×

The Use of the OT in the NT (Part 1)

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


Just to let you all know, I’m going to take the first half hour or so today to finish off the material that I was doing yesterday. So if you’ve come in expecting me to plunge into material on The Use of the Old Testament in the New Testament, be of cheer; I’ll get there eventually, but not quite yet.

We ended last day by beginning to offer some alternative epistemological models about how to understand human knowing so that you can speak of knowing truly without knowing omnisciently. That, in effect, rejects the antithesis that so many moderns try to force upon us in order to draw us toward postmodernism relativizing conclusions. I want to make a couple of more comments along these lines and then suggest what bearing this has on how we do evangelism, how we think some of these things through, and so forth.

One of the things that postmodernism has done.… When talking about the advantages, I did not draw this one out. This one is an advantage, although it’s handled, in my view, the wrong way. Postmodernism does point out, rightly, that there is more to human knowing than that which comes through mere linear thought, argumentation, evidence, and tight epistemological controls. We learn so much in highly astonishing, subjective ways, don’t we?

When I was pastor of a church in Vancouver quite a number of years ago, there was a young woman in the church. Her name was Peggy. She was a university student at the University of British Columbia. She was vivacious, interesting, and full of life and sparkle. She had a wonderful sense of humor.

She didn’t have a linear thought in her head. She thought tangentially, eclectically, laterally, intuitively, but on the other hand, within that framework, she was really brilliant and very interesting. It was fun to have a conversation with her because you couldn’t figure out where she was going. Then, suddenly, the light would go on and you’d say, “Oh! That’s how you got there.” It was so different from the way I think, you see?

One day she came to me (she was a keen Christian) and said, “Pastor Don, there’s a chap at the university called Fred. He’s on the football team. He’s not a Christian at all, but he wants to take me out. I’d like to talk to him about the Lord. You don’t mind if I go out with him, do you?” Now why she was asking me.… I mean, I wasn’t her boss. I said, “Well, Peggy, be careful. The heart is pretty deceitful, you know. You can end up in a relationship that you might not be able to handle here. So just watch what you’re doing.”

“Oh! That’s not what’s going to happen at all. I’m going to share my faith with him.”

“Okay, okay. If you’re serious about that, you go out with him, and then you bring him to me afterward.”

I figured that would kill it right there. Instead, that Saturday night, 10:30 in my study (I was still single in those days) in the church, there was knock on the door. “Come in!” In come Peggy and Fred. Fred has never been inside a church building in his life. He’s looking somewhat intimidated. Peggy comes in, full of life and vivacity, “We’ve just been to a movie. You said to bring him to you, so now I’m doing that.” What do you do with a girl like that?

So we went out to a restaurant, IHOP (International House of Pancakes), at 11:00 at night. We started talking. I was trying to get to know Fred and get him to relax a bit. We talked about this and.… He was as dour, straight, linear, and logical as she was vivacious. Talk about opposites attract! I mean, that’s just that way they were. That was the first night.

The next Saturday night, 11:00 at night. Back again. Out we go again. This time he had a list of questions. So we started eating.… This is the night I am supposed to preach twice the next morning! Eleven till two at IHOP. He had this list of questions, and I answered the questions. “Thank you. Thank you. Yes, that makes sense. Yes. Thank you.” Next Saturday night, another list of questions. Go to IHOP. “No. No. Yes. Well, I have another question. Yes. That makes sense.” Very dour. Very straight.

After 13 weeks, every Saturday night, he said, “All right. I’ll become a Christian.” And he did! I baptized him two week later. Today he’s deacon of a church. His kids have grown up. His daughter has just married a Christian lad. What can I say? But I have to tell you, although I’ve seen a few people converted with this sort of linear apologetic, the overwhelming majority of people that I have seen converted over the years, humanly speaking, come to Christ for the most amazing complex of reasons.

Some articulation of the gospel.… Then it’s because some Christian has shown them a bit of kindness; they remembered that when their mother was dying he or she prayed for them. Or they were riding on the bus one day and looked outside, where the sun was shining beautifully, and they remembered thinking, “It suddenly hit me, ‘God really is there!’ ” What do you do with this kind of stuff? Your average modernist would have heart attack! But it is part of the way human knowing is, isn’t it? It is very strange, not always predictable.

That’s part of what does also open up epistemological space for the secret internal work of the Spirit. It opens up epistemological space for impressions, learning things through art and beauty, and all kinds of things, you see? The danger is trying so to regularize all of this material that it’s all in a little box that we exhaustively understand.

We have to be very careful that we do not construct epistemologies that are so tight that we act as if we know all about human knowing. We know quite a lot of things about human knowing, but we don’t know all there is to know about human knowing, neither the modernist nor the postmodernist does.

What that reminds us of, then, is something very important. Postmoderns who are Christians like to speak about abandoning linear knowing. They like to exclude in-out things: people getting converted, changing their minds. They want to talk instead about relationships. They want to talk about the integrity of fellowship in the church, about how people feel when they come into a service, whether they’re accepted or not, whether they sense there’s something authentic there.

So when you start reading contemporary books that talk about postmodernism evangelism, that’s the direction in which most of them go. It has to do with authenticity, corporate worship that’s full of vivacity and life, and so on. Then you sometimes get the modern knee-jerk reactions, “Yeah, but where’s the truth?” Once again, what you really must say is, “A plague on both your houses.” Both approaches are profoundly reductionistic.

Surely any Christian who reads his or her Bible thoughtfully will not want to minimize the importance of integrity and love in the context of the local church as an evangelistic strategy quite apart from integrity. “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

In my judgment, in fact my experience of just watching churches in various parts of the world, in various parts of any particular country, the issue as to whether or not young postmoderns are being attracted has very little to do with the style of worship. It has much more to do with the appearance of authenticity.

I have seen many postmoderns come into a church that is liturgical, structured, in some senses old-fashioned, grounded and steeped in tradition, but where it comes across as authentic, genuine, it’s attractive. I have also seen churches that are more enthusiastic, more charismatic, but when it seems not manipulative but authentic, it’s attractive. It’s the authenticity issue.

What a lot of young people from the postmodern world mean by something that feels spiritual is something authentic. They use the term spiritual in a sense that I’m not, but that’s what they mean by it. Now that by itself does not justify a particular form of corporate worship; that’s another issue. I’m not trying to justify a particular style at this juncture.

All I’m trying to say is there must be authenticity, integrity, sincerity, and within that framework also love, acceptance … along with the unambiguous, clear-minded, intelligent articulation, re-articulation, and application of gospel truth. You don’t want to lose either of those polarities any more than you want to lose the left wing or the right wing of an airplane. You want both emphases all the time, don’t you?

So I resent a merely linear approach to such matters as much as I resent a postmodern approach that leaves the truth in the dust and talks endlessly about relationships till the cows come home. Do you see? Both compromise something that is deeply taught in Scripture. It’s why at the end of the day, a thoughtful Christian will not want to be too deeply indebted either to a modern epistemology or to a postmodern epistemology.

I have not set out here a distinctively Christian epistemology; that would be another whole exercise. In my view, both of them are too small, precisely because they don’t take into account the importance of beginning with God. I do think that there were things wrong with premodern epistemology too, but that’s a slightly different discussion again.

Within that framework then, it seems to me that the communication of truth and the articulation of these matters in evangelistic settings and elsewhere often have to do, as least in part, with what is increasingly being called worldview formation or worldview evangelism. At the risk of caricature now, here I must make a distinction, for the last 50 or 60 years, between countries in Europe and North America that had a pretty strong Christian tradition and countries in Europe where there was so much Communism that Christianity was in small pockets only. It was not part of the air that you breathed.

If you start talking about countries that were still steeped, pretty strongly, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, then as recently as 30–40 years ago (and in some of these countries more recently than that, 20 years ago) if you started talking to unbelievers within that context, even if they despised Christianity, even if they were reacting against it, even if they disbelieved it, even if they had become philosophical naturalists; nevertheless, they knew what the categories were.

So if I were trying to evangelize an atheist 30 years ago, he or she was a Christian atheist. That is, he or she was disbelieving in the Christian God, which is another way of saying that the categories were all on my turf. But once you move into an era of this degree of biblical illiteracy, an atheist might not know anything there is about the Christian God.

He’s rejecting all god-ness, whether pantheism, polytheism, or maybe he’s been exposed to Buddhism and has rejected it. Whatever. It could mean almost anything. It could be merely a way of affirming philosophical materialism, that’s all. It could be the reaction of having bought into some kind of logical positivist epistemology.

So you see, as a result, 30 or 40 years ago, a lot of our evangelistic strategies were very small; they were very tiny. You stressed, for example, how bad sin is, but people still by and large believed that the Ten Commandments were a pretty nice summary of moral law, even if they couldn’t recite them all and even if they didn’t believe they were given by God. It was still something of this inheritance in the air in Western culture, do you see?

What you did was you said, “Look, God’s solution to our alienation because of our sin is his own Son who died on the cross in our behalf. What you must do is repent and trust him.” That was evangelism. Supposing there’s no real consciousness of sin as understood in Scripture? No real understanding of who God is as taught in Scripture? No real understanding of what sacrifice is as exemplified in the whole Old Testament covenantal structure?

Supposing there is an already deeply embedded philosophical materialism and not much knowledge of other stuff? To begin by saying, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” Good grief! What does that mean? “Oh, boy, I like that! In this area of increased spirituality, ‘God loves you and has a wonderful …’ What does that mean? More sex? Better job? Sense of fulfillment? ‘God loves me and has a wonderful …’ I’ll try that! I’m for that!” Who’s going to stop that?

So, in relation to approaches to evangelism that begin with, “Do you know that God offers you the abundant life?” when people don’t have any of the biblical categories, what does that even mean? Where does the expression abundant life come from in the Bible? Do you remember? Where does it come from? John 10. That’s the only place where it’s used. And there, it’s used in the extended metaphor of the sheep and the shepherd. “I have come that they might have abundant life.” In the content of the extended metaphor, that means that all these sheep have a lot of grass!

Now you can’t go telling university students what they need is a lot of grass. If you didn’t get that, in English, grass means marijuana. You see? You can’t begin there unless you’ve already bought into a biblical frame of reference and already know who God is and what sin is. Then it’s worth talking about. If people know they’re lost, and God is promising abundant life, then that makes sense.

What is required today is not evangelism in which people already, more or less, buy into a Judeo-Christian worldview and you merely focus on a few things at the center and bring people to Jesus. What you really need to do is articulate a whole frame of reference. It’s a whole worldview in which Jesus rests, a worldview in which Jesus alone makes sense. So that evangelism must go farther back, teach much more. It must present a worldview that makes sense of who Jesus is as well as of who we are. Do you see?

There are far more bridges to cross. It’s much more like what a missionary must do who suddenly goes to Thailand and begins to expound the gospel there. Supposing you learn Thai fluently in a linguistics course, and then you go to Thailand. For some stupid reason you stand outside a decent Buddhist temple, and as people come out of the Buddhist temple you start saying in fluent Thai, “Jesus is Lord.” What will they hear you saying?

Well, they will hear you saying, amongst other things, that Jesus is inferior to Gautama the Buddha because in the highest exaltation of Buddhism, when you get to the highest state, nothing can be predicated of you. The Buddha is neither hot not cold. He’s neither lord nor un-lord. He’s neither good nor bad. You’re beyond all predication. Do you see?

If you’re predicating that Jesus is Lord, what that means is that he’s automatically inferior to Gautama the Buddha, which isn’t exactly what you had in mind, is it? It’s not because the Thai people are stupid that they don’t understand. It’s because their entire frame of reference, their entire worldview, means that there is a lot of remaking, restructuring to do to explain what Paul means when he says, “Jesus is Lord.” You’re back to the fusion of horizons.

Thus the postmodernists rightly warn us that because we live in different worlds, it’s possible to misunderstand. On the other hand, you can so fuse horizons that you can have good transfer of knowledge across any language, across any culture, across any racial barrier. It takes more time, more thought, more patience, more care, more love, but you can do it.

What is at issue then, most profoundly, is the construction of careful worldviews. Within this framework, it seems to me that Acts 17 is for us a wonderful model. If you want to see Paul evangelizing in the context of a biblically literate people, read Acts 13. You find him in Pisidian Antioch. If you want to read Paul and his evangelism in the context of biblically illiterate people, read Acts 17.

I try to treat that at some length in the book Telling the Truth: Evangelizing Postmoderns. I asked that it be on the book stall here, but somehow it wasn’t brought across. But if you are interested in evangelism and communicating the gospel to biblical illiterates in the postmodern world, that’s a collection of essays that came out of a conference at Trinity in 1999, and it might be of use. Telling the Truth: Evangelizing Postmoderns. It’s a kind of more practical follow-up to The Gagging of God, which is more philosophical and a little harder to follow.

There is a lot more that could be said, but let me stop now for questions and comments

Male: Would that book help develop a Christian worldview in the midst of postmodernism, or is there some other book that you would recommend for that?

Don Carson: It does in part. More needs to be done, but there are some chapters that would help along those lines.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: If you mean, “Am I in danger of trying to say that what you really must do is so understand the culture that you successfully argue people into the kingdom. The Holy Spirit could get up and walk, and we wouldn’t even recognize his departure because we’re so clever at cross-cultural communication?” then I would say there’s always a danger of arrogance.

There’s a danger of arrogance in faddish postmodernity. There’s a danger of arrogance in stubborn fundamentalism. There’s always a danger of arrogance. But it’s also important to say that God is normally a God of means. If we take seriously the injunction of Peter to be “ready to give to every man a reason for the hope that lies within us,” then there is some importance to trying to understand what’s going on. Within that framework, there are just enough examples in the New Testament of what that looks like to encourage us to do the same thing.

Nowhere is that more startling, it seems to me, than in the contrast between Paul’s sermon in Pisidian Antioch, where he’s dealing with biblically literate people who already know about creation, the fall, Israel, the prophecies, Messianism.… They already know that stuff. So he spends almost all of his time proving that Jesus really is the promised Messiah, and that properly read, Scripture itself anticipates that he had to die and rise again. “Now repent and believe.”

Whereas, when you come to Acts 17, and people have never heard of Moses, never read Moses, or anything like that, then he’s got to build a much, much bigger view. He’s quite prepared to quote minor pagan poets, as I’m quite prepared to quote endless contemporary philosophers and secularists when I’m doing university missions. There is in Scripture, in other words, some really excellent modeling along these lines that help us to think clearly.

Female: I was left with a question yesterday, and I think very much you’ve already taken my question. The question was if we still do our own research according to the criteria of modernist epistemology while we are living in the world of postmodernism. This world’s already changing, and sometimes it’s transitioning, entering a new epoch, whether we call it post-postmodernism or not.

Our mentors risk being no more relevant because they don’t meet people where they are. They don’t think the way people think now. So I feel very much pioneering a path in my own research and trying to find methods that are both appropriate to the material I’m working with, which is God’s Word, and that are appropriate with regard to the world I’m living in.

Don: I think there may be a small danger of confusing two issues. On the one hand, there is the importance of … you call them methods of research. That is, in terms of understanding what Scripture says. In a postmodern approach to Scriptural study, what tends to happen in the academy is that you can use almost any method you like so long as it is reasonably self-consistent and so long as you do not say it’s the only method.

It doesn’t matter if the results are self-consistent. It doesn’t matter if they cohere with other results. You do not think that there is one unified message or anything like that. Here are some titles. There is a lot of material I left out here for want of time. Here are some recent titles:

The New Literary Criticism in the Hebrew Bible, Reading Sacred Texts Through American Eyes, Deconstructing the New Testament, Mark and Luke in Poststructuralist Perspectives, Poststructuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross, Liberating Exegesis, The Open Text. These are just a few books in my discipline that have come out in the last few years. The stuff’s all over the place.

Over against that, I would want to say that anybody who has a high view of Scripture but recognizes the complexity of human epistemology will want to try to understand the Bible on its own terms, recognizing that however many diverse literary forms there are and how many different writers there are, if there is one mind, finally, behind the whole thing, at some level it really does cohere.

Thus you use the diversity of methods, whether it’s studying Greek grammar or discourse analysis or whatever, to try to find out what the text says. But that’s a little different from then trying to think through.… How do you communicate it with others in another world? That’s a slightly different question. Here it’s worth thinking through the model of fusion of horizons again in one further step.

The model of fusion of horizons yesterday finds me the receptor now trying to fuse my horizon of understanding with the horizon of, let’s say Paul, in order that I might make a good transfer across. But now I want to communicate that to somebody who has a further horizon, who doesn’t read the Bible, doesn’t know what the Bible is saying, and maybe has a postmodern exegesis. Now what do I do? Now that person has another horizon of understanding.

Let’s take it right out of Europe. Now you’re becoming a missionary to Japan. At this point you have to understand the Japanese languages. They have their horizon of understanding. So there’s Paul’s horizon of understanding. You have tried to distance yourself from your own horizon of understanding in order to have a good transfer here. Now you try to bring your horizon of understanding into a new fusion with the new group.

The difference is that in the first transfer, the text is static before us (now the Spirit of God is there; we’ll come to that in a moment). The Spirit of God is there, but so far as the human participants and knowers are concerned, Paul is dead. It’s the receptor who has the bulk of the responsibility at the human level for trying to make a good transfer across.

Now when you come to the mission context, however, it’s the donor who has the primary responsibility for getting it across, because the receptor is not going to be initially interested or the like. Do you see? As a result, you are now trying to transmute this material into Japanese with another culture and explain it in order to bring that person to understand what Paul is saying way back here through a mediary.

Female: Sorry, I’m afraid I didn’t phrase my question correctly. I didn’t intend to provoke that answer. I happen to agree with you in your answer, but I don’t want to take any more of your time.

Don: Well, what is your question?

Question: My question was that.… I’m very much aware that I’m not meant to confuse both areas, but as I’m doing research, I still don’t feel comfortable using methods of past epoch.

Don: Why not?

Female: Because then you would have to use other methods when you’re addressing people in present epoch.

Don: Why? That presupposes that methods of the past epoch are all wrong.

Female: No.

Don: Yes, it does. You still have to learn Greek whether you live in the fifteenth century or you’re a Latin in the second century or you’re a Japanese in the twenty-first century. That still is a method.

Female: I’m afraid I wasn’t able to express correctly what I intended to convey, and that was the problem, of communication.

Don: What I’m saying is to presuppose that methods of a past epoch, you cannot use today, presupposes that they’re no longer relevant today.

Female: No, I wouldn’t want to say they’re [inaudible].

Don: Then why shouldn’t I use them?

Female: I wouldn’t want to use methods which are [inaudible] today.

Don: Such as?

Female: Yesterday, you were mentioning the new approach of the twentieth century, like Popper and Kuhn, of the philosophy of science that is actually giving a chance. It’s a postmodern product. It’s giving a chance with regard to methods of research that is using an axiomatic hypothesis on which you can build your research upon.

I like that very much. That gives me an opportunity with regard to past methods. Now past methods which I wouldn’t to use anymore because they are not relevant.… Well, people don’t think in categories like moderns, and so there are some methods which I use and some methods which I don’t use.

Don: Such as?

Female: Can you give me another example?

Don: I don’t think there is one.

Female: Ok.

Don: That’s my whole point. You see, Kuhn is not a method. Kuhn is trying to analyze how various epistemologies work, how various disciplines work. While Kuhn is rabbiting on about his stuff (and it’s very helpful and insightful) meanwhile, the ordinary scientist at his workbench doesn’t change what he or she is doing. He or she might become a little more insightful about what he or she is doing and how it works, but it doesn’t actually change what’s going on at the lab bench.

In other words, new methods may be invented, and it may well be that some methods, with time, become marginalized because they’re not very good. But insofar as they have been useful at all at truly understanding the text in some measure, they can still be used.

Female: I agree.

Don: From any epoch.

Female: I agree.

Don: So in that sense, you see, if discourse analysis as a discipline was really invented only about 60 years ago, then in a 150 years, if the Lord tarries, if discourse analysis itself is still being useful in part in understanding the text, by all means still use it. Or it might be absorbed into a broader discipline, so it’s still being used.

What would be wrong would be to think that discourse analysis becomes the be-all and the end-all for text understanding such that all other methods are wrong. Insofar as it is helpful in bringing us asymptotically to some understanding of the text, I don’t care in what epoch it was invented. In fact, all kinds of elements of discourse analysis were being used in times past without being brought together under a discipline called discourse analysis.

Female: I see your point.

Don: Okay? Anything else?

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: That depends. Slovakia is very Catholic. Poland.… It was too much of a generalization. I acknowledge that. In a country like Albania, the government was pretty close to stamping out every form of Christendom. It was very ruthless and bloody, and it was very effective. It was not very effective in Poland.

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: I acknowledge that, but that really does depend on which country you’re talking about, doesn’t it, how far it goes. I was really giving a generalization that was probably not quite fair, for want of time. But I acknowledge the diversity. Even in what used to be Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic today, is far, far more secular than Slovakia which still has a lot of Catholic roots and so on. That’s partly urban/rural too. It’s complex, isn’t it?

Male: [Inaudible]

Don: I agree with that, and I am not one of those who try to make a stereotype of the entire world of the USSR plus China plus a number of other countries, such as Cuba, because it is more complex than that. I understand that. But I would say, similarly, there are entire similar complexities in the Western world too.

A country like France, with its heritage of the French Revolution, has been anticlerical in profound ways for a century and a half that you do not find in Britain, which instead of the French Revolution had the evangelical awakening. Then the kind of forms of Christendom that you find in Portugal and Spain, right through Franco, are really quite different from the forms of Christendom that you find in Norway and Sweden, and so on.

On the other hand, you still have to make some kinds of generalizations because there are some distinctions as well. There was more overt freedom, and in many Western countries (not all), Christianity was part of school curriculum and things like that. Therefore, even when people were not particularly Christian, except in some sort of inherited sense, there was still in the air a lot more talk of this sort of thing.

They were nominally the categories in which the culture was being built. The powers that be, the press, the TV programs, services on the air became part of the accepted inheritance and recognized as such in much more of the non-Communist Europe and North America and elsewhere.

Whereas, although there was great diversity between what was going on, let’s say in Siberia, and what was going on in Estonia; nevertheless, those in power were still, as much as they could, controlling the curriculum in the schools; advancing certain people in society, in part on whether or not they were holding to any faith; stopping some people from getting into universities if they really were fervent Christians; and on and on. Which does not mean that Christianity was crushed, everybody was in jail, or there had to be an underground church.

Nevertheless, it was really quite a difference, and as a result, in the wake of that, you have a high percentage of people coming through many of these countries (much less so in Poland, than say the Czech Republic) with pretty massive biblical illiteracy precisely because they have not been steeped in an inheritance that has been full of this kind of thing. The West is catching up to that degree of biblical illiteracy, and, in some cases, has surpassed it. I would say there is far more biblical illiteracy in France today than there is in Poland.

Male: But either way, as you were talking about, today people’s base problem is sin. For example, they did a study in Estonia last year on “What is sin?” Of course, the majority of Estonians agreed with them that what’s the greatest sin is car theft, among other things. But basically, what I want to say is actually so many politicians, so many media people use this term very often.

Don: What? Sin? In Estonia? How interesting.

Male: Yes! But they are interpreting this in a very different way. It’s partly [inaudible] partly Christian, Judeo-Christian [inaudible] multiple levels in what they are thinking. So the term itself is functional, but you use it, and in some cases you may be correct or half correct or 80 percent correct, or however you want to put it. This is not a term or something which the people don’t use at all.

Don: Is this just in Estonia or is it all the Baltic States?

Male: Well, I am speaking of my experience.

Don: I just wondered if it’s also Latvia and so on. But you see, in the West, that is simply not the case. And it is not the case in most central and eastern European countries where I have spent more time. It just isn’t the case. Sin is either a word that’s not used or it’s a religious word that has no power anymore.

Then you go to other parts of the world.… You go to Japan.… Japanese has one word for sin and crime. So every time you say, “All human beings are sinners.” They’re hearing, “All human beings are criminals.” So you have another whole.… I’m not trying to oversimplify the problem, and I was unaware of that particular phenomenon in Estonia. That’s very interesting.

When I go to a country to preach to Christians, I just go to the country and preach to Christians. If I’m going to a country I haven’t been to before where I’m going to be doing university evangelism and missions, I usually ask Christians in that country to send me between five and ten books that summarize the history, culture, religious heritage, language, and so on, because I realize there are far more dangers in communicating to outsiders and unbelievers.

The first time I went to Brazil, for example, a missionary down there sent me a big stack of books. I found out all kinds of things that.… For example, just slapping your knee, is the equivalent to, in the Western, English world, giving somebody the third finger. Whereas, in Quebec, where I grew up, when you laugh you slap your leg. Even though I knew this because I was down there, I found myself a couple of times enjoying a good laugh and slapping my leg. Good grief!

When you start crossing cultures to communicate, you have to find out more. No doubt, I am painting with a broad brush, and it’s helpful to have some of these more immediate culture-related corrections. Last question, then we have to press on.

Male: I’m very interested in the topic you raise about biblical illiteracy growing. What do you think the church should do about that? How do we address that issue?

Don: Well, there are a lot of factors. Again, I don’t think there are formulaic answers, because a lot depends on where you are in the country and what the relationship is between the church and the state in the country.

In Hungary today, there are a lot of schools that are not only allowing in, but inviting in, Christians to teach the Bible. There are not only nationals but internationals, cross-cultural missionaries, who are teaching the Bible in schools in a way that you could not possibly teach the Bible in schools in Chicago or New York. Obviously, there can be a strategy there that is part of the whole vision of things that just won’t fit, in London, even.

It’s just very difficult to make formulaic judgments. What you must do, it seems to me, is try to think through.… If you’re trying to teach the Bible in a worldview-ish way, it seems to me that it becomes more and more important to teach not only individual Bible verses but to teach the whole sweep of things, to teach the whole counsel of God.

Let me put it this way. Postmoderns are very interested in stories. You tell your story. I tell my story. We all tell our story. What they’re suspicious of is the metanarrative. The big story. The metanarrative is to narrative what metaphysics is to physics. Metaphysics is the big world framework in which your physics operates. The metanarrative is the big story that makes sense of all the little stories.

Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar, is so postmodern that when he reads the Bible, he insists on reading all the Bible stories independently, which gives them far more creativity, but they are no longer part of the biblical metanarrative. He doesn’t think there is a biblical metanarrative. He doesn’t view the Bible in any sort of traditional way at all. In my view, he misunderstands the Bible pretty deeply, even though he’s a very interesting man and writes a lot of insightful stuff now and then.

Nevertheless, he’s so typically postmodern that any particular story he takes, the first thing he does is detach it from any of the context. That’s a very postmodern trick. What the Christians must do, it seems to me, is make sure that the Bible is taught as a metanarrative. It’s the big picture; it’s the structure. The Bible must frame our metanarrative, and within that.… Because the Bible is a big story.

It’s a big story that explains world history, explains right and wrong, explains who we are, and identifies what’s gone wrong and what the solution is. It is a big, explaining story. It’s a metanarrative. Out of that metanarrative, then, you form your metaphysics, which shapes your worldview. If you don’t do that and only preach little texts, then what happens is people take those texts eclectically and drop them somewhere into whatever worldview they happen to bring to the table.

So part of teaching the whole counsel of God is thinking through how to teach people to think Christian-like, and that means the metanarrative and the worldview metaphysic that comes out of it. To unpack that would take me quite a long time, but does that head the right direction?

Male: That is helpful.

Don: Enough of this. I did say that was the last one, didn’t I. Well, I make an exception for you because of your smile.

Male: I have a question about Acts 17 that I think is very interesting. I’ve always been disturbed by the fact that we don’t even know [inaudible].

Don: In fact, there are some who go so far as to argue that Paul made a big mistake in Acts 17. Are you familiar with that theory? Do I need to respond to that one? Is that the theory you’re really referring to here?

Male: No. I’m not disturbed by those theories. I’m disturbed by reading in the New Testament that he never comes back to [inaudible].

Don: If you haven’t bought into that theory, which I will not attempt to refute (but if I needed to, I would be happy to, because it’s dead wrong), then you still have to ask the question.… Why then does Luke include this account in the book? The answer must be, at least in some part, because he thinks that it is a very good model of what should be done. Unless you take the other, larger explanation that says that Paul made a big mistake. You have to say the reason why it’s in the book is for this purpose.

I think that there are other things. I think that we have sometimes misunderstood the way the text ends up in Acts, chapter 17. The English version I’m using ends up by saying, “A few men became followers of Paul and believed.” That’s not what the text says. It says, “Certain men …” In fact, the Greek expression is one that Luke uses a number of times when he describes what happens when the gospel is preached. Certain people believed and certain didn’t.

The Areopagus was, in fact, a smaller group, so it couldn’t have been 3000 as on the day of Pentecost, but certain people believed, and certain did not. I think that some of our versions which translate this as “a few” are already loading the dice a wee bit. That’s the first thing to say.

The second thing to say is when we read in our texts, “They became followers of Paul and believed,” we think that’s referring necessarily to “they believed on the spot.” I doubt that’s what it means. There were no universities in the ancient world. There were itinerant speakers who charged for their speaking. If they became really good, then they might start a small school and carry disciples around them.

Rich parents would attach their sons especially to these people, pay their fees, and thus they were like private tutors that were also in public speaking places, arenas, and things like that. So the disciples became followers of these people. What has happened now is that certain people have heard Paul and become disciples of Paul. They want to hear him again. That doesn’t mean that they believed on the spot. They become disciples of Paul, but because they became disciples of Paul, then in due course, they believed.

You see, in this text, Paul actually doesn’t get to the heart of the gospel. He established the whole frame of reference, comes down to Christ, and you know where he would have gone. Already we’re told that in the market places, he was evangelizing. The verb is euaggelizomai. He was announcing the gospel all right; that’s what he did. You know where he’s going to go, but he only gets as far as Jesus and the resurrection when he’s cut off. What happens? Well, certain people became followers of Paul. They got more and, in consequence, believed.

When I started doing university missions 25 or 30 years ago, those who tended to get converted tended to get converted during the weekend I was there or the week that I was there or whatever. That’s the way it was. People spoke of following up on people who’d become Christians. Fair enough.

That’s not the way it is today. Today, very, very often in a university mission, no one makes a profession of faith. But you sign up a whole batch of them for ongoing evangelistic Bible studies, and, in fact, they become followers of Don. And subsequently, they believe. So I’m still seeing approximately the same percentage of people getting converted, but they’re so bone ignorant that it takes a little longer for them to form a frame of reference. Then they do get converted. They become followers of Don, and in due course, they believe.

At a little mini-mission at Oxford a few years ago there were 16 people, if I recall, who signed up from this one-day mission for these Christianity Explained courses. Six weeks later, Vaughan Roberts emailed me and said, “Well, eleven have really unambiguously become Christians, and we’re praying for the other five.” That’s just typical. I think that’s what’s going on here, and Luke is showing that’s the way things work in this little pagan environment, too. There are more hurdles to overcome.

Again, I don’t want to deny that the blessed Holy Spirit of God may come down in revival fire and bring people to an understanding of a worldview and close with Christ in 15 minutes. It can happen. It really can. It can likewise happen very quickly in a framework that’s steeped in tradition, but it’s all formal and dead.

Yes, it can happen. But it’s also the case that very often (most commonly), God, in the very nature of things, by his Holy Spirit uses means. Luke carefully records them here and the way it works. I don’t think we should infer the wrong conclusions from this text.

This brother from Estonia talks about sin being in the vocabulary but meaning something else. Are there other countries represented here where sin is used?

Male: Poland.

Don: Poland. Oh yes, of course, with all the Catholic heritage.

Male: I have noticed that in some cases, some of the politicians or journalists use the term sin in a positive way.

Don: What do you mean a positive way?

Male: It means that it is something nice.

Don: It’s a good thing to sin now and then? How interesting. In Poland?

Male: Yes.

Don: That’s charming.

Male: Ireland would be that way too.

Don: Is that right? In the South, especially, or the North as well?

Male: No, in the South. I think it’s as a result of ultra-control.

Don: Yeah, it’s rebelling.

Male: It’s a reaction.

Don: You see, this is equivalent to what I call today “the snicker use of sin”. Ha ha! Isn’t that cute? Sort of fun. Various strands of America have gone through that, and now the word is just falling out now. It’s just falling out.

Male: On the plane I was reading about the cost of living in sin.

Don: Yes. You see, 30 years ago, people in North America spoke of “living in sin,” but they would never use that expression now. They live common law or they’re living together, but they never speak of living in sin anymore.

Male: The author was saying that when we use this term now, people just laugh.

Don: It’s a snicker word. You’re about 30 years behind America in our degeneration. This is not a point of pride.

Male: In Estonia, nobody accepts that stealing a car as a positive, good thing.

Don: Because it’s my car.

Male: Including the car thieves. The whole community has one understanding of this.

Don: What that really does indicate, though, is that whether you’re in Estonia, Poland, or anywhere else, we all have a job to do in terms of explaining sin as, first and foremost, offense before God, or else you can’t make sense of the atonement and you can’t make sense of the gospel. That’s the point.

Let’s turn now to the use of the Old Testament in the New. I did give you a small outline of the principal topics we’ll talk about, but I left myself enough slippery room here so I can go and explore a wee bit. I have to tell you that this is a subject that interests me enormously. I teach two PhD seminars on a cyclical basis on this subject constantly and gradually over the years assign more and more of these texts to my doctoral students, so I have an achieved bibliography in this area that is frightening.

Moreover, there’s been a lot of work in this area in the last 30 or 40 years as well. As I’ve begun to dig back in history, I’ve discovered buried volumes that are often extraordinarily insightful that have gotten lost. There’s one by Taylor, published in 1840, a two-volume work. An astonishingly profound and insightful (obviously it’s not dealing with all the contemporary issues) work that just isn’t cited anywhere anymore. I stumbled across it in a secondhand book shop.

Sometimes these things get explored in another generation and then get lost and have to be re-found again. We think we’re doing really wonderful, clever things. We’re actually rediscovering what another generation of Christians knew jolly well, thank you very much, and that we’ve all nicely forgotten.

This is clearly a topic that Christians have had to wrestle with from the beginning, since after all, the Bible for the first Christians was what we call the Old Testament, give or take. Therefore, they had to come to an understanding of what they understood Christ to be and what the gospel was in the context of what we call the Old Testament (Tanakh). In the first instance, that was the frame of reference in which they thought and moved.

A fair bit of the New Testament documents, in fact, can be understood as an attempt to unpack who Jesus is and what the gospel is in the light of the antecedent revelation. So this sort of study may be a technical one, in certain respects, but on the other hand, properly done, it’s also one of the approaches that help you read the Bible holistically. It’s one of the approaches that help you read the whole storyline.

Let me begin in terms of my own interests so that I explain where I’m coming from. About 20 years ago, Hugh Williamson at Oxford and I edited a book called It is Written: Scripture Citing Scripture published by Cambridge University Press. It was a Festschrift for Barnabas Lindars, who was my Doktorvater. Now another chap and I are editing a book, Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, where we’re looking at all Old Testament in the New quotations and allusions. We’re not commenting on the whole New Testament, just on those.

In fact, one section of it is being written by Peter Balla in Budapest. So it’s an international effort again, to try to deal with these things. There is a great deal of work that’s being done in these lines by all kinds of people around the world. I have to confess that because it’s an interest, I am in perpetual danger of trying to say too much or to get too many things across. I have to pick and choose here as to what might be most helpful in the four and a half hours or so that we have left.

Let me begin simply by listing some of the relevant subtopics under this topic. We’re not going to explore them all; I just want to draw some of them to your attention.

1. Transparently, there is a vast array of text-critical issues.

Since after all, when the New Testament quotes the Old, the New Testament is being written in Greek. Initially, Tanakh, of course, was Hebrew and Aramaic. Inevitably, it’s not just the particular text that is being used, but in some cases, the particular version that is being used and what text is behind that version. As you know, there are vast issues of complexity in this regard.

There was a useful essay written about 20 years ago by Moises Silva in a volume John Woodbridge and I edited called Scripture and Truth. If you want to take a look at his essay, it is still worth reading to this day. All he does is look at the text-critical issues and start thinking some of them through. I’m going to spend almost no time on them now. This isn’t the time or place for it, and it would presuppose a confidence in Greek and Hebrew that may not be shared by everyone in the room. So, I’ll drop that one.

2. Transparently, this issue is also related to some other hot topics.

It’s related in particular, for example, to the use of the Law that has both historical-theological dimensions and contemporary debate issues. For example, the understanding of how the law (that is, the Mosaic law) functions in the New Testament is a little different with Calvin than it is with Luther. And it’s different again with the Anabaptists. All of those traditions have come down to shape us in various ways.

Probably the dominant Protestant understanding of these matters was actually shaped by Aquinas who developed his theory of the tripartite division of the law: moral, civil, ceremonial law. You find those categories in the Patristics. But nowhere in the Patristics, as far as I have been able to discover, is there an instance of an analysis of the tripartite breakdown of the law that becomes the controlling criterion for establishing what continues and what does not.

That’s Thomistic. In other words, that one comes from Aquinas. Calvin got it from Thomas. Under this vison, you see, the law is broken down into moral, civil, ceremonial law. The civil law disappears from the Old Testament because it had to do with Israel qua nation, and the locus of the people of God is no longer nation. It’s international. The ceremonial law disappears because it was bound up with the sacrificial system which has now been displaced by Christ and his sacrifice. What remains is the moral law.

I will argue, somewhere along the line (I am going to get into that one a little bit more) that although there is an element of truth to it at a certain pragmatic level.… I would argue very strongly that you cannot find any place in the New Testament where the New Testament writers themselves are establishing patterns of continuity and discontinuity with the Old on the basis of an a priori definition of what constitutes moral law. I think that’s terribly anachronistic. It’s reading Thomas and Calvin back into Paul and Matthew.

On the other hand, Thomas and Calvin do have some insight into this area at a certain heuristic level, but I’ll come to that in due course. Clearly there are huge historical debates on this front. The church has been wrestling with this sort of thing for a long, long time. We’re not the first generation to think about these questions, and it’s important to keep that in mind as we approach them.