https://blog.tms.edu/is-the-old-testament-unintelligible-without-the-new
I was struck by two recent displays of the reductionist
hermeneutics utilised by the MacArthurite faction. These are retentions of the
Baconian attempt within Dispensationalism to cast hermeneutics into a
scientific framework. They want the Scriptures to have one clear unambiguous propositional
meaning that is grounded in the inductive and deductive processes of human
experience.
Anything else smacks of equivocation, relativism, mysticism
and thus they view such hermeneutical methods as an assault on the Scriptures.
While it's certainly possible to stray into these errors, there is an equally
dangerous error in Scriptural reductionism – when the Scriptures are minimised
and thus the doctrinal strata, redemptive-historical development, typology,
nuance, and frankly the incomprehensible wonder and miraculous nature of the
holy writings and the doctrines they reveal are called into question, denied,
or missed entirely.
The Hyper-Literalist hermeneutic of Dispensationalism seeks
to be faithful to the Scriptures and many of its peculiarities can be
understood best when its historical context is taken into account. It was
forged during the advent of Higher Criticism and in response to it. But the
great irony is this – the hermeneutic results in a stripping down of the
Scriptures, on the basis of principle and pre-commitment denying elements that
are clearly there and in other cases relegating portions of Scripture to
specific epochs, thus limiting the ways in which they can be utilised and
applied. Authors such as Arthur Pink attacked the system a century ago
realising that the resulting reductionism was in the end not all that different
from the truncated Scriptures that were the result of Higher Criticism's
pseudo-scientific methodology. There is always this danger when your
hermeneutic or epistemology is rooted in reaction or in countering something
that is being opposed. It can limit and restrict your own ability to elaborate.
In the case of Dispensationalism, their hermeneutic is driven less by Scripture
as it is motivated to oppose anything that (they think) even hints of Higher
Criticism. The Critical movement is a good thing to oppose but not when it ties
your own hands.
Dispensationalism has since improved. Few today hold to the
old Scofield system and thus books like the Epistle to the Hebrews are no
longer viewed as being for the Jews during the Tribulation. Likewise, The
Sermon on the Mount isn't relegated to the Kingdom era and yet even today there
are still serious inconsistencies. If the New Covenant only pertains to the
Millennial Jewish Kingdom, the Church's celebration of the New Covenant meal
makes little sense, and yet all but a few extremists do in fact celebrate it.
One of the key planks of Dispensational hermeneutics is that
the Bible has to be taken literally (or really in a hyper-literalistic manner) and
so when for example the land is given to Abraham forever, that cannot change.
Even if the New Testament comes along and re-frames the discussion – not
denying it, but rather expanding on its meaning in light of Christ – this
faction will not have it. The Jewish reading (as it were) triumphs.
Careful readers of the New Testament come to understand that
the apostles and yes, Christ himself utilise the Old Testament in what prima facie seems to be a somewhat
strange manner. They pull out verses that sometimes seem to have nothing to do
with their immediate context and apply them in ways that make some raise their
eyebrows. Even figures like Martin Luther struggled with this reality – and it
could be argued he never quite freed himself from his doubts.
A careful read reveals that we are in the New Covenant era
which marks the fulfillment of the Old Covenant (or Testament) and the Old (as
such) no longer has any standing – on its own. It's not even that simple
though. There is certainly a symbiotic relationship between the two canons. One
can make little sense of the New without the Old as a foundation. And yet we
come to realise that to read the Old Covenant as Christians we must do so
through the lens of the New Testament. We must read the Old Testament
Christocentrically and as the authors of the New Testament reveal, the Old
Testament pointed in every way to Christ – sometimes as Judge, and other times
as Saviour, and other times he was represented and foreshadowed by the
prophets, priests, and kings of the covenant people.
But either way Christ is woven into the narratives. In God's
Providence the history of the Old Testament is like a living parable. The
voices of the psalmists and prophets are overlaid and blended with not just
prophecies concerning Christ but through the Holy Spirit – the very voice of
Christ Himself, the True Prophet shines through. It's fascinating, awe
inspiring and yet in many respects defies a rigid hermeneutic that attempts to
treat Bible reading as a reducible literalist and quantifiable scientific
exercise. Those who do so are not being faithful to the New Testament and were
the apostles among us – it's safe to say they would be arguing with them and
countering them at almost every point.
The MacArthurite Klassen makes his case by appealing to a
straw man. He argues that those who insist on New Testament priority are
treating the Old Testament as if it were some kind of embedded secret code.
This is a false misrepresentative charge and plays upon the hucksters and
charlatans who every few years appear on the scene with some kind of new key to
a 'Bible Code'. They are rightly viewed in a negative light and ironically have
actually gained far more traction in Dispensational circles than outside of it.
And there are reasons for this.*
No one I know (or know of) who approaches the Scriptures
through a Redemptive-Historical hermeneutic believes the Old Testament is in
code. Even this false characterisation smacks of the quantification and the either/or-driven
thinking of Dispensational hermeneutics.
There's no need to pick apart this or that Psalm and say
these verses are the voice of David, and these verses are Christ, or that this
portion of the prophecy refers to an earthly king and this part to the angelic
realm, or this part of the discourse is about 70AD and this part about the end
of the world.
Rather it's much more simple and yet profound. It's all David,
and as David is a prophet, a type of the True Prophet, and as David is
inscribing the words of the Holy Spirit – he is at the same time a shadowy
form, a manifestation of Christ Himself. And thus there's overlap. Christ's
very words overlap and exist alongside the words of David. You cannot easily
distinguish them nor is their cause to try. The same is often true of events,
as the one (such as the destruction of Jerusalem) typifies the other (the end
of the world). You can't break down the prophecies and determine which 'verses'
or individual clauses apply to this or that event.
I even take exception to the quote from Hodge regarding
Scripture contradicting Scripture. This is an appeal to the well known but
often misused Analogy of Scripture. I am wary of those who would attempt to
force doctrines into an empirically and finite-dependent framework of human
logic. The Analogy is helpful in reconciling narrative discrepancies and the
like but I am unwilling to impose Aristotelian or Enlightenment categories of
coherence onto Divine Revelation when it comes to doctrines that are being
revealed. If there's a paradox or dynamic left in the doctrinal formulation I
would prefer to leave it as God has revealed it. A failure to do so will
eventually lead to a reduction and ultimately disintegration of doctrine. After
the various apostolic dynamics are flattened and thus eliminated, the
trajectory will lead to the eventual questioning of the Incarnation and the
Trinity. History has shown this to be the case.
It's inevitable. It might take a few generations but the hermeneutical
(and philosophical) foundations will work themselves out.
Even examining the methodology of Christ in the gospels one
finds Him utilising Occasionalism – in other words he addresses needs and
situations and applies doctrine in that context – not bothering to present the
teachings in a coherent form or bind them to other revealed truths. We need to
ask why and truly ponder this because it's also the case in the epistles.
Rather than seek to formulate a grand system (as per Scholasticism) it is
better to leave doctrines in situ and
to that extent undeveloped. This kind of flexibility and lack of concreteness limits
the function of the Analogy-tool and makes Baconian dogmatists uncomfortable
but I think it's far more faithful to what Christ and the apostles were doing.
Klassen speaks of diversity, and variations in focus and
styles, in reference to need of the recipients. All well and good but Klassen
(I assert) doesn't actually mean this. He's not questioning the premise of
Scholasticism and systematics. Instead what he's doing is he's attempting to
make a case for a non-Christocentric reading of the Scriptures. He has to retain
Old Testament priority when it comes to the discussion of the Jews and the
Kingdom or else his system will collapse. And yet when dealing with these
topics, like all Dispensationalists he's going to fall right back into the
Baconian model and utilise the same kind of induction and cohesion-based
arguments that he wants to criticise.
His statement regarding propositions is telling as it betrays
his fundamental epistemological and hermeneutical commitments. Additionally he
appeals again to concepts such as quantity. He's right in the sense that truths
aren't more true or less true simply because of repetition or reiteration. But
the deeper problem is found in his propositional approach which necessarily
limits the scope of what passages are able to mean. If there is a multi-faceted
application which must be the case if one is to understand typology as
something more than mere allegory, the propositional approach to reading the
prophets must be rejected.**
Klassen's second point seems plain enough but it hides his
fundamental commitment regarding the Old Testament. As faithful New Covenant
Christians not only must we reject Old Testament parity, we must certainly reject
the Old Testament priority that Klassen is subtly trying to make the case for.
Critics of Dispensationalism and its Jewish-land prioritisation model insist
that God is not breaking promises made to Abraham in the New Testament. It's
simply that the promises were revealed in that context, at that point in
redemptive-historical revelation and in terms possible for the audience to
understand. Not all was revealed as it is in the New Testament which describes
itself as better and founded on better promises – not on mere types and shadows
we might say. Abraham's promise is fully in force, a point Paul makes
abundantly clear in Galatians but a great deal more has been revealed about its
nature. The promises made to Abraham in Genesis anticipated Christ and as Paul
teaches in Galatians, Ephesians, and in Romans, the fulfillment of these things
is found in the Church and the True Israel – Christ Himself and His Kingdom – which
is not the strip of land in the Levant but Heaven itself.
Dispensationalism rejects this and must therefore retain Old
Testament hermeneutical priority. It is a Judaizing hermeneutic and close
cousin to some of the very errors the apostles were battling on the pages of
the New Testament itself.
In the end the hermeneutic advocated by Klassen and the
MacArthurites is more Jewish than Christian. It is at war with the apostles and
rooted in a rejection of their prolegomena, epistemology, hermeneutics, and
doctrine.
Further to answer some of Klassen's objections we can say
this –
The Old Testament prophets spoke in spiritual Christocentric
terms. The truths of the gospel as revealed in the New Testament are found in
the Old but men and women had to look beyond the types and symbols and the
external righteousness found in the Law in order to be saved. They were saved
as we are, as Abraham was – by faith. You see this in passages such as Psalm 40
and elsewhere where it's suggested that God doesn't want sacrifices and
offerings. Is that right? Were those God-commanded means of no value and
therefore unnecessary? On the contrary those were commands to be obeyed and if
done in faith were certainly efficacious but even Old Testament saints such as
David (and the other prophets) were already looking beyond to something beyond
and a time in which those sacrifices and that entire system would no longer
function or be necessary. And yet what was beyond was still revealed in shadow
form and in idiomatic terms they might hope to but were unlikely to understand.
To be honest, most didn't get the message. The prophets say as much. It's
similar to the parables in the Gospels. One must have eyes to see and ears to
hear and a heart to understand. Otherwise the visions and declarations are
meaningless or even more likely they will be completely misunderstood and
misapplied.
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*The Codes have often relied upon Kabbalistic-type readings
of the Scripture which (though in defiance of basic Dispensational
hermeneutics) gain traction because Dispensationalism still grants validity to
Judaism, Jewish practices and Jewish hermeneutics, even though they are at
their core – Christ rejecting.
**At the same time one might be tempted to say that doctrines
revealed in the epistles are of a more clear-cut and straightforward nature.
There's truth to the notion that Paul speaks with much greater clarity than say
a passage in Ezekiel and certainly Paul says more in one or two verses than
Isaiah might say in a whole chapter. That said, the doctrines of Paul are no
less revelatory and the concepts they speak of in many cases cannot be
subjugated to reductionist attempts at dissection and then reconstructed into
some kind of grand unified theology.
Rather, Paul wrote in a context and for specific occasions.
He reveals something of the concepts, of eternal realities but at best our
understanding still retains a strong element of analogical relation. This is in
reference to questions of prolegomena, not an endorsement of the
Analogy-hermeneutic which relies on propositionally-rooted epistemology.
The entire scholastic approach is in error and further Paul reveals that there's even more – beyond what he is written about which he cannot speak of for such things are unspeakable or inexpressible. What this even means is somewhat beyond us. Are they things forbidden and thus hidden from us? Are they things beyond our comprehension? Are they things beyond the limits of language? We can speculate but in the end we just don't know. But it's certainly enough to humble us when it comes to doctrinal elaboration, deduction, and systematisation – or ought to be.