorting to go on. And
you're right I think that will add it'd be very hard to deliver that without a sense if you're the
pastor without people getting a sense of here is a pastor who likes us. Yeah. And loves us.
We're not perfect but he appreciates what he sees the Lord do in us and that just makes you feel
rather differently towards your elders. I just took a crafty look at the little clock that's down
there. We've been going for a while. I could go longer but we should probably bring this to a
close. David you've been feeding us questions the last few minutes or so. Anything practical.
You're an elder in the church. You're regularly stuck in the ministry. I mean you've been preaching
a lot lately I know as well as lots of other things within pastoral ministry. Could you leave
us with one thing where you found your own life as a Christian in church or ministry as an elder
shaped by reflection on some of these things or ways in which you'd like it to be more so?
Yeah gladly. The anecdote from earlier. I was just thinking about where I've gone too often for help
in understanding a passage. So this is anecdote and testimony really. I think my instinct very
often would be pull down the most recent commentary from the Shelf and see what it is.
See where we're up to on this sort of debate. And struck by how a lot of modern commentaries
are still very caught up with some of those questions about historical context, some of the
scholarly debate and responses to critical readings of the New Testament and so on.
And you know I read a section on that and I find out what the response to those scholars is and I
discover that we don't quite know where that place was but it might have been one of these two places.
And which bits of this might come from Q.
And I'm no further on. I find that online for free I can read Augustine who will reflect on
the faith of the Syro-Phoenician woman for example and will as he reflects on her
making her plea before Jesus and humbling herself he will give an illustration and he
speaks about how God's grace is like the rain. It runs off the high places. It gathers in the low
places. Such a beautiful little picture to say as we humble ourselves before the Lord then that is
where God's grace naturally gathers and brings life. The valleys he says are green and fertile
because that's where the water gathers. So just for my own encouragement and devotional reading
and for help as I'm thinking how do I preach and communicate this. I've just I found so much help
there and so that's been one thing that's encouraged and helped me. The other thought is just
the way that I think we are encouraged to think about being formed as disciples of Jesus over the
long haul and growing in our love for him and appreciation for him in the scriptures which
we're never going to exhaust and that just says slow down and it says be patient to me. So the
thought of we could run a six-week course that will equip people to read the Bible well.
A six-week course can do all sorts of good and I think some things that we've talked about today
would help us think well what would most helpfully go into those six weeks but it also I think
encourages us to think there's a longer and slower work here. If central to the Christian
calling is not getting on and being very busy for the Lord but actually enjoying him reflecting
him and coming to bear his image more and more as we gaze on him then that encourages me
week by week to go to the word for something slightly different. Yeah terrific thank you.
This has been a great conversation. We know we're going to continue to think about these things
wanting to learn from others, wanting to learn from the past. Of course and we know this the
last thing we're saying is Augustine was the golden age if he says it that's obviously the
that gives you your sermon. No he's we read him and think on a bunch of areas really not sure
I'm not sure you should say that from that passage but discovering alongside others that
there are treasures there that genuinely refresh us and renew us. Thank you so much.
We really trust you've enjoyed this podcast. We're going to be back I'm not quite sure where the
next one will come out but we already know what the next one's going to be. We're going to be in
Galatians with David Shor again because he's recently preached through Galatians as well
have done doing lots of other thinking about it. Indeed so yeah I'm most of the way through
preaching Galatians I'll be a bit further on by the time we record and it's one of those books
that I think a lot of us feel quite nervous about how do we preach this how do we teach it.
It's pulled at his most spiky and a lot of dense passages to try and work through so
we'll think about that letter and how we how we preach it and live it out.
Great looking forward to that see you next time.