Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Biblical Theology in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
Don Carson: In my view, “He shall be called a Nazarene,” is not a direct quotation. Some try to connect it with netser, the Hebrew for branch. I don’t think that’s what’s being said at all. I think in the context it means, “He’s a Galilean. What can you expect?” In America it’s, “Oh, he’s from the Ozarks,” or in Australia you’d say, “He’s from Queensland.” I won’t suggest what you would say in Great Britain, although I have one or two ideas.
Most countries have these places where you’re viewed as second class. In the first century, Galilee was viewed as second class, and Nazareth was proverbial for being the armpit of Galilee. Instead of being called Jesus the Bethlehemite, which would have had evocations of Davidic rule right away, he is called Jesus the Nazarene.
I think that’s the point in that passage and it’s based on the fact that he is to be identified as a suffering servant and acquainted with grief. It’s bound with those passages with a thematic fulfillment rather than a particular text. The ones in Jude are in some ways the most difficult and the most interesting. The very least that has to be said is in no case where a non-biblical text is cited is it ever cited as graphe, as Scripture. Never. In other words, various texts can be cited and alluded to as saying the truth about something and can be actually quoted but never quoted as graphe, as Scripture.
If I’m giving an evangelistic address in a university somewhere and I’m expounding some Scripture, which is the way I go about evangelistic addresses, I may nevertheless in the course of the address, depending on the university, be quoting from other authors (for instance, Jacques Derrida), but that doesn’t mean I call them Scripture. I’m not quoting them as Scripture. Even where I think they’re right I’m not quoting them as Scripture. Do you see?
Certainly, the New Testament writers, and the Old Testament writers, for that matter too, refer on occasion to other books we don’t have any record of, precisely because they are historical persons. In real-time space history, they can make use of language and make use of literature that real people in those days knew about. There’s nothing to be alarmed by any of that. It would be a little more shocking if they called any of those pieces of literature Scripture.
Moderator: Is there a question from the floor? Don, you can briefly restate the question and then answer it.
Don: I claimed in the second session that there is some sort of distinction to be made between rabbinic exegesis that raises the law to the level of hermeneutical control and is in some sense a temporal versus Paul’s argument, which is profoundly based in redemptive historical reading of the Gospels, but didn’t Jews themselves sometimes treat Scripture typologically in some fashion or another? And the very nature of typology means there is a sequential reading.
It’s true. It’s a sort of thing that could more easily be unpacked in four hours than in one. Nevertheless, there’s a huge distinction to be made. Let me take an analogy first and then come back to your question. It’s worth making the distinction between biblical theology and systematic theology.
Systematic theology, on the whole, asks atemporal questions bound up with logic and order. It asks questions like, “Who is God?” and “What is sin?” and “Who are human beings?” whereas biblical theology more inductively asks, “What is the contribution of Isaiah the prophet to all the Canon says about the doctrine of God and how does it fit in the sequential treatment?”
It’s not that the systematician is completely unaware there are temporal distinctions in the Bible. Of course not. I mean, they’re not fake, and after all, part of the way you order things, whether you’re a Lutheran or a Calvinist or a dispensationalist or whatever you are, is precisely because in your logical presentation of who God is or what grace is or what the covenants are or whatever, even presented in a logical array, there are inevitably some subsets under that that are working over the matters of sequence.
It’s just unavoidable in the very nature of the handling of the documents. It is still distinguishable from the first priorities of biblical theology which works more inductively out of the text and is keeping an eye focused on the sequential pattern all the time as part of the hermeneutical grid for seeing how the bits fit together. Do you see?
If you ask, “Are there some rabbinic sources which do see typological connections along the stream of history?” after all they do deeply, deeply believe on the importance of Israel’s history … I’m not denying that. They’re not “flat-earthers” or “flat-texters.” Of course they see history. Nevertheless, the sources that show this pattern of elevating the law to the point of hermeneutical control are deep and constant and early.
It is remarkable how often, when Paul responds to that kind of issue, he responds with a salvation historical re-reading that shows, in fact, the sequential stuff must control how you put the bits together. I’d be happy to put in all kinds of footnotes and caveats along those lines, but I think the main point still really must stand.
Moderator: The question is, “Was there ever an offer of salvation based on the law, even if hypothetical and unattainable?”
Don: One wants to ask the question, if it were hypothetical and unobtainable, was it really an offer, doesn’t one? I don’t know the questioner, but my guess is the question behind the question is how you understand a passage like Romans 2, which raises questions about whether the Old Testament text offers salvation genuinely or sincerely on condition of obeying the law, so that somehow obeying the law becomes the proper condition of salvation, presumably in some sort of meritorious or obedience-earning way.
I presume that’s the question behind the question. If that is the question behind the question, then I would say, of course, obedience to the old covenant was important and could actually be raised as a condition, just as obedience to the new covenant is important and can be raised as a condition, but that’s a bit different from saying the law covenant was given in its stream in redemptive history to bring people to God primarily by being good enough. I don’t think it was.
I think there is ample evidence, even within the Pentateuch that the Pentateuchal writer does not envisage the law that way. I think it’s one of the reasons why the story ends up with such calamitous failure and with Moses himself not going into the Promised Land. I think there are lessons to the way the Pentateuch ends that way.
It’s an anticipation of what Paul says. The law helps us to see our fault lines or our failures or our limitations and thus functions across redemptive history to lead us to Christ. On the other hand, I would still want to say in the very same breath, those pious people who, touched by God’s grace, really did trust Christ and submit to his Word and bow to him were morally bound to obey the terms of the law covenant just as those who by God’s grace are touched by grace and trust Christ, under the terms of the new covenant are morally bound to obey the new covenant.
Where the word gospel is the object, very frequently “to believe” is the verb (to believe the gospel) almost as frequently “to obey” is the verb (to obey the gospel). I’m not too happy if we make the false kind of antithesis there. I think it’s a demand to read law in terms other than what biblical theology will allow you to read law in, if I’m permitted to end a sentence with a preposition.
Moderator: You are. Two more law questions. “What’s the relationship of the Mosaic law to the Gentiles in the Old Testament, i.e. other nations,” and, on the law again, “How should we use the Mosaic law today? How would you preach the Ten Commandments?”
Don: Transparently there are some people who receive God’s grace apart from the locus of the old covenant people of God. Saving grace as far as one can tell. What do you do with Jonah and the Ninevites, for example? Quite apart from the fact there are many passages which insist God is sovereign over all the nations (“Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people,” and “All nations will be brought to account,” and all of that sort of thing), there are also plenty of passages where individuals are seen as God’s emissaries for some purpose (Cyrus, my servant and that sort of thing).
Then there are some passages where there are people on a borderline, where you’re not quite sure where they stand, like Balaam, who is a good prophet and a bad prophet, but then even amongst the people of God there are some people who are remarkably mixed. I mean, even the so-called good guys in the last three chapters of Judges are pretty horrendous. Then you deal with Ninevites and so on.
In other words, although the primary pattern of the locus of God’s redeemed community is in Israel, it begins to shift in two ways. First, increasingly you get a remnant theology (not all Israel are truly Israel). There is a faithful remnant from within, but also, it’s not only Israelites who are saved in some sense too, so you have to make room for a Jonah somewhere. What that does is preserve something, it seems to me, of the sovereignty of God that goes beyond a narrow form of covenantal reading of the old covenant structure.
How do I preach the Ten Commandments today? That’s a very big question. I wish I had time to unpack it at length because it deals with how you view law within the law covenant. I don’t know how to answer this one briefly. It’s not that I don’t know what to say; I don’t know what to say in two minutes.
In some sense, the way I would preach the Ten Commandments is exactly the way I would preach any other law-based structure in the Old Testament. That is to say, if I were preaching chunks of Leviticus, which I have often done even evangelistically on university campuses, then you want to see not only what the texts mean in their own light but how they point forward through the canonical structures to their ultimate fulfillment in a great, bloody sacrifice.
Oh, you can preach Leviticus evangelistically. Yes, you can. There’s a sense in which you want to preach Exodus 20 the same way, to see its great, moral, sweeping demands, its holism, its God-centeredness, its base in redemption. “This is the Lord God who brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the land of slavery,” and “I am the Lord your God,” the foundational nature of idolatry being behind all sin and so on.
But you also, surely, as a Christian want to say this points forward too to the moral interiority and, ultimately, the consummated splendor of a new heaven and a new earth. Don’t you want to do that as well? I think that’s what it means to reckon that Jesus has not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfill them.
Moderator: We have another floor question. Don will restate it.
Don: If you come to a passage in Paul that uses a term like righteousness, how much do you read in the entire background of the entire Old Testament and perhaps come up with some sort of understanding of righteousness having to do with God’s great saving activity or the like versus some narrower immediately constrained usage which might have more to do with imputed righteousness? Is that the question?
Part of the problem here is this gentleman has just pushed my button, and so I’m in terrible danger of dumping two volumes on you, which really will not do at five till five in the afternoon. I suspect behind this question, too, is in part concern for how one handles the whole new perspective on Paul and related matters. Is that fair?
Part of that issue is bound up on whether your first assumptions about how righteousness is understood in the Old Testament are correct. That’s a huge assumption, and there I would recommend two essays, one of which has been published and the other which has not. The one that has been published is by Mark Seifrid in Volume 1 of Justification and Variegated Nomism. In the second volume, which will be out in a few months, he ties how that gets connected to Paul’s terminology.
On the issue itself, I would want to say those are very up-to-date, balanced, and pretty sensible studies that will probably answer the details of your question. The more general question is … The rule of thumb when you start appealing to context is immediate context first and then work out.
The only place where that is not the way to go is occasionally the author is so transparently bringing an antecedent context with him that you really have to understand in that line or you’ll misinterpret it, but the general rule of thumb is text and the context of the immediate grammar sentence, paragraph, chapter, discourse, book, corpus, covenant, canon. Generally, that’s the way the authority line runs, interpretively speaking or hermeneutically speaking.
There are some instances, nevertheless, where especially if a term is discerned to be what is often called a technical term with a certain range of meaning it always has in certain associations or a certain range of meaning it always has in certain contexts, then you have to be careful. It has to be said, too, in the wisdom of God some words are used somewhat differently by different writers. That too is bound up with the mystery of providence even in the nature of inscripturation.
In Paul, for example, the call of God is effective. If you’re called, you’re saved. In the Synoptic Gospels, if you’re called, you’re invited. Many are called but few are chosen. So one cannot simply notice how a word is used in one passage and assume it’s a technical term that always has precisely that force in every other passage.
Behind the question is a further question of how do you go about doing word studies in general? That’s another whole set of issues. I talked about some of them in my book on exegetical fallacies, the chapter on word studies. Another useful book to read in this regard is MoisÈs Silva’s Biblical Words and Their Meaning. After that, you’re into the really big ones.
Moderator: Should we mention Jesus in every sermon we preach?
Don: The short answer is yes, but there’s a longer answer. If we’re Christian preachers and that’s what we’re really doing, of course, you cannot help but look at things from the perspective of a finished canon. It is somehow robbing the people of God to do something other. On the other hand, I could imagine some situations where you might not explicitly mention Jesus because of the particular situation, where it might be a strategic advantage to think through how to get somewhere.
In the part of the world where I live, on the north shore of Chicago, and not very far away there are some pretty strong Jewish communities, and occasionally we get drawn into some kinds of discussions and so forth, including discussions of the sort, “How do you Christians understand this passage?” and then it’s an Old Testament one, some of us will be drawn in on it.
It might be the part of wisdom if you’re having an ongoing discussion to expound the passage at some length within the framework of the kind of biblical theology I’m doing there, to show from within the Old Testament where it drives, where it does truly drive and blows up some Reformed or Conservative Jewish expectations so they can see the hints of where it’s going without me using the word Jesus in every third sentence or something like that. Do you see?
There might be subtle reasons in certain cases where having an exception to what I’ve said, but as a general rule of thumb, to put the shoe on the other foot, you don’t want somebody expounding Jeremiah for 60 weeks or so, and because Jeremiah never mentions the name of Jesus, you never mention the name of Jesus either, because after all, you keep your finger on the text. You just say what’s in the text. You’re a textual preacher, aren’t you? Expository. It doesn’t mention Jesus so you don’t mention Jesus.
Clearly there’s something wrong with that too, because you’re reading the book of Jeremiah, not only in its own context but within the larger Old Testament covenantal context, the streams of redemptive history, and finally the whole canonical context. You have to do that! You’re a Christian, for goodness sake, but you do it in such a way that you handle Jeremiah as a sixth-century prophet faithfully, carefully, historically based within its own …
Yes, yes, you do that, but then you also say where it’s going from here and why it points forward and how it does that and achieves that. Two things. In preaching from Old Testament texts there are moralizing sermons to be learned. In other words, we have sometimes been burned by Old Testament preachers who handle every Old Testament narrative purely as a moralizing source. “This king was a bad king. Therefore, don’t be bad. This king was a good king. Therefore, be good.”
No. It’s put more elegantly than that, but there’s an awful lot of that. The life of Abraham sort of sermons and the life of Daniel sort of sermons and the lessons to be learned from the life of Elijah? All these moralizing tidbits come rolling off. There’s absolutely nothing there with respect to the great movement of Scripture or the story line or where you are in redemptive history or Jesus. It goes on for months. “This is how you walk by faith if you’re a Christian leader.”
In fact, the New Testament can use Old Testament stories for moralizing purposes. Read the first half of 1 Corinthians 10, for example. Even the passage we saw in Hebrews 3 and 4, before the great typology is worked out there is a moralizing lesson that’s drawn. Do you see? Don’t be afraid of moralizing. Just don’t make it everything.
The second thing to say about the Old Testament is the best expository preaching, it seems to me, not only handles this specific text (old or new) but it tries somehow to frame that text not only in the structure of the Bible’s storyline but also in its impact and what we should believe and how to live today in our culture. Preaching must cover all those bridges.
In other words, we need to handle the text in its context. We need to give enough topical synthetic material maybe not in every sermon but often enough to show how it fits into the whole thing, and that will inevitably then draw you to talking about Christ. That’s just responsible canonical exegesis, but you don’t want to make this mere information either.
It has to be done in such a way that it’s conveying the very presence of God. It’s building up the people of God or it’s commanding repentance or it’s glorifying God in inviting worship or it’s rebuking or it’s nurturing the people of God in some larger way as well. It’s not merely an information session. Good preaching surely wants to do all of those things … if not all the time, most of the time.
