Goldsworthy: Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics

Yesterday got my first Graeme Goldsworthy book in the mail, Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics: Foundations and Principles of Evangelical Biblical Interpretation. I've dipped into various books of his, always finding him helpful, but have yet to plow through a book of his cover to cover. So far I'm finding what I expected: he brings together the gospel, biblical theology, salvation history, unapologetic evangelical confessionalism, and christocentrism in fruitful cross-pollination that is, in a word, exciting, and fills out much of what I've learned from Greg Beale and others the past two years. Miles Van Pelt reviews/summarizes this book at Ref 21 here.

Here's a typically good statement on the hermeneutical priority of the gospel itself.

The Bible makes a very radical idea inescapable: not only is the gospel the interpretative norm for the whole Bible, but there is an important sense in which Jesus Christ is the mediator of the meaning of everything that exists. In other words, the gospel is the hermeneutical norm for the whole of reality. All reality was created by Christ, through Christ and for Christ (Col 1:15-16). God's plan is to sum up all things in Christ (Eph 1:9-10). In him are all the treasures of wisdom and understanding (Col 2:2-3). As a result, the ultimate significance of all non-biblical literature can be summed up in biblical-gospel terms. . . . The atoning work of Christ has redemptive ramifications for the whole universe. . . . [T]he ultimate interpretation of the meaning of everything is found only in Christ. (p. 63; emphasis original).

Leading as God Has Wired Us

Good stuff from Sean Lucas (a fellow INTJ) on a new book outlining how to serve and lead in the church as an introvert.

Edwards: 'All This Vast Inheritance'

Today I reread one of the most powerful statements by one of my dearest friends, Jonathan Edwards (though it's a one-way friendship for now) that I've ever read, first discovered Dec 17, 2004. Have you ever thought of your union with Christ like this?

By virtue of the believer's union with Christ, he doth really possess all things. That we know plainly from Scripture. But it may be asked, how [doth] he possess all things? What is he the better for it? How is a true Christian so much richer than other men?

To answer this, I'll tell you what I mean by "possessing all things." I mean that God three in one, all that he is, and all that he has, and all that he does, all that he has made or done--the whole universe, bodies and spirits, earth and heaven, angels, men and devils, sun, moon and stars, land and sea, fish and fowls, all the silver and gold, kings and potentates as well as mean men--are as much the Christian's as the money in his pocket, the clothes he wears, the house he dwells in, or the victuals he eats; yea more properly his, more advantageously his, than if he could command all those things mentioned to be just in all respects as he pleased at any time, by virtue of the union with Christ; because Christ, who certainly doth thus possess all things, is entirely his: so that he possesses it all, more than a wife the share of the best and dearest husband, more than the hand possesses what the head doth; it is all his. . . .

Every atom in the universe is managed by Christ so as to be most to the advantage of the Christian, every particle of air or every ray of the sun; so that he in the other world, when he comes to see it, shall sit and enjoy all this vast inheritance with surprising, amazing joy.

--Jonathan Edwards, Miscellany ff., in Vol 13 of the Yale edition of JE's Works, p. 183

If you're united to Christ, not only is justification yours; Saturn is yours.

All things are yours. --1 Cor 3:21

Psalm 116

Stacey and I have been reminding each other this weekend of the overwhelming mercies, of all sorts, washing into our lives in recent years, uninvited and undeserved. Too innumerable, and too un-capture-able with words, to speak of here. God is so good. Challenges deeper than what we've yet faced doubtless lie ahead; but even that can only speed us on our way to Christ more deeply. As the three points of a sermon Edwards preached in 1722 when he was 19 put it: in Christ, all your good can never be taken away from you; all your bad can only be turned for good; and the best is yet to come.

Hallelujah; praise the Lord.

Return, O my soul, to your rest; for the LORD has dealt bountifully with you. . . . What shall I render to the LORD for all his benefits to me? --Psalm 116:7, 12

Him We Proclaim

Among other things Dennis Johnson's helpful book with this very title has brought home to me this past year the programmatic nature of these three words in Col 1:28 and the light they shed, along with other texts like Luke 24:25ff., on the way Christ himself illumines the whole Bible.

What was new for me this morning was noticing the organic connection between Christ-proclamation and the rest of the verse--

. . . him we proclaim, instructing all men and teaching all men in all wisdom in order that we might present all men perfect/mature/complete [teleois] in Christ.

Progressive sanctification--bringing other people to spiritual maturity--took place, as Paul understood his ministry, by proclaiming Christ. Not only in our evangelizing unbelievers but also in our instructing and admonishing and teaching believers, it is Christ that we proclaim.

Don't Move On

. . . but now he has reconciled you in the body of his flesh through death to present holy and blameless and irreproachable before him, if indeed you continue in the faith established and steadfast and not shifting from the hope of the gospel which you heard . . . (Col 1:23)

The ongoing relevance of the gospel for believers.

Why Do We Like Movies?

Because we're made in God's image; because God, with whom we are indelibly stamped, believer and unbeliever alike, is a God of story. All of human history is structured with a beginning (creation), a problem (sin), a thickening of plot (salvation history and one failed human deliverer after another), a climax (Christ), and a resolution (the new earth). Movies, novels, having personal goals, making sense of our lives, having a sense of meaning that helps us hit the alarm and get out of bed one more day, all derive from this. Hollywood is big because of salvation history.

Vern Poythress has me thinking about these things. Tonight I read:

Redemption by Christ is a story. It is a story of something that really happened in history, in space and time. Because it is at the heart of God's purposes for the world, it is the one central story. So, in the end, all the other stories about working out human purposes derive their meaning from being related to this central story. We should not be surprised that the categories for stories in general analogically reflect the character of redemption, that is, the one central story. (Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language: A God-Centered Approach [Crossway 2009], 206)

This is not, by the way, story instead of propositions as a way of accessing truth. It's not Hodge and Henry or the Wright brothers (Chris and Tom). It's a both/and. Human bodies only function if they have fleshy, squishy parts and a rock-solid skeleton. Not an either/or. Both are very different, but equally needed.

Luther: A Mediator

Reflecting back on the first time he was called upon to officiate at mass as a young priest, Luther wrote:

When I stood there during the mass and began the canon, I was so frightened that I would have fled if I hadn't been admonished by the prior. For when I read the words, 'Thee, therefore, most merciful Father,' and thought I had to speak to God without a Mediator, I felt like fleeing from the world like Judas. Who can bear the majesty of God without Christ as Mediator? In short, as a monk I experienced such horrors; I had to experience them before I could fight them.

--Martin Luther, 'Table Talk,' in LW 54:234

Again: Wright on Justification

David Mathis of Desiring God helpfully weighs in on Wright's Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision in the latest Themelios. Thanks David.

Justification by Union

Richard Gaffin nails it in one of his concluding statements to his book on the resurrection in Paul's soteriology.

Not justification by faith but union with the resurrected Christ by faith (of which union, to be sure, the justifying aspect stands out perhaps most prominently) is the central motif of Paul's applied soteriology.

Gaffin footnotes Jonathan Edwards, who had written:

What is real in the union between Christ and his people, is the foundation of what is legal; that is, it is something that is really in them, and between them, uniting them, that is the ground of the suitableness of their being accounted as one by the judge.

--Richard Gaffin, Resurrection and Redemption: A Study in Paul's Soteriology (2d ed.; P&R 1987), 132