Occasionally you catch wind of entire conversations and debates that are pretty foreign to you, just as your debates may be foreign to others. I've been picking up on a big debate between, say, Baptists and the Presbyterian/Reformed, that I wasn't really aware of.
I've noticed from time to time some rather strong statements on the covenant among certain biblical scholars. For example, Grant Osborne's Hermeneutical Spiral makes a pretty big deal of the idea that every bit of the OT still applies--it's just fulfilled through Jesus.
In chapter 7 of Vanhoozer's Is There a Meaning in This Text, he distances himself fairly strongly from fundamentalism. One of his examples is an "insistence that passages about Israel concern the physical nation Israel and never the church" (429). He then mentions the hermeneutics of dispensationalism.
A new book by Todd Magnum, The Dispensational-Covenantal Rift, apparently tells the historical roots of this conflict, going back to a rift between Dallas Theological Seminary and places like Westminster Theological Seminary. I picture the Presbyterians and Reformed looking down their noses at "less sophisticated" Baptists.
Dispensationalism tends to view history as a series of dispensations in which God runs things differently. I remember hearing of seven dispensations as a child--the Pilgrim Holiness side of Wesleyan background was significantly impacted by dispensationalism. I was raised a pre-trib. rapture, premillennial.
Of course I now consider the very idea of a seven year tribulation dubious from a biblical perspective. Paul knows nothing of anything like this. Jesus will return and the judgment will ensue. Revelation is highly symbolic, and we'll know what God was thinking after it happens. In any case, it doesn't have a seven year tribulation, in my opinion. It mentions a "great tribulation," but nowhere connects it to a number of years.
All that's really a tangent. I wonder if some of the negative response to my hermeneutic is because it sounded a tinge dispensational to some of the publishers who looked at it. Of course I didn't come up with this hermeneutic because I started with a particular theological vantage point like dispensationalism. It is my attempt to let the Bible say what it says while coming out with orthodox Christian belief on the other side.
When it comes to the relationship between the OT and the NT, I end up with a couple conclusions that rub the current evangelical consensus the wrong way:
1. The NT surprisingly disregards a number of OT ethics in a way that is mostly explicable in terms of a) the expansion of the people of God to include the Gentiles and b) injunctions that simply didn't fit the Mediterranean world in the way they fit the ancient near east.
This is not the theologically neat fulfillment of all the OT in the NT that covenantal scholars envisage. Even Jesus' fulfillment of every jot and tittle in Matthew 5 dispenses with parts of the OT, like an "eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." And Jesus' command to love one's enemy stands in serious tension with significant portions of the OT when read in context.
2. The NT doesn't follow Vanhoozer or Osborne's rules for how to read texts in context in its reading of the OT. The whole "the NT reads typologically, not allegorically or with disregard to context" is just plain wrong. The NT doesn't care about this scruple of evangelical scholarship past. This deconstructs Vanhoozer's entire hermeneutical project, by the way.
So the result looks a little like one form of dispensationalism, where God has one set of rules for Israel and then changes the rules in the NT.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Perhaps (?), Jesus was not "fullfilling" (Covenatal) or deconstructing (Dispensational) Israel's "hope" (of a Messiah), but "reconstructing it"....Moral models "go against" the "grain" of religious understandings (and myth) to actualize the "real meaning" of "myth"....a real life in real time with real realities....those are the things that LIFE is made of...not religious jargon, or religious ritual....it is real people with real problems that need real solutions and real help...
So, the Dispensationalists are "correct" in their understanding of the "era of grace"...and the Covenatalists are "correct" in their understanding of "God's graciousness"....because it is ALL about grace as far as I can understand...Life is a gift and its fulfillment is a lived life of gratitude to the Giver of Life.
Ken, haven't you been reading your Scofield Reference Bible? It's all right there, right in the notes.
It's interesting to note that the whole "seven-year" tribulation deal really only comes from one passage--Daniel 9:27, but to get there you have to insert weird dispensational hermeneutics about "God's prophetic time-clock stopping", add a multi-millennial gap between verses 26 and 27 and claim they are talking about vastly different historical events. This is what passes for logic and keen Scriptural teacing in dispensational circles.
And as far as Revelation goes, the only time frame mentioned is 3.5 years. Dispensationalists try to combine two 3.5 year periods to come up with 7 years, but really it's the same period of time referred to multiple times and if you added up all instances of 3.5 in Rev. you'd be left with way more than 7 years. The time frame is most probably symbolic anyway.
Post a Comment