The Flow of Revelation 1

It is on my bucket list to write a book on biblical theology, starting with the notes from when I taught it as a graduate class. However, the church could probably use a popular version of my notes. I've thought about writing on it on Fridays. Here's a possible start.

_______________________________

Introduction
It is natural for Christians to read the Bible as a single book from God to them. It is the word of God. It is good news for everyone in the world. The Holy Spirit speaks daily to believers as they read these words.

In the pages that follow I want to take you on a journey in your reading of the Bible. The goal is not to interfere with those direct words from God to you every day as you read the word. I call it God "zapping" us. I am reading the biblical text and, bam, God makes some passage come alive. In older language, he "quickens" it. 

Keep chewing on the text daily. If you know what lectio divina is, keep doing it -- reading small portions of text over and over again asking God to speak to you. Keep hearing that overarching story of salvation from creation to fall to redeption to final consummation in the text.

Yet, I want to sharpen your hearing of another story in the Bible. This is the story of God walking with humanity toward a more and more precise understanding of him. The pages of Scripture give witness to this journey. The New Testament has a fuller understanding of God than the Old Testament because of the fuller understanding of Christ, who is the key to unlock everything. Yes, we and the New Testament authors see Jesus in the Old Testament, but it is the Spirit and the New Testament that has opened our eyes. 

You don't have to take my word for it. We are about to see this developing understanding, this "flow of revelation," in the pages of the Bible itself. We will look at passages you may not have noticed. We will learn how to read the books of the Bible in context -- how those who first received it might have understood it. The goal is not to take away your direct zappings but to add what the biblical texts might have meant when God first revealed them.

The result will be a transformation of your reading of the Bible from a flat, two-dimensional story to a deep, three-dimensional chorus. We hope to hear how God spoke to a host of different individuals on different occasions in different times and places. I welcome you to treat me as a hostile witness if you want. Feel free to suspend your judgment on what is being said until you are fully convinced. If I am wrong, I don't want you to believe me.

I expect to learn on this journey as well. Who knows, maybe the text will talk me out of what I think this book is going to say. But it is the biblical text itself I want us to listen to. Some say that, but I wonder if they truly mean it. In practice, is it more the case that they listen to the Bible until it hits an electric fence their tradition has put up? In other words, I wonder if they listen to the text as long as it doesn't break their "rules."

We'll see what you think. We're going to start with what the Bible has to say about God. Then we'll follow a fairly conventional path. What does the Bible say about creation? About a Fall? What is the arc of Israel in the biblical texts? What about Christ and salvation? What about ethics? What about the return of Christ?

What I think you will find is that the earliest texts of the Old Testament have a very broad understanding of these things. I think you will find that the flow of revelation gets more and more precise as we go along. The details get filled in. The earlier revelation is more anthropomorphic in relation to God (portraying God using human illustrations we can relate to), the later texts more theologically detailed.

We will argue that Jesus is the "final Word" of Scripture. I want to be careful not to put a rule on the Bible that it doesn't want -- after all, that is what I am saying others do. But our working hypothesis will be that the flow of revelation after Christ is an unpacking of Christ's significance rather than "extra" revelation. One rule we will try to maintain is that the New Testament is the definitive unpacking of Christ's significance.

Yet, if we are honest, the unpacking of Christ did not end there. I write this introduction during the months of the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea in AD325. The Nicene Creed that would eventually develop out of that meeting is a much more precise presentation of the Trinity than anything found in the Bible. Indeed, the contours of the Bible itself -- called the "canon" or measuring rod -- are not found in the Bible. The Bible never says, "Here are the books of the Bible." That was a decision that bubbled up hundreds of years later in the church.

So, Jesus was the "last Word" and the New Testament is the authoritative presentation of God's Word. But the unpacking of that revelation continued in fundamental ways for several hundred years. And there are issues like predestination that we continue to wrestle with today. 

We want things to be crystal clear, and Christians often act as if the Bible serves that purpose. Yet, over 20,000 Protestant church groups later, it is simply not the case that the Bible has removed all ambiguity on questions of theology. It is quite curious to make such a claim in the light of history. Words by their very nature can typically be read in multiple ways. For good or ill, the community of faith almost always ends up playing a role in our understanding of Scripture. [1]

You can decide for yourself. Let's set sail on the river of revelation in Scripture. Orthodoxy will be our guiding star on the voyage -- the commonly held beliefs of Christians over the centuries. Yet we will also keep in mind that it is a "rule." Hopefully, the rivers of Scripture lead us there, but we also want to be honest if at some point we have to get out of the river of Scripture and finish the journey by land.

We'll see. Let's get in the boat and start sailing in Genesis. 

Key Concepts

lectio divina -- "divine reading." It's a practice of reading Scripture is small bites. Mulling it over. Meditating on it. Praying over it. Chewing on it.

anthropomorphism -- portraying something that isn't human in human terms

canon -- the collection of authoritative books found in the Bible, the "measuring rod" for our belief and practice

orthodoxy -- "right belief"

hermeneutics -- the study of how we interpret things, especially the Bible

[1] Several years ago, I tried to set out a "hermeneutic" -- an approach to reading the Bible -- that takes all these factors into account. The ebook of Who Decides What the Bible Means? is here, and the paperback on Amazon.

11.1-3 Theology of Revelation 1

11.1 Rule of Faith

• God has revealed himself through nature and reason (natural revelation). The human mind can apprehend some truth, although it is almost always partial and skewed. Our language about such things is more expression than explanation.
• The Holy Spirit has revealed and reveals truth (special revelation).
• The Spirit has revealed and reveals himself through Scripture, the Church, and spiritual experiences. 
• Wesley's quadrilateral aptly captures these sources of truth--Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, although I refer to spiritual experience here.
• Prevenient grace is God's grace that reaches out to us and empowers us to move toward him, including our knowledge of him.
• Scripture was inspired, is infallible, and authoritative.

11.2 Natural Revelation

• Psalm 19 - "The heavens declare the glory of God."
• Romans 1:20 - "The invisible things of God are clearly seen by that which is made, even his eternal power and divinity."
• Acts 17:26
• Debates between Barth and Brunner, Cornelius van Til and the Calvinist presuppositionalists
• Critical Realism and postmodernism

11.3 Christ, the Word

• John 1:1 - "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
• John 14:6 - "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."
• All we need to know about God is revealed in Christ. 
• The Old Testament anticipates Christ. The New Testament witnesses to Christ. 
• The Holy Spirit has continued to unfold the significance of Christ in the Church.

Previous "chapters"
Chapter 1: What is Biblical Theology?
Chapter 2: Theology of God
Chapter 3: Creation and Consummation
Chapter 4: Sin and Atonement
Interlude: A Theology of Israel
Chapter 5: Jesus the Christ
Chapter 6: Salvation
Chapter 7: The Holy Spirit
Chapter 8: The Church
Chapter 9: Eschatology
Chapter 10: Christian Ethics

2.2 The Progress of the Biblical Understanding of God

Thus far in a future book.

Chapter 1: What is Biblical Theology?
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Basic Approaches
1.3 History of Biblical Theology
1.4 This Book's Approach

Chapter 2: Theology of God
2.1a The Rule of Faith of God, part 1
2.1b The Rule of Faith of God, part 2

2.2 Progress of the Biblical Understanding of God
1. Many sciences make a distinction between precision and accuracy. If something is inaccurate, it is wrong, but a measurement can be more or less precise. If I am trying to hit the side of a barn with a B-B gun, I probably have a fairly large target in mind.

But say that I have painted a series of concentric circles on the side of the barn, down to a bull's eye that is not very big at all. Precision is a matter of how close I get to the bull's eye. If I hit the outermost circle, I have still hit the target, but my aim is not very precise. My shot is accurate, but it is not precise.

In the same way, let me suggest that Abraham's understanding of God was accurate but not nearly as precise as Moses' understanding of God. Let me further suggest that Isaiah's understanding of God was more precise than Moses'. Then Paul's understanding of God was arguably more precise than Isaiah's. And if you would, the understanding of God in the Nicene Creed is more precise perhaps than even Paul's was.

On one level, these understandings do not contradict each other, but they become more and more precise as God clarified and refined the understanding. Joshua 24:2 tells us that Abraham's father and ancestors were polytheists--they worshiped many gods. Genesis and Exodus suggest that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob worshiped the true God, but they did not yet know him as Yahweh. They knew him as El Shaddai or "God Almighty" (cf. Exod. 6:3).

When Abram met Melchizedek in Genesis 14:17, Melchizedek is said to be the priest of El Elyon (14:19), the priest of "God Most High." Although we immediately and rightly assume that this God is in fact Yahweh, the one true God, it is significant to recognize that El Elyon was the king of the gods in the Canaanite pantheon. That is to say, certainly the Canaanites understood this God to be one among many gods.

The point is that while we have more precise understandings because we stand at the end of the canon and the unfolding of revelation, these understandings were not exactly the same for the biblical authors or the individuals mentioned in the Bible. [1] When we hear about "God Most High," we know this is the only God, Yahweh, the one true God. For Abraham, he was the most appropriate object of worship. For Isaiah, he would have been the only appropriate object of worship. For Paul, he is the only God that truly exists, and other so-called gods are demons (cf. 1 Cor. 10:20).

2. Another possibility to consider is the very real possibility that our understanding of the universe has become greater over time. The natural implication is that our sense of the greatness of God has expanded as well. So Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Paul, Athanasius (church father at the Council of Nicaea in AD325) and us today--we all believe that God is the greatest Being that exists. But is it not the case that our sense of what the "greatest" might be has increased exponentially since Abraham?

So the "greatest" God for Abraham would surely have been the most powerful, but what would the most powerful Being have been for him? Isaiah 45 may understand the greatness of God on a level that was beyond anything that Abraham might have imagined. Isaiah 55:9 suggests that God is beyond the capacity of human understanding.

Then the New Testament and the early centuries of Christianity wrestled with the Trinity, which was surely beyond anything the Old Testament authors imagined. Similarly, when the doctrine of creation out of nothing crystallized in the late 100s AD, the understanding of God becomes even greater than is clear in Scripture. Now we understand more precisely God as the creator of all matter and not just the one who shaped the chaos that had always been.

I would personally argue that developments in physics in the last century have suggested a universe that is greater than anything a biblical author or an Aquinas or a Luther could have dreamed. Now space--emptiness itself--is something that God must have created. The scope of the universe, the theory of relativity, the strangeness of the quantum world--our conception of greatness has vastly increased. Accordingly, surely our sense of the greatness of the God who made it all out of nothing has become immensely greater.

3. The rest of this chapter aims to follow the progress of biblical understanding about God as it developed within the canon. We do not engage in this investigation as mere analysts of history. We have a theological presupposition. Our theological presupposition is that these developments were moving toward a goal, namely, the rule of faith about God that we set out at the beginning of this chapter. We thus have a theological end point in mind as we process the history of the biblical texts and the more and less precise theological perspectives along the way.

[1] Various scholars debate whether all the people mentioned in the Bible actually existed in history. Such debates are ultimately irrelevant for our point here. We are asserting by faith that God has been walking with humanity since our beginning and that God has been steadily revealing God-self to us over time. What the precise names and dates were of those with whom he walked are irrelevant to this general sense of this unfolding of revelation.

Ehrman Chapter 8: Post-NT (2nd and 3rd Centuries)

Now chapter 8 of Bart Ehrman's, How Jesus Became God. So far:

Introduction
1. Divine Humans in Ancient Greece and Rome
2. Divine Humans in Ancient Judaism
3. Did Jesus Think He Was God?
4. The Resurrection of Jesus: What We Cannot Know
5. The Resurrection - What We Can Know
6. The Beginning of Christology
7. Jesus as God on Earth: Early Incarnation Christologies

In this chapter, Ehrman examines those views that did not end up prevailing in Christian history, the views that were eventually declared heresies (288). The basic claim of this chapter is that, as time went by, thinking about Christ continued to develop in the early church. "Views that were originally considered 'right' eventually came to be thought of as 'wrong'; that is, views originally deemed orthodox came to be declared heretical" (289). At the same time, "heresy hunters" then rewrote history as if their (new) views were the ones the apostles had originally held and that the old majorities had been deviations.

There are two basic questions in the evaluation of this chapter. First, how accurate are the descriptions of the various Christologies? Second, how accurate is his overall thesis in this chapter?

1. Ehrman's Descriptions 
I am not an expert either on the early church fathers or the various groups he discusses, so it is quite possible that I have read right past slightly incorrect descriptions. In general, his descriptions of the various groups seemed on target to me. For a more expert response, see Charles Hill's evaluation of this chapter in chapter 8 of the response book.

Let me quickly summarize the groups mentioned in this chapter:

Groups That Denied Jesus' Divinity
a. Ebionites - In Ehrman's descriptions, the Ebionites saw Jesus as a man just like everyone else. Ehrman argues that they were Jewish Christians with views just like the earliest disciples. A problem Hill points out is that Ehrman has already claimed that the earliest Christians worshiped Jesus as divine, so there seems to be some disconnect here in his own thesis.

b. Theodotians - These were adoptionists, a group that believed Jesus had become Son of God either at his baptism or resurrection. Again, Ehrman connects their view to a view in the earliest church.

Groups That Denied Jesus' Humanity
a. Docetists - This is the group with which John had to contend at Ephesus, a group that believed Jesus had only seemed to have flesh. By the way, the author of 1 John seems to claim to have "touched" Jesus (1:1), something with which any reconstruction of earliest Christianity has to deal with, IMO.

b. Marcionites - Marcion (ca. 150) believed that the creator god of the OT was not the same God as the Father of Jesus. The material realm is evil, so Jesus descended in the appearance of a full-grown adult.

Groups That Split Jesus into Parts
Gnostics - In a more technical definition, the Gnostics saw Jesus as two beings, a spirit being and a human one. The spirit Christ came on Jesus at his baptism and left him before his crucifixion.

Hetero-Orthodoxies
It is interesting that Ehrman distinguishes between the groups above and the groups below. The groups that follow: 1) saw Jesus as both human and God yet 2) saw him as one person. This is thus the thread that would lead to what would become the standard view of Christ in the 300s. Ehrman's thesis, again, is that "views that at one time were the majority opinion, or at least that were widely seen as completely acceptable, eventually came to be left behind; and as theology moved forward to become increasingly nuanced and sophisticated, these earlier majority opinions came to be condemned as heresies" (308).

a. Modalism - Modalism is where God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are seen as one person who is changing roles. God the Father comes down to earth as Jesus the Son, then returns as God the Holy Spirit. Groups today like oneness Pentecostals would still fall into this category.

One claim that Hill disputes about Ehrman's description of the 200s modalists is the claim that this was the majority position at Rome. Hill calls this a "generous intepretation of a slim amount of evidence" (164). Nevertheless, in looking at the quote Hill gives of Tertullian, it does look like Tertullian is saying that modalism was the most popular belief going around at the time (Against Praxeis 3). That of course doesn't mean that most church leaders held that position. Hippolytus mentions two bishops at Rome who were modalists.

b. Subordinationism - Ehrman wants to portray the views of Tertullian and Hippolytus as substandard over and against what would become the consensus a couple centuries later. In particular, Tertullian uses language that portrays the Father as greater than the Son, a view that would later be rejected (Against Praxeis 9).

Hill rejects this interpretation of Tertullian, and quotes Athanasius (the architect of the Trinity as we now know it) in relation to the language of John 14:28. I do not know enough at this point to decide between Ehrman and Hill here. I would not be surprised if Ehrman is correct.

c. Origen - I like to joke about Origen (ca. 200) being forced to pack his bags and leave heaven when he was excommunicated several hundred years after his death. Ehrman is quite correct that Origen went from being one of the greatest scholars of the early church to being a heretic in the eyes of the later church.

If Ehrman has described Origen's views correctly (and some of his description was new to me), Origen saw Jesus as the incarnation of the purest soul, which had so associated with God's Wisdom and Logos that, like a poker in a fire, had taken on all the characteristic "heat" of the fire.

2. Ehrman's Interpretation Overall
a. I do not think that Ehrman's individual interpretations of various groups are too far off the mark. I've noted some of Hill's critique and perhaps some of my patristic friends will weigh in. What is more significant as it relates to faith is Ehrman's overall argument.

Here, let me first say that some of the shock of a chapter like this one has to do with a certain Protestant assumption that we can jump straight from Revelation to Martin Luther. This is the "sola scriptura" hang-over. One of the reasons why there has been such a "Canterbury Trail" in recent decades--Protestants who are attracted to the Anglican, Catholic, or Orthodox churches--is the realization that the Bible alone does not as confidently yield orthodox faith as the pre-modern assumes it does.

The most sophisticated evangelical perspective I have heard on this subject is the idea that orthodoxy was there in nuce, in a nutshell, in the New Testament writings, but that it took several hundred years to unpack it. One way I have put it is that orthodoxy was in a zipped file on the cross, but it took several hundred years to unzip the file.

But what I want to say to my target audience, the person who is reading Ehrman with an open mind, is that orthodox Christian faith does not stand or fall on whether or not the New Testament church had it all figured out. There is a catholic version of faith that sees God slowly but surely, in his own "day is like a 1000 years" time, unfolding what would become the consensus opinion by around the year 400.

Protestants tend to have trouble with this approach. Our impulse is to "get back," as if the earliest is always the better and more accurate. This is an unexamined assumption. Luther and Wycliffe used the "back to the Bible" approach to try to peal back 1000 years of church history. But it is no surprise that they soon found Socinians around in the Reformation who did not believe in the Trinity. And it is no surprise that Zwingli soon found himself fighting individuals who questioned infant baptism.

Indeed, liberal Protestantism, in my opinion, is one direct consequence of this impulse, as scholars peeled back and peeled back until all they were left with was the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Ehrman himself is a shadow of his former fundamentalist self. Indeed, this chapter reflects his shadow Protestantism, where development of doctrine is implicitly seen as an argument against the orthodox result.

b. I suppose the crucial question, however, is the extent to which the groups to which Ehrman points were mainstream and to what extent they were deviations. That is to say, is later orthodoxy in continuity with the apostles or discontinuity? He portrays orthodoxy as being in discontinuity.

It has been the standard view since Walter Bauer's, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity that it is anachronistic to speak of orthodoxy or heresy in the 100s. There was no church structure to make such a judgment. There were no popes yet. There were only individuals with authority and influence.

So there were bishops and there were writers. We know what Ignatius or Justin Martyr or Irenaeus wrote, but we should not consider them to be the position of Christianity at the time. They are just the ones whose writings reflect the historical "winners." It is a matter of faith to say that God played a role in who the winners were.

This position of faith is central to orthodox Christianity. For orthodox faith, it is not that orthodoxy "established itself" or "declared it was right" (288). It is that God was working behind the scenes, slowly but surely, to make sure that the "winner" would eventually be the right view.

I might add that Bauer's position is a little different from the feel of Ehrman. Bauer's contention was that there simply wasn't such a thing as orthodoxy in the 100s. It didn't exist yet. The impression Ehrman gives is that orthodoxy was constantly changing. This is a significant distinction, it seems to me.

And here let me reiterate again my not so latent Pietism. God is not nearly so concerned, in my opinion, with what is going on in our heads as what is going on in our hearts. It is the person who thinks beliefs are the first order of business who will be most troubled by these sorts of things. I fully believe that Origen and Athanasius had an ambrosia and a laugh together in heaven after he was declared a heretic.

I think we can quickly establish that Docetism, Gnosticism, modalism, and Origen were deviations. The earliest Christians did not question that Jesus was a real human who stood in front of them or that he was a distinct person from God the Father. The Ebionites are sometimes compared to one thread within Jerusalem Christianity, but those who do so usually consider even Paul's theology to have differed significantly from theirs.

In the end, I believe, it comes down to faith. Was God behind the scenes directing the path that Christian belief would take or was it just a mindless conflict with the final answer being a matter of chance and the winners? The same data can probably fit into either interpretation.

God's Speakings 3: The New Testament Church

Now to continue my Sunday work on Biblical Theology.

Chapter 1
Introduction to Biblical Theology

Chapter 2: Revelation
2a From Text to Scripture
2b NT Understanding of Scripture
2c God's Speakings before Scripture
2d God's Speakings in the Old Testament
____________
... Christians believe that God's definitive speaking in all of human history was and is in Jesus Christ.  More than in any writing of any kind, more than any individual oracle, the Revelation of God par excellence was in a person. God's Word for the creation became flesh in Jesus Christ (John 1:14), the consummate Word.

While Jesus was on earth, he revealed what humanity can be.  He demonstrated a life fully pleasing to God and confirmed that love is the whole of God's expectation of humanity. In his death God revealed his identification with human suffering and the healing of a broken universe.  In his resurrection God revealed the ultimate hope for humanity's eternity.

The New Testament and the common Christianity that followed are the unpacking of the central Revelation of Jesus Christ.  This unpacking not only looked to the unfolding of the significance of Jesus Christ but it involved a renewed look at the Scriptures of Israel to see their fulfilled sense.  For example, the Gospel of Matthew shows us how Jesus fulfills the Law, filtering its instructions through the love command.

The books of Paul recognize that Jesus is not just for Israel but for the whole world. Those parts of the Law that were specific to ethnic Israel--circumcision, food laws, sabbath--are not required of these new believers. Hebrews, perhaps in the wake of the temple's destruction, recognizes that Christ's death is the only true sacrifice of history, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. These realizations did not come the day after Jesus' death and resurrection.  It took decades for these revelations, which are central to Christianity, to become obvious.

Some of the most central beliefs of historic Christianity took even longer. The worship of someone who had only recently been alive was unprecedented in Judaism. But from our comfortable vantage point two thousand years later, we are prone to think that they understood what they were doing exactly as we do. A brief look at church history reveals that it took several centuries for the early Christians to unpack our current understanding of the Trinity.

Christians believe that Christ was not merely the firstborn of the creation, but in fact "eternally begotten of the Father."  To say that Jesus was fully divine and fully human took some processing. We see this truth so easily now when we read the New Testament, but it took centuries for this precise understanding to unfold. It is no coincidence that it is about the same time that these insights were finalized that the New Testament canon was finally solidified.

Christianity as it exists today finds its common ground in the understanding of the New Testament Scriptures at this point when the unpacking of Christ reached its mature form in the 400s. When the Protestant Reformation would peel back the further developments of the Roman Catholic Church, it would reset the church to this point. It represents common Christianity. It also reminds us that, for our method to be coherent, we must always be open to reformation of earlier understanding.

Christian Scripture, the Bible read from this mature understanding, is thus the primary witness to the significance of Christ.  To be sure, these moments in God's walk with humanity were moments in history, points in time when God met specific people at specific places through specific prophets. There is thus a tension between the "timeless" reading of these texts and their original particularity.  Discerning the parts where God was meeting and audience in its particularity and those that transcend a moment in time is a difficult and corporate task.  We work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

The ultimate interpreter of Christ is the Spirit. It was the Spirit that unpacked Christ in the writings of the New Testament. It was the Spirit who unpacked the core significance of Scripture in the early centuries of the church. And it is the Spirit that unfolds any truth we might know today.

Any word from the Spirit is as true and authoritative as any other word, including Scripture.  How could it not be so?  The problem is not with the Spirit's authority but the fact that we cannot trust ourselves to know for certain when we are truly hearing the Spirit. No degree of individual certainty, even corporate human certainty, can be trusted absolutely.

But God can and does speak today through reason and experience, as he has in the past. And surely God has spoken in Christian history.  Scripture is our starting point for hearing his words, but Christian tradition, experience and reason are also ways God has spoken and continues to speak. All of them, when we truly hear God in them, are a witness to Christ.

God is thus a God who speaks.  He can speak through our experiences, especially our experiences of the Spirit. He can speak through reason and science.  Scripture is the best starting point to hear his voice, and we join the Christians of the ages in listening to God's voice in them. But the consummate Revelation of God, the image of his substance, is the Son, the person, Jesus Christ.

God's Speakings 2: the Old Testament

On Saturdays I've been critiquing Grudem's Systematic Theology.  On Sundays I've been giving my own biblical theology.  So far I've blogged:

Chapter 1
Introduction to Biblical Theology

Chapter 2: Revelation

2a From Text to Scripture
2b NT Understanding of Scripture
2c God's Speakings before Scripture

Now this post: God's Speakings in the Old Testament
________________
... At each point, God seems to refine the understanding. God reveals himself as YHWH, as the "I AM," at the burning bush to Moses.  God gave the Law to Israel with Moses.  How extensive that Law was in relation to the current contents of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, is debated. Certainly the Historical Books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings do not indicate that much of the Pentateuch was followed (or mentioned) until almost the end of the monarchy under Josiah--some seven hundred years after Moses. Most think that the Book of the Law discovered in the temple at that time was some form of Deuteronomy.

Until the time of Josiah, YHWH seemed to be worshiped everywhere.  Gideon, Samuel, Elijah, Elisha--they all make altars to YHWH all over Israel.  Not until the time of Hezekiah and Josiah is there a real concerted effort to make sure that sacrifices are only offered to YHWH in the temple, as Deuteronomy implies. Elijah's zeal was that Israel not worship the other gods, but we have no record of him ever visiting Jerusalem. That emphasis came with Hezekiah and Josiah.

What was God's speaking in the Law?  Yes, it codified certain basic moral expectations such as not murdering or stealing.  The most important was to love YHWH and not other gods, as well as to love our neighbors.  All the ethical rules of the Law boil down to these two, according to Jesus.

Of course there were many laws that had to do with God's unique relationship with Israel. As Christians, we believe that God did a special "case study" with Israel, that he piloted a relationship with it that embodied on a racial scale his desire to have a universal and individual relationship with humanity in general.  Much of the Law was thus God meeting this particular people where they were at. Circumcision, a practice Israel did not invent, became symbolic of participation in the special relationship.

In those days everyone offered sacrifices. Perhaps there was some universal trace in that practice of humanity's sense of needing to address the disorder of the world and humanity's frequent "sinfulness" in before God, its tendency to do things that it knows aren't right. But perhaps laws such as those in Leviticus are even more so God meeting Israel where it was at.  Hebrews in the New Testament will see all the sacrifices of the Old Testament as symbolic pointers toward the ultimate reordering of the universe in Christ.

Some of the laws--particularly the food laws--were reflections of Israel's sense of the order God had placed in the world.  There were certain types of things in the sea and the air that reflected that order and were "clean."  Others didn't fit the categories and were unclean. The prohibition not to eat pork probably, like circumcision, set Israel apart from the surrounding peoples who herded pigs. In the New Testament, when God was now more explicitly seeking a relationship with the whole world, these "works of Law" became obsolete, never having been able to make an Israelite truly right with God in the first place.

The evidence of the Historical Books leads us to believe that the Law as we know it was not fully known or much used until the time of Ezra in the 400s after the exile. At that point, what may have largely been oral tradition among the people and only known in some written form to certain elite becomes a real standard for the Jews of the south. Even then, perhaps it would not be until the rise of the synagogue and the democratization of Judaism in the Greek period that the Law would really trickle down to the people.

However, in the time of the kings God raised up the prophets of the Old Testament to make it clear to Israel what it meant to love YHWH and love one's neighbor.  God's favor on the disempowered, the poor, widows, orphans--social justice--is a consistent theme.  The tendency to think that sacrifices in themselves take care of things--with no necessary change of heart--is also indicted.

These "oracles" were delivered orally, but perhaps also written down (Isaiah 8:1, 16).  At some point, perhaps even after the prophet was gone, they were collected and arranged.  Many think that those who preserved these prophecies sometimes also continued the legacies of a prophet by extending his message to situations during and after the exile.  It is often suggested that Isaiah 40-66, which never mention Isaiah or say he is their author, are an extension of Isaiah's legacy to the time just before and after the end of the exile.

By the time of Christ, the "Law and the Prophets" could be mentioned as a shorthand for what we think of as the Old Testament Scriptures.  The precise content of the "Writings," the third section of the Jewish Bible, was not fixed at the time.  The Writings begin with the Psalms (cf. Luke 24:44), which probably reached something like its current form in the worship of the second temple after the exile.  Chronicles repeats much of the ground of Samuel and Kings but now from the perspective of a time well into the post-exilic period when the temple is the center of power and people.

We see certain developments in Israel's understanding of God in this phase of Israel's history. One of the most noticeable is a sense of "the Satan," one of the servants of God whose job is to test the loyalty of the earth. We see him behind the scenes in Job, given permission to test Job by bringing trials. If you compare 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1 you'll see that the second attributes the temptation of David to Satan, while the first attributes the temptation to God.

Even more significant is the rise of resurrection understanding in Daniel 12:2-3, the only undisputed reference to a meaningful afterlife in the Old Testament.  While the dating of Daniel's prophecy is debated, the predicted context of Daniel 11 is the Maccabean crisis of 167-64BC.  It was this crisis and the things that ensued in Israel that created the New Testament context of Jesus perhaps even more than the Old Testament books themselves.

So we see in the pages of the Old Testament a piloted relationship of God with a whole people that took many, many centuries.  Although we now have the witness to that relationship at our fingertips in the books of the Old Testament, the relationship was experienced as much more slow moving and oral in nature. Much of the Old Testament reflects God meeting Israel where it was at.  Some of it reflects Israel relating back to God in song and poetry. Meanwhile the prophets more than anyone served as reminders of God's core values, getting us ready for Christ...

Does God directly cause suffering...

I've noticed that some bloggers, like some preachers, have a tendency to "preach from the same passage" over and over.  I know I have.  There are some topics I'm tired of because I've mentioned them over and over--and I'm sure you are even moreso. I have had a couple of instances these last few weeks, however, that give examples of old topics, namely, that the OT read in context is not yet Christian.

One such occasion had to do with the possibility that a certain external person at some point might teach a course in a non-religion context at IWU on suffering and disability. This person uses a book by John Piper for her theology piece: Suffering and the Sovereignty of God.  I have advocated for the Arminian position also being represented if the course ever materializes.

Our position is that God may sometimes cause suffering directly, but that God's normal mode of operation is to allow humans to act freely and, I would say, to allow the creation to follow through its normal course of cause and effect.  As humans act freely and as the creation plays out cause and effect, suffering happens.  God allows it, signs off on it.  Yes, he's sovereign.

But the whole Purpose Driven Life, "what is God trying to tell me by causing me to get a pimple," is narcissistic clap-trap.  Yes, you can probably learn something valuable from breaking your arm, maybe even getting a pimple.  But God doesn't micro-manage his creation.  Grow up, baby head, and take some responsibility for your own actions.

The potential visitor on suffering was quite willing to include the Arminian perspective and apparently already did, but without a real sense of how to justify it.  Three passages were offered with a sense that they were pretty clear to her: Exodus 4:11, Psalm 94:9, and Isaiah 45:7.  Does not God directly decide to make people blind?

My response was that one cannot explain the differences between certain OT passages and other biblical passages unless one supposes a development in understanding on topics like this.  I mentioned James 1:13 which says God does not tempt people, while the OT clearly says that he has led people to evil on various occasions (e.g., 2 Sam. 24:1; 1 Sam. 18:10).  The only way to find unity between these two passages is to conclude that these OT passages do not understand God as fully as the NT does.

My standard example of such development is to compare 2 Sam. 24:1 with 1 Chronicles 21:1.  In the first, God incites David to take a census.  1 Chronicles says it was Satan who incited him.  What we see unfolding in the history of ideas is a distancing of God from the direct causation of evil.  In the NT, we have Satan and demons who, in addition to human flesh and desire, tempt and do evil. In the earlier parts of the OT, God is given credit for the whole sha-bang.

A contextual reading of the OT is thus not yet Christian unless it is read in the light of the NT and a mature Christian understanding as it unfolded in the first few centuries of Christianity.  A Christian reading of the OT will filter its application through the NT and not directly apply it.