That the Old Testament was harder to understand did not minimise the onus placed on the saints of that era. And yet, New Testament believers are called to a higher ethical standard. We have so much more revealed and we are called to live as citizens not of the typological kingdom comprised of sword-conquests, land boundaries, stone buildings, and blood sacrifices. Rather, we are called to live as citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven and as such we are strangers and pilgrims on the Earth in a way the saints living under the Mosaic order were not. We do not live by the sword, we have the completed perfect sacrifice which grants us access to the Kingdom of Heaven. Our Kingdom is eternal and yet hidden to the unregenerate. Our Temple and sacrifices are spiritual. Our High Priest is in Heaven. Our battles are not against flesh and blood. Our ethics are born of a higher eternal order.
Klassen's third point regarding the diminished apologetic
value of the Old Testament under a New Testament-prioritised hermeneutic is
again a case of a straw-man appeal but it also misses something profound. The
New Testament refers to itself as better and the Old Covenant is an
administration of bondage, and a yoke. And (if taken alone apart from Christ
with Moses as its standalone mediator) it is a ministration of death. It was still
glorious and certainly condemned the nations but it did not possess the glory
of the New Testament and its mediator – Christ.
Jesus' condemnation of Jewish rulers and the inability of
others to understand the Old Testament was indeed a rebuke, but not for their
failure to employ proper hermeneutics per se. The issue was one of faith, a
faith they did not possess, a refusal to submit to God's teachings and to give
one's self to them. We must be careful not to make the Scriptures so plain and
'clear' that an unregenerate person with the simply the right scholastic 'training'
will suddenly have access to their truths. Those truths are revealed in a way
to make men accountable but at the same time they're only truly accessible by
means of the Holy Spirit's transformation of the inner man and his very
epistemology. The same is true (we might add) when it comes to the idea of
'natural' law.
The apostles certainly appeal to the Old Testament to make
their case but again they do so authoritatively. Klassen tries to minimise the
way in which the apostles utilise passages in defiance of common sense
hermeneutical intuitions. It's not just once or twice. It's everywhere and it
only increases when one gets into a book like Revelation. It turns conventional
Old Testament readings on their head and thus one must conclude that to read
the Old Testament as Christians – we must do so through the lens of the New
Testament.
New Testament prioritisation doesn't lead to allegory –
though Paul himself employed this, and yet it does lead to the very kind of
spiritualising Klassen and his ilk abhor. He concludes the point by saying that
such tendencies create conditions –
"wherein the Old Testament text is spiritualized to make
it repeat exactly that which is stated in the New."
That's because the
apostles are the interpreters of the Old Testament. The apostles wrote the
canon of the New Testament – the covenant we are under. We must submit to their
teaching and embrace their hermeneutical methodology. Klassen's statement
reveals in very clear terms that his theological system is not in submission to
the apostolic hermeneutic. He rejects it and therefore his system cannot be
spoken of as being Christian in an orthodox sense. It's a non-New Testament
hermeneutic or to be more accurate it's a Judaizing system.
His final point
concerning EJ Young is a case of non-sequitir. Many Calvinist systematicians
are inconsistent but no more so than Klassen. Their problem lies in the fact
that many are still committed to some form of chiliasm (such as Postmillennialism)
and as such they miss the Already-Not Yet/ This Age and the Age to Come eschatological
dynamic found in the New Testament. The Coming of Christ is presented by the
Old Testament prophets as a singular event – the Day of the Lord. The New
Testament reveals that due to God's mercy and longsuffering the final Judgment phase
of that singular 'Day' event has been put on hold as it were. The delay is only
a delay from the perspective and perception of those limited to temporal
thinking and experience. In terms of eternity the already two-thousand year
period (we call the Church Age) is but a passing moment, a mere 'blip' vis-à-vis
the eschatological framework of the New Testament. The Day of the Lord is upon
us and all that it entails. The entire Jewish-oriented schema is a distraction
and at times a dangerous one. In Dispensationalism it has led to unfortunate
political activism, dubious ethics, and support for a foreign policy that leads
to suffering and war.
We can safely conclude
The Master's Seminary is not a place to learn Biblical studies or New Testament
doctrine.
I realised very early
on in my Christian life that one of the most fundamental issues of Biblical
study is the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. If you get this
question wrong, your entire doctrinal framework will be off and indeed more often
than not it can also deeply affect one's understanding of Christian ethics. The
results of such wrong-headed and unfaithful readings have been disastrous
throughout Church History and even in our present day such flawed readings
result in Christians supporting terrible wars and policies that run counter to
New Testament ethical and doctrinal imperatives.
Given the nature of
Old Testament misunderstandings of their own sacred writings, the grave errors
of the Pharisees and Zealots, and the way and manner in which Christ and the
apostles treat these issues – we must (without qualification) begin in the New
Testament and read the fulfilled and thus disannulled but still pertinent and
useful Old Covenant writings in their light. This very teaching upsets many as
they rely heavily on the Old Covenant writings for their social and cultural
projects. This itself, this rejection of what the New Testament teaches
regarding the Old, reveals their misunderstandings of the issues and their
abuse of the Old Testament – and the New for that matter. For if they
understood the latter properly they would not fall into these patterns of
thinking – patterns of Old Testament prioritisation and reductionism that John
MacArthur and other Dispensationalists have fallen into time and again.
Jeff
Riddle exposes another instance of MacArthurite-Dispensational reductionism. In
this case it's in reference to Hosea 6. While the verse in question which deals
with the question of a third day resurrection is relevant to the immediate
context of Israel, the prophecy most certainly also foreshadows Christ.
http://www.jeffriddle.net/2021/06/wm-206-is-hosea-62-prophecy-of-third.html
If anyone doubts this then merely look to Hosea 11.1 and its
utilisation by Matthew in chapter 2 of his gospel. Israel itself is a type of
the Second Adam – Adam (we might add) once more in the garden (the land of milk
and honey) and charged to tend it by protecting or purifying it of that which
is unclean and unholy. As in Eden, God's Holy Mountain (Zion) is found within
this land. The Hebrews were a picture of the First Adam but also the Second, a
point Matthew picks up.
As Riddle points out, earlier Bible commentators understand
this kind of layered typology and the hermeneutic it produces. They didn't
always understand it well or consistently and at times they were limited by
scholastic and confessional commitments but nevertheless they couldn't deny
what was obvious in light of apostolic teaching and interactions with the Old
Testament.
Even Calvin who was something of a hermeneutical minimalist
could make the connections, but the Baconian-Fundamentalist hermeneutics of
MacArthurite Dispensationalism cannot. And why? Because an acknowledgement of
this hermeneutical reality, methodology, and the fact that the New Testament
interprets the Old – is the bane of their Judaizing system and leads to its
collapse.
Dispensationalism is a non-Christocentric system. In fact
it's worse than that. It's a Judeo-centric system. Christ is not the central
focal point of Scripture but the Jewish people and the Levantine state are.
Riddle ties the MacArthurite misread to their embrace of Text
Criticism which has led John MacArthur (and his Calvinistic-Dispensational
camp) to embrace not a few of the canons of the academy and Higher Criticism –
which one might point out is just dripping with irony. And this ties in with
his low view of textual preservation and his text-reconstructionist
understanding of inerrancy. While these tendencies are certainly present, the
real problem in Hosea harks back to basic hermeneutical commitments and a
misunderstanding of the nature of literalism – in reality an inconsistent and
at times pedantic hyper-literalism which fails to treat the text of revelation as
something to be submitted to but rather treats it as a data set to be examined
and subjected to taxonomy.
Though tangential, this also ties in with a general tendency
among Evangelicals and many Reformed to downplay the supernatural aspects of
Scripture. If there is a Text Critical element that's strongly at work here, it
is the academy's focus on human authorship and a reticence to see the Providential
Hand of God shepherding history, visions and the entirety of Old Testament
history (the history of the redemption of God's people) as driving toward,
focused upon, and wholly structured around the person and work of Christ.
Given the MacArthurite reading of Hosea, one wonders how they
would hope to understand the New Testament's use of Isaiah 7.14? Was the
ultimate meaning of the prophecy something pertinent to Ahaz's context? And
then there's James' use of Amos 9 in Acts 15. The hermeneutic employed by James
does not even remotely resemble the methodology of MacArthur or
Dispensationalism in general – in fact it condemns it and exposes just how far
off their system is at its very foundation. We could say even more regarding
the Septuagint (LXX) and the way in which New Testament authors use it, a point
which only further destroys the Old Testament prioritisation model utilised by
Dispensationalism.
Riddle is right. MacArthur is dangerous on this point and
many others. His Judaizing is also playing out in his ethics. Again, Dispensationalism
in general has an abysmal record when it comes to this and their support of
evil and brutal regimes bent on subjugating and murdering conquered people.
They wrongly sanction this on the basis of the Abrahamic Covenant and the
example of the Canaanite conquest even while they ignore what the New Testament
says about these things and the status of Jewish Israel. These ethics are
further confused when combined with nationalism and other Enlightenment ideals
and values that are deeply ingrained in western and American cultural DNA.
See also:
https://pilgrimunderground.blogspot.com/2015/08/dispensationalisms-bloody-record.html