Addendum to Last Post

In my last post I called for the recommendations from Dispensationalists for sources citing the definition and defense of any form of that position. I mentioned in that post, several representatives of the faceted position, but I did fail to mention the proponents of what is called, "Progressive Dispensationalism". Craig Blaising and Darrell Bock are two of the major proponents, as well as Robert Saucey. After some prompting, I felt compeled to mention their names.

Calling All Dispensationalists, of Whatever Stripe or Shade

I am in the process of composing an essay on the differing hermeneutical assumptions of the Dispensational and Covenantal systems of theology, and their consequences on bible interpretation. In this process I have already consulted several sources on both sides of the issue. Of course I am writing from the side of Covenantal Theology, and in the progress of the essay I will argue that position. Even though I grew up in and was somewhat nurtured into Dispensational Theology, I still would like those who still hold that view to aid in my choices of sources for representation of that position, and its historical survey.

For instance, from the Brethren camp I have read and/or cited J.N. Darby, C.H. Mackintosh, and T.B. Baines. From the Fundamentalist Baptist camp, C.I. Scofield, L.S. Chafer, J. D. Pentecost, John Walvoord, and the more contemporary, Charles Ryrie. From the more progressive camp (and perhaps Calvinistic Dispensationalists) Michael Vlach, John MacArthur, Barry Horner, and Dennis Swanson.

I am making a call now to any dispensationalist reading this blog, to help me to quote the best sources in the areas of: scholastic/academic Dispensationalism, and surveys of that theology's occurrence in history made by trustworthy Dispensational sources.

The Not-So Surprising Parallel Between the Hippie Movement and the Jesus People Movement

I've been listening to an interview with Stephen Nichols on the White Horse Inn. He has written a book recently called, "Jesus, Made in America".

Part of the discussion included a brief mention of the "Jesus People Movement" of the 70's. In this, Nichols described how many of those who gathered to talk about Jesus without conforming to the popularly established forms of clothing and music associated with going to church, had later in life finally traded in their long hair and headbands for a feathers cut and necktie, and started to sell insurance.

A similar thing happened with the individuals from the Hippie movement. The same ones who gathered to talk about world peace and social injustices without conforming to the popularly established forms of clothing and ethical standards, had later in life finally traded in their peace sign and tabs of acid for dollar signs and a half glass of Pinot Noir.

I find this parallel fascinating and I think it only makes sense when we consider that there is a strong historical argument suggesting that, in large measure, those individuals in Jesus People Movement came out of the Hippie Movement.

What Does It Mean to Pray?

Whether one hales from a Calvinistic theology of God's providence or not, prayer really is a difficult thing for us finite creatures to wrap our minds around. As a matter of fact, we can't wrap our minds around this idea, and I don't think god intends for us to. All He would have us know about prayer in this age He has revealed in His Word and we can ascertain through our collaborative review of the historical, biblical and systematic theologies of prayer.

Prayer can be illustrated in this way. When I pray it is a bit like me throwing my self with my earnest desires against the immutable Rock of God's will and he chips away at my desires so as to make me look more like His Son the Christ, in Who's Image I have been re-created.

In obedience to His command for His children to come to Him in prayer, I humbly submit my requests, mediated by the righteousness of Christ before His throne, expecting him to do all His holy will, and wait for Him to work all things together for good, for those who love Him.

Communicating the Doctrine of the Trinity Through Analogy

Whenever different theologians have tried in the past to devise various illustrations to better explain the Trinity on human terms, they have often gotten into trouble; some for trying to work the analogous picture too far, and others who simply have used the description in a limited sense but their audience misunderstood them to be saying that "God is only like this...".

So, naturally, I'll have to tread these dangerous waters.  But one caveat before I do, I want to it absolutely clear that I don't think that this illustration is by any means complete, thorough or perfect as a depiction of the mystery of the Triune God or His work in creation.  Note that a portion of this illustration has shamelessly been adapted from an analogy (I assume) that was invented by Kim Riddlebarger to describe the process of progressive revelation.  With that, here goes.

Imagine that you are in a darkened room.  No lights; it's as pitch as the darkest, starless, moonless rural night.  Imagine God as a man who stands outside the room and speaks to you.  You can only hear Him and the only things you know about Him are the things He has spoken to you through the door.  Even the things you know about the darkened room in which you sit are limited to your vain sensual perception and what He has told you about the room.  Imagine that one day, God opens the door just slightly and reaches His arm in and turns on the light in the room.  You are absolutely amazed by what you see.  The elements and character of the room are exactly as God had described them.  You call out to God, and because all you see is the arm, and ask, "God, is that You?".  God replies "yes, it is Me."

Obviously, God turning the light on represents what happened when He came in Christ to proclaim the Kingdom and explained the purposes of the Old Covenant cultic rituals.  But when you ask, "God is that You?" and He answers yes, even though all you saw of Him was a hand, we know that God is more than just a hand, but just as if I was to quietly sneak around a corner of my house into a room occupied by my sons, and if they saw part of my body and cried out, "Dad, is that you?".  even though the portion of my body they saw is only part of me, I can still say, and would say, yes, it is me.  Likewise, Jesus IS God, but He is not all that God is.  God is Father Son and Holy Spirit.

Covenantal Hermeneutical Presuppositions and Their Logical Sequence

Below I have Included a revised edition of the covenantal hermeneutics I listed in a post a week ago or so. I have attempted to place the items in this list in a logical order, one that follows another in their function.

 

I.                    Let easily interpreted passages guide our interpretation of difficult passages. 

a.        

                                           i.      Let the interpretation of the fulfillment of Old Testament prophesies/promises found in the New Testament amplify/expand the grammatical/historical understanding of a particular prophesy when it was given.

                                             ii.      When a promise is made, the object of promise is always, to some degree, a shadow or type of the object of fulfillment; so if the fulfillment of a promise is limited to its "literal" or grammatical/historical manifestation, then it isn't as illustrative of God's goodness. But if the quality of the object of fulfillment is to be accurately represented by the object of promise, it cannot always be limited to its grammatical/historical manifestation.

1.      Christ is the ultimate fulfillment of the types and shadows pictured in the Old Testament, so in that way, all the Old Testament points forward to Christ and not to a future manifestation of ethnic Israel, but Christ is the true Israel and those found “in Him” are true Israelites.

b.       

                                               i.      Let our understanding of the immediate context of a passage be interpreted under the larger umbrella of the entire context of Revelation; the "meta-narrative" or "big picture" perspective of redemptive history should be used to tailor our understanding of the immediate contexts of passages, such as the context provided by their human authorship, chronology in respect to other writings of Revelation, and literary genre.

                               ii.      Let the literary genre of a passage guide our understanding of symbols, types/shadows, parables, numbers, and prophesies (either their giving or fulfillment) i.e., historical narratives such as the gospel accounts of resurrection should be taken at face value, but apocalyptic literature when it presents visions such as dragons, lamp stands, 24 elders, etc, they may be symbols which represent something greater. The objects they represent either, could not have been understood if their future manifestation had been presented, or God has decided that the objects being represented are meant to be kept a mystery in part, until such a time when He sees fit to reveal their identity. Note that the object being symbolized is normally a literal and real object.

What Does It Mean to be The Church?

George Barna and Fred Viola have collaborated in a book called, "Pagan Christianity", and Barna in other sources has stated similar opinions regarding the impractical nature of the local church as its practice has been since the Reformation, and as I see it, the way it was established in the first century.

With the differences over several forms of polity aside (Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational) the way in which a local church is to function is never to be established by what we believe "works". Granted, no individual local church or denominational polity is enacted perfectly, no matter how closely it operates to the biblical mandate of its existence, it remains the community of creatures yet to be glorified.


Though Mike Horton in an article at the White Horse Inn has already accurately critiqued Barna's position, I too will take a stab.


I think that it is clear that Horton isn’t suggesting that the layperson neglect personal Bible study just that, contrary to Barna’s heterodox conclusions, shepherds are not trying to work themselves out of a job as it were As Horton points out, “The church’s min-istry is exercised faithfully when the people are fed, not when the sheep are expected to become their own shepherds.”

Here are a few disturbing quotes from Barna:

“Ours is not the business of organized religion, corporate worship, or Bible teaching. If we dedicate ourselves to such a business we will be left by the wayside as the culture moves forward. Those are fragments of a larger purpose to which we have been called by God’s Word. We are in the business of life transformation.”–George Barna, The Second Coming of the Church (Nashville: Word, 1998), 96.

“Believers need not find a good church, but they should “get a good coach.”–Barna, The Second Coming of the Church, 68, 138-40.

Once the PRIMARY reasons we gather together at a local church become something other than to worship God by “hearing the gospel preached”, and to participate in the sacraments rightly administered, and to submit ourselves to the discipline of the elders, then we are skewing the purpose of God in the local body. When Christ told Peter to feed His sheep, it wasn’t the pragmatic feeding of the food of self help or “moralistic therapy” or the fickle “felt needs” of each individual layperson, it was the food of the gospel that Christ was commanding Peter (and all elders following)to feed His sheep.

There certainly are SECONDARY and even byproduct reasons for gathering: worship through fellowship, catechizes, and other implements of sanctification, but these can never be elevated to the preaching and hearing of the gospel and the viewing of it in the sacraments of baptism and the Supper.

Somehow, I think that when we have a hermeneutic that doesn’t lead us to Christ and His gospel as we interpret all of the OT and NT, the result is that a vacuum is created that we try to fill with our “felt” needs.

In conclusion, it's hard not to question Barna's adherance to the doctrine of sola scriptura when he is so zealous to take a pragmatic approach to, not just the re-structuring of local church government, but really his willingness to promote its total dismantling.

Clearing Up Confusion Over Distinctions #19

Below are more of Zaspel's words on Rev. 20.

“Reigning

Then there is the matter of "reigning" and the consideration that this period has a specific time of duration -- one thousand years. Premillennialists assert that the "reigning" of those of the first resurrection is one that involves rule over the lost. It is an authority exercised over rebellious men. This fits well with Rev.2:25-27, where a "rod of iron" is promised to the faithful when Christ returns (cf. 19:15). An iron rod is necessary only in a world of sin. For the amillennialist, on the other hand, the reigning is a spiritual one only, in either of two senses: 1) in the sense of a heavenly vindication of some kind in the intermediate state, or 2) in the sense of the believer's spiritual reigning "in Christ." Neither idea, however, is allowed by the text. 1) The term translated "they came to life" ( ezesan) is nowhere in the NT used to describe the continued life of the soul in heaven after the death of the body. Never. It speaks of life after death only in resurrection. It indicates the final state, not the intermediate. Furthermore, the picture presented in Rev.6:9-11 of the saints in heaven during the intermediate state is far from that of "reigning": they are crying out to the Lord for vengeance to be executed upon their oppressors still on earth. In response they are told to "rest" and be patient until the number of martyrs is complete. The situation in chapter 20, however, is the answer to this: when Christ comes in His kingdom, only then will they be raised to reign with Him. Finally, now, their time of vindication has come. And 2) while the term is used outside of the book of Revelation in a spiritual sense (e.g., Jn.5:25), we must ask, In what sense can spiritual reigning be said to last only a thousand years? Will that kind of reign not continue forever? And is it not so that we should expect suffering today and reigning only tomorrow (2Tim.2:12)? Again, the amillennialist suggestion seems neither to rise from nor fit the demands of the passage.”

Zaspel’s assumptions here are clear, that the terms “reigning” and “rod of iron” logically indicate the perfect obedience of those being reigned, that those who reign cannot be “crying out to the Lord for vindication”; the two ideas are antithetical, that Amillennialists DON’T consider the millennium to be a “specific time of duration”, that those reigning are saints who have been resurrected into glorified bodies and those who are reigned are unbelievers (those unbelievers over whom they reign are yet in their physical bodies—such an interpretation should raise several questions). As for the nature of spiritual reigning, there is certainly no warrant by biblical or systematic theology to suggest that it must be exactly the same in this age and the age to come. Also, the dichotomy between the “reigning” in Rev. 20 and suffering is falsely imposed.

And in the following section from "John's Use of the OT", he quotes hymnodist and Greek scholar Henry Alfred.

“The famous admonition of Henry Alford concerning arbitrary interpretation in Rev.20 merits repeating here:

‘As regards the text itself, no legitimate treatments of it will extort what is known as the spiritual interpretation now in fashion. If, in a passage where two resurrections are mentioned, where certain psychai ezesan ["souls came to life"] at the first, and the rest of the nekroi ezesan ["dead came to life"] only at the end of a specified period after the first, -- if in such a passage the first resurrection may be understood to mean spiritual rising with Christ, while the second means literal rising from the grave; -- then there is an end of all significance in language, and Scripture is wiped out as a definite testimony to anything.’

Alford's criticism is a valid one. It is demonstrably evident that the interpreter who admits no inter-regnum period prior to the eternal state in Rev.20 approaches the passage with preconceived notions and leaves with the same; he gains from the text "neither the exact sense nor the value."”

I can't help but think that if Alfred's line of reasoning was consistently applied to all the New Testament, then he and Zaspel both would not end up as Calvinists, at least not the variety that espouses particular redemption. Because, at least as one makes a surface reading of certain texts such as 2 Peter 3:9, 1 John 2:2, and others, one could conclude that God intends to save every living soul, but when one begins to place these texts in the greater context of all of revelation, one will soon see that not all persons are saved and he becomes an advocate of a preveinient sort of redemptive grace for "all" or "the whole world", but hopefully, soon after that, when one continues to contextualize the atonement through the testaments, one becomes an advocate of particular redemption, but not through what Alfred would call a "legitimate treatment". Again, we see that our interpretations come directly from our operating assumptions; how we reason through scripture texts. And at least at the point of Rev. 20, both Alfred and Zaspel refuse to admit that their interpretation is tied to any assumption about how to come to a conclusion regarding scripture.

At this point I plan to pause in my critique of Zaspel's essay and discuss in more depth, the hermeneutical assumptions of Premillenialist and Covenant Theologians.

Thus it can be said of Zaspel’s conclusions in general (as laid out in his essay, “The Kingdom The Millennium, and The Eschaton”, that he does just what he has repeatedly accused the Amillennialist of, reading the text in light of assumptions, but his own Premillennial grid of assumptions causes interpretations which have their own difficulties to which he is blinded because he appears unwilling to admit to the existence of and examine those hermeneutical operating assumptions from which his interpretations flow.

Clearing Up Confusion Over Distinctions #18

After a short hiatus from blogging, here is the next installment of my critique of Zaspel's essay.

“It is equated with the resurrection of "the rest of the dead" (v.5), which all sides admit is physical. There is exactly no evidence within the text itself which would indicate a change in the meaning of words, no hint at all that the two resurrections spoken of are of a different nature. Much to the contrary, to shift in mid-stream without express warrant from the text is exegetical chaos. Further, the term ezesan (v.4, "they lived, they came to life," ingressive aorist) elsewhere in the book of Revelation refers only to bodily resurrection (2:8; 13:14), and never is it used in a spiritualized sense. Moreover, the resurrection of these in verse 4 is said to follow, not precede, their faithfulness -- a consideration which allows only a physical resurrection. Once again, the amillennial interpretation, here, rests on presuppositions imported to the passage and that against the most natural reading of the text; it is not grounded in exegesis. And again, if it is wrong at this point, we are left with premillennialism.”

The first thing that should be said is that, it is right to look at the content of the text at hand and its immediate context when we begin to interpret a text. Soon after that, even if he has already come to some conclusions, the reader should look at the concentric contexts in which the passage finds itself: the context of the book or letter and its author, where in the progress of revelation was it given, and finally, the context of the entirety of revelation and the context of redemptive history. It seems to me that many times the dispensational Pre-millennialist in particular (and we all are guilty of this at times) tries to interpret the text in its immediate context alone, often ignoring the type of literature it is (the context of the book itself, and the purpose of the human author), and its place in redemptive history. So in a certain limited sense, this interpreter can claim that he is viewing the passage “in context”. But because of his operating assumptions (probably the exclusively grammatical/historical fulfillment of prophecy, or what is often referred to the “literal” interpretation of ALL prophecy, and that of the sharp distinction of spiritual Israel and the Church) he will not allow for the analogy of faith (to allow the principle of the right interpretation of simpler passages to interpret the more difficult to trump immediate context), or for the context of literary genre, or for the over-arching purposes of God in redemptive history to be his boundaries when interpreting prophesy. I think it is these things, perhaps among others, that help lead Zaspel to his interpretation of Revelation 20, and thus guide his understanding of resurrections in this chapter. This is why he can make a statement like, “There is exactly no evidence within the text itself which would indicate a change in the meaning of words, no hint at all that the two resurrections spoken of are of a different nature.”

He goes on to say this, “Much to the contrary, to shift in mid-stream without express warrant from the text is exegetical chaos.” Zaspel is looking for “express warrant” “from the text” alone to allow for the two resurrections spoken of to be different but in symphony. He has decided that it is chaotic to allow any other interpretive help outside the exegesis of this text alone to define the vocabulary of this text; in his mind, the immediate context alone has the authority to give definition to the words.

Lastly, Zaspel accuses Amillennialists of impressing their presuppositions on the text of Rev. 20 in order to spin out their notion of two types of resurrections there, the one being the resurrection of regeneration in this age, and the other being the resurrection of the physically dead to physical life. At the same time, he claims that he has no external hermeneutical principle that colors his view of the resurrections in the passage, that the plain reading of the text alone is enough to come to the conclusion he has. But I say that, when one assumes the premillennial position (especially if he does not think that it too derives from a set of hermeneutical assumptions) and refuses to have the immediate context of a particular passage checked by the greater context of redemptive history or to have his understanding of it filtered through the more easily understandable texts in the rest of scripture, then his interpretation in my opinion, can end up being isolated and individualistic instead of communal and confessional.