Understanding Scripture in Light of Christ

That's the theme of the most recent issue of Southern Seminary's magazine, The Tie. Articles and authors include:

• Scripture’s story centers on Christ
  Stephen J. Wellum
  

• Old Testament: Christ hidden
  Russell Fuller
  

• New Testament: Christ revealed
  James M. Hamilton Jr.
  

• Biblical counseling: Centering cure on Christ
  David Powlison
  

• Beyond a Veggie Tales gospel: Preaching Christ from every text
  Russell D. Moore
  

• Christ as Warrior-King: Preaching Christ from Judges
  David E. Prince
  

The complete issue is available for free here. (HT: Steve Weaver)

Ten Indispensable Resources for Bible Study

Chad Knudson at The Road to Emmaus has assembled a helpul annotated list.

The Primary Emphasis When Interpreting Biblical Narratives

....biblical narratives are primarily about God and God's redemptive activity among humanity, and their authors' claim to reveal God truthfully. This may seem like a truism, but we often focus our attention on the ethical dimensions of narrative rather than on its theological dimension. In other words, it is too easy to ask the question of narratives, What should I be like? rather than, What is God like? or, What is God doing? The ethical question is not inappropriate. Yet, our primary interpretive emphasis should be theological. Our first question ought to be the "God question." As John Goldingay asserts, "The shaping of character is rarely the direct aim of biblical narrative; we are not told stories about Abraham, Moses, Jesus, or Paul chiefly in order that we might let our characters be shaped by theirs. The primary concern of biblical narrative is to expound the gospel, to talk about God and what God has done, rather than to talk about the human characters who appear in God's story." By centering our attention on the theological question, we will be in a better position to hear well the ethical stance of the text.


Our tendency to derive ethics apart from theology in the narratives of Scripture is nowhere more pervasive than in teaching the Bible to our children. We routinely teach Bible stories to children to make an ethical point: "Be like Samson, Ruth, and David. Be like Joseph and share with others just as he distributed food among the Egyptians." The latter point was expressly made in a curriculum I was to teach to the Sunday school class of my three-year-old daughter. What a marvelous lesson for self-centered three-year-olds: share! the problem, of course, is that Joseph also "shares" food with his long-lost family, while in the process not only hiding his identity from them, but also putting his own silver cup in their food bags, so that he can drag them back to Egypt and deceive them a bit longer (Gen. 44). This is not exactly the kind of sharing we want to inculcate in our children! In contrast, if we make our first question the theological question, not only will we teach that God is good even when human beings fail, but we will also provide the right point of view from which to evaluate the human characters of the Bible's narratives. 

               - Jeannine K. Brown, Scripture as Communication: Introducing Biblical Hermeneutics, pp. 162-163

Larry Crabb on Hermeneutics and Christian Counseling

I've followed with great interest Larry Crabb's movement toward a more intentionally and explicitly theological approach to understanding people and how to help them in distinctively Christian ways. I'm hopeful that he will be influential in provoking more of his professional peers, and the body of Christ at large, to give more serious thought to the conceptual frameworks functionally governing our evaluation of what is wrong with people as well as our efforts to help them change.

The latest issue of Edification, a publication of the Society for Christian Psychology, contains an interview with Crabb in which he offers the following thoughts concerning the role of the Bible in counseling:

...I think my essential contribution to the counseling discussion is in hermeneutics. You can't go to the Bible and find verses about anorexia. As a result, people who want to stay biblical -- and I do -- but who have a limited hermeneutic, become very narrow when they find some application of the Bible to deal with problems that the Bible doesn't seem to directly address. I think that if we have a rich anthropology [doctrine of man], a rich hamartiology [doctrine of sin], a rich pneumatology [doctrine of the Holy Spirit and His work], then we will know how to "hermeneut." We will know how to interpret scriptures so that we discover ways of thinking, and categories for understanding. When I deal with a homosexual, my concern is not only to say homosexuality is sinful, so stop it, and let me hold you accountable until you don't do it anymore. Certainly that must be said. It is a sin, so it shouldn't continue any more than adultery should, or pornography, or any thing else that is obviously sin. But these are not the root sin. So my concern is to say to the homosexual, "What did God have in mind when he created them man and female?" And, "Let's explore the essence of masculinity. Let's find where your terror of not feeling alive as a man has resulted in your clenched-fisted determination to find some kind of satisfaction as a man without taking the risk of manhood, which then makes you vulnerable to homosexuality." Let's explore these deeper issues, which in my mind are not "psychology," but are very biblical, because God made them male and female.


God wants us to unpack and to interpret scripture in a way that does not result in a proof text, and not in a bunch of principle - do this, and don't do that - but in an enriched, deep understanding of what is happening in the human soul that has gone profoundly wrong that leads to all these difficult and sinful problems. You can apply it to homosexuality, eating disorders, panic attacks, whatever else. What is going on in the human soul, and how does the Bible give us categories for understanding this? So I think my major contribution is a hermeneutic that allows me to develop categories for understanding that don't come across as proof-texting or merely exhortational, but as liberating and releasing.

Crabb goes on to describe the idolatry underlying homosexual (and all other sinful) behavior:

It [homosexual behavior] is sinful, but the core sin is turning to God and saying, "You are not the source of joy, you are not the essence of goodness. There's a greater good than you." This is the sin of Adam and Eve, who decided that there was a greater good than God. So we have to get down to the essential sin in dealing with all of these problems, and I think my hermeneutic, which is very nonlinear and categorical, allows for a richer understanding of the human condition. It remains biblical, but in the minds of some looks like it's forgetting the Bible and going towards psychology. But my understanding of homosexuality, of anorexia, or multiple personality, is dependent on biblical categories and not upon psychological research, even though I find secular research to be very analytic and the secular thinkers to be very provocative. They make me think and ask questions that I wouldn't otherwise ask, but never would I regard them as authoritative.

Crabb is right to point out the vital necessity of having our thinking about the nature of human problems and their resolution substantively formed by the doctrines and storyline of Scripture. I find it alarming how frequently the explanations offered by Christians about what motivates people to do what they do sounds virtually identical to secular accounts which have no category for the activity of the heart with reference to God. When pressed, we'll acknowledge in some vague, generic sense that "we're all sinners," so as not to be thought of as unorthodox. But listen carefully to how believers talk among themselves or read some of the bestselling Christian pop psychology (frequently marketed under the heading of "personal development") and you'll find that we don't really expect the Bible's teaching on sin to be of much practical value in helping us get to the meat of the matter of our intra- and interpersonal problems. Consequently, as I've stated before, the person and redemptive work of Jesus Christ is marginalized to that nebulous (not to mention, narrow) region of our lives designated as "spiritual." The gospel becomes icing on the cake of "real life" whose primary ingredients must be acquired at the mental health market.

I'm also glad to see Crabb drawing attention to the fact that how we answer the question "What is the Bible and how does God communicate through it?" has great consequence for the conclusions we draw concerning its relevance and the scope of that relevance for counseling issues. One of the main reasons that assertions about the Bible's sufficiency for understanding and addressing counseling issues is dismissed as being naive and simplistic is that people assume that the Bible is a compilation of atomistic verses (a view revealed by the frequently encountered request, "Show me a verse for....") rather than as a comprehensive lens through which all of life is to be interpreted. Crabb's reflection on this point resembles that of David Powlison who, in the current issue of the Journal of Biblical Counseling notes, "The writers of the Bible intend to provide eyeglasses that enable all seeing, not an encyclopedia that contains all facts."

Given the place of prominence that American evangelicalism has afforded psychologists, perhaps an affirmation of the Bible's sufficiency for counseling matters from someone like Crabb will persuade more believers to take it seriously.

The (Fragmentary) Christian Mind

Mike at Eternal Perspectives commented: "BTW, great quote in your masthead." Since Francis Schaeffer has played such an influential role in my Christian life, I'm particularly appreciative of the quote displayed in the masthead of Mike's blog. It's from Schaeffer's The God Who Is There:

True education means thinking by associating across the various disciplines, and not just being highly qualified in one field, as a technician might be. I suppose no discipline has tended to think more in fragmented fashion than the orthodox or evangelical theology of today.

Schaeffer was concerned that increased specialization tended to emphasize the parts at the expense of the whole. One of the potential dangers of focusing intently in one area of study is that that area's relationship to other subjects can be overlooked if not forgotten. Think of each discipline as one of the over 3 million dots of color in Georges Seurat's familiar painting "A Sunday in the Park on the Island of La Grande Jatte" (above). How foolish (not to mention unsatisfying) would it be for art students to set out to become experts in one point of paint? Standing with their noses pressed against the canvas, scrutinizing their particular dot, they would miss the grandeur and beauty of the entire piece.

The "today" Schaeffer was referring to was almost forty years ago. The information explosion presents even more obstacles to the kind of cross-disciplinary thinking he was advocating. Millard Erickson, in Christian Theology, describes the impact on theological scholarship:

Theology is now being done in a period characterized by, among other things, a "knowledge explosion." The amount of information is growing so rapidly that mastery of a large area of thought is becoming increasingly difficult. While this is especially true in technological areas, biblical and theological knowledge is also much broader than it once was. The result has been a much greater degree of specialization than was previously the case. In biblical studies, for example, New Testament scholars tend to specialize in the Gospels or in the Pauline writings. Church historians tend to specialize in one period, such as the Reformation. Consequently, research and publication are often in narrower areas and in greater depth.

The mass of theological data is too great for any one person or group of persons to master. I'm not so naive as to question that. What I do question is where the integrative task is being done. Where and how does theological Humpty Dumpty get put together again once we've analyzed his yolk, white, and shell? Are our seminaries aiding future pastors to become truly educated as Schaeffer defined true education? Are we training leaders who will be capable of teaching others to make the connection between their respective vocations and biblical faith?
In a previous post I quoted from the preface of Craig Bartholomew's and Michael Goheen's book The Drama of Scripture in which they warn of the consequences of approaching the Bible atomistically. Assuming that there's at least one person who hasn't gone back in this blog's archives, I'll post it again. It's that important:

Many of us have read the Bible as if it were merely a mosaic of little bits - theological bits, moral bits, historical-critical bits, sermon bits, devotional bits. But when we read the Bible in such a fragmented way, we ignore its divine author's intention to shape our lives through its story. All human communities
live out of some story that provides a context for understanding the meaning of history and gives shape and direction to their lives. If we allow the Bible to become fragmented, it is in danger of being absorbed into whatever other story is shaping our culture, and it will thus cease to shape our lives as it should. Idolatry has twisted the dominant cultural story of the secular Western world. If as believers we allow this story (rather than the Bible) to become the foundation of our thought and action, then our lives will manifest not the truths of Scripture, but the lies of an idolatrous culture. Hence, the unity of Scripture is no minor matter; a fragmented Bible may actually produce theologically orthodox, morally upright, warmly pious idol worshippers.

The Whole Story: Biblical Narrative & Counseling

In their book The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story, Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen note the piecemeal fashion in which we're prone to read the Bible along with its detrimental results:

Many of us have read the Bible as if it were merely a mosaic of little bits - theological bits, moral bits, historical-critical bits, sermon bits, devotional bits. But when we read the Bible in such a fragmented way, we ignore its divine author's intention to shape our lives through its story. All human communities live out of some story that provides a context for understanding the meaning of history and gives shape and direction to their lives. If we allow the Bible to become fragmented, it is in danger of being absorbed into whatever other story is shaping our culture, and it will thus cease to shape our lives as it should. Idolatry has twisted the dominant cultural story of the secular Western world. If as believers we allow this story (rather than the Bible) to become the foundation of our thought and action, then our lives will manifest not the truths of Scripture, but the lies of an idolatrous culture. Hence, the unity of Scripture is no minor matter; a fragmented Bible may actually produce theologically orthodox, morally upright, warmly pious idol worshippers.

Among the "stories" that exercise great formative power in our culture are those told by the psychotherapeutic communities. These stories are practically inescapable. We hear them not only in professional counseling offices but on television, the radio and in casual conversations. When we see ourselves as characters in these stories instead of the biblical narrative of creation, corruption, redemption and consummation, phrases like self-esteem, self-love, needs, and codependence ring loudly in our ears, drowning out biblical themes like idolatry, self-denial, faith, and transforming grace. We may not completely abandon the Bible's story but we don't really expect it to speak as meaningfully about our problems as do the therapeutic tales.

In his unfortunately out-of-print book, Taking the Word to Heart: Self & Others in an Age of Therapies, Robert C. Roberts writes: "the kind of persons we become (the kind of character we develop) is a function of how we think about ourselves." This is just another way of making the same point as Bartholomew and Goheen. Whatever story functions authoritatively in our lives will shape us and our interpretation of ourselves. Roberts refers to the various schools of therapy as "alternative spiritualities" and offers the following warning:

The danger is that these psychologies may to one degree or another replace Christianity without most people even noticing that any substitution has taken place. In some instances the influence of the therapies -even from within the church - may be so strong that our character and relationships are no longer Christian but are now Rogerian, or family-systemic, or Jungian, or rational-emotive...In short, under the influence of these psychologies, our souls may turn out Therapeutic rather than Christian.

Too often believers regard the cultivation of the intellectual life as an abstract, impractical pursuit but it need not be. We should seek to think well so we can love (both God and neighbor) well. I'm grateful for the efforts of the Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation towardhelping the church to think well about how each of our stories is a subplot in the grand narrative whose central figure is Jesus Christ. David Powlison is one of those at the forefront of this work. Yesterday, Justin Taylor provided an informative introduction to Powlison along with a bibliography of his writing at Between Two Worlds. That entry prompted this one.