If I Could Te

You Jus

ThingNatha

Pitchford

Chapter Nine: They Are They Which Testify of Me

In our quest to determine just what Christianity is, and whether it really matters to ordinary menand women in America and beyond, we have discovered a few, basic, all-important truths, includingthe little-recognized fact that Christianity is not primarily about individual salvation, but on thecontrary, its ultimate design is to fashion a new, corporate body of redeemed persons, perfectly unifiedand purified, to be presented as a glorious bride to Christ, who before the world began had chosen this people as his reward for the great sufferings he would willingly undergo. What that means in our dailylives, as we examined in the last chapter, is that true Christians always advance in their journey toconsummate their union with Christ from within the realm of local churches, that is, among others whoshare a commonality in the gospel accomplishment of Christ, and who, by the structures andinstitutions that God has prescribed for us in his word, continue to prod each other on to greater faithand holiness. In concluding that chapter, we looked at three marks by which to distinguish a true localchurch from a false one: the word must be rightly preached, the sacraments rightly administered, andchurch discipline faithfully enforced.When you think about it, though, the most fundamental of these signs is the first: the right preaching of the word. The only way we know what the sacraments are and how they are to beadministered is by studying the word; and the same thing could be said of church discipline. The onegreat non-negotiable truth that has preserved God's Church throughout the ages and that has broughther back from corruption when she had gone astray is what the Protestant Reformers trumpeted in theLatin phrase,

sola scriptura

! Scriptures alone! The scriptures are unique among all other writings andtraditions in that, they alone are God's own words, breathed out by him, perfectly recorded withouterror in the original manuscripts, and faithfully transmitted down through the ages

. The bible is ahuman book, yes – it was written by human authors within human history, it was fashioned in humanlanguages, its purpose was to address human needs; but although it is, therefore, a thoroughly human book, it is also uniquely divine. Who was the author of the bible? At one level, the dozens of humanauthors who contributed to its pages – but behind and beneath them it was only the one, true God whocreated humanity and always directs history to his own ends and purposes. The bible is God's book, andas we shall see, this will have a profound impact on how we are to understand it.It should come as no surprise, then, that periods of great apostasy and corruption in the Churchhave come at times either when the bible itself was suppressed, or when the way to understand itcorrectly was distorted. In the late Medieval Era, for instance, any translation of the bible into thevernacular languages was strictly opposed by the Roman Church, which considered its pages thedomain of experts and church officials alone. At the same time, the official way of understanding the bible (or, in the terminology I will employ from now on, the commonly accepted “hermeneutic”) wasgrossly misunderstood. Throughout the Middle Ages, the elaborate, fourfold hermeneutic that had itsroots in the Alexandrian Church fathers Clement and Origen effectively denied the true human natureof the bible. It was not to be understood by means of a normal, “grammatical-historical” hermeneutic – it was a spiritual book, and mysterious, spiritual meanings had to be teased out from beneath thesurface. When the Protestant Reformers began to challenge the entrenched doctrines of the corruptMedieval Church, they did so by arguing from the outset for a different hermeneutic, one that took thegrammar of the original languages in a normal and straightforward fashion, a hermeneutic whichLuther called “grammatico-historical”.Of course, this was a necessary step for recovering true doctrine. If the bible is not to beinterpreted according to common grammatical rules, then there is no end to what one may find in itapart from the limits of his own imagination. But today, the pendulum has largely swung in the other

1 For the doctrine of inspiration, see 2 Samuel 23:2; 2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:20-21; 3:15-16

If I Could Te

You Jus

ThingNatha

Pitchford

direction. The hermeneutic of the Church, which in the Middle Ages was shaped by men such asOrigen, is today largely shaped by the principles of the Enlightenment, which was a movementintending to advance human learning and knowledge apart from any appeal to or recognition of thedivine. In much of the modern Church, human grammar and history is the nearly exclusive domain inwhich biblical interpretation is pursued. The divine authorship of the whole, while recognized intheory, has little practical effect on how we understand the scriptures. In essence, when we look toscriptures we seek to understand what we can say with certainty that the human author alone wasintending to convey, and what his immediate human audience alone might naturally have understoodhim to mean. The effects of this naturalistic hermeneutic, that is, the grammatical-historicalhermeneutic divorced from any practical consideration of ultimate divine authorship, has been tragic inseveral respects, but most significantly in this: it has effectively cut away the Christ-centeredunderstanding of every part of the bible, including all its Old Testament portions.Of course, this is precisely

not

what the Reformers intended when they championed their “grammatico-historical” hermeneutic! For Luther, the grammatical-historical hermeneutic was simplythe interpretation of scripture that “drives home Christ.” As he once expressed it, “He who would readthe Bible must simply take heed that he does not err, for the Scripture may permit itself to be stretchedand led, but let no one lead it according to his own inclinations but let him lead it to its source, that is,the cross of Christ. Then he will surely strike the center”

. To read the scriptures with a grammatical-historical sense is nothing other than to read them with Christ at the center

.This modern error, which refuses to see Christ at the center of every part of scriptures, has hadmanifold deleterious effects on the Church today: not only has it hindered us from learning the thingsthat we ought to learn, when we look to the Old Testament and see Christ revealed for our encouragement and instruction; but furthermore, it has led to definite doctrinal errors, for we have tounderstand those scriptures somehow; and if we understand them apart from Christ, we will understandthem errantly and harmfully.We already have a sobering historical example of what happens when we read the OldTestament scriptures with a very careful, precise hermeneutic that is not, however, Christ-centered. ThePharisees were the religious scholars of Jesus' day, and they searched the scriptures diligently, butwithout recognizing in them that Jesus was the Christ, and that his entire life and ministry was foretoldin every conceivable way from the Hebrew books of the bible. But when Jesus was addressing them onthis point, he did not commend their insightful scholarship or diligent study. Instead, he said this: “Yousearch the scriptures, because you think you have life in them – and they are they which testify of me,and you will not come to me that you might have life!”

. In other words, the Scriptures give life only in proportion as they point to Christ and lead us to him. If we read the bible – any part of it – withoutlearning of Christ and being driven to him, we have missed the whole point, and our labors aredamning instead of life-giving.One of the most widespread hermeneutics in the modern Church, which misses this point, iscommonly called “Dispensationalism”. The interpretive system of Dispensationalism is known most

2 Quoted by Timothy George,

Theology of the Reformers

(Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 1988), p. 83.3 For a helpful discussion of the reformers' grammatico-historical interpretation as typological but not allegorical, seeKlein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Jr.,

Introduction to Biblical Interpretation

(Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1993), pp. 45-50. According to their understanding, “Luther followed those medievalists who rejected the allegorical method of interpretation because, in his view, it amounted to empty speculation. Instead, with Aquinas he affirmed that Scripturehad one simple meaning, its historical sense. This is discerned, Luther said, by applying the ordinary rules of grammar inthe light of Scripture's original historical context. At the same time, Luther echoed a theme of the Church Fathers andthe medievalists:

he read the bible through Christocentric glasses, claiming that the whole Bible – including the OT – taught about Christ. Thus, while rejecting allegory, Luther took up again the typological interpretation typical of the NT.

4 John 5:39-40

If I Could Te

You Jus

ThingNatha

Pitchford

widely for its sensational positions and surmisings on eschatology (the doctrine of last things); scarcelyany event of any import may occur in the Middle East without Dispensational authors predicting how itwill play into the end times, with its often bizarre and always terrifying apocalypse. But this preoccupation with end-times predictions about the modern nation-state of Israel comes directly from anaturalistic, “literalizing” hermeneutic that refuses to see Christ at the center of the Old Testamentscriptures, and reads everything instead – all the prophecies, especially – as pertaining strictly to ethnicIsrael and having only earthly, non-spiritual, non-typical meanings. But this hermeneutic fails toaccount for the divine authorship of the whole, and God's self-attested purpose of using the ethnicnation of Israel, in a temporary way, as a “picture-book” of Christological truths that are permanent andall-encompassing. We will support this truth from the bible itself a little later.But for now, I have to confess that it is not just dispensationalists who have capitulated, to someextent, to this non-Christological reading of the Old Testament in particular. Even many reformedscholars, writing in the tradition of the great Reformation-era recovery of the gospel message,customarily seek to understand the Old Testament as a natural person, with no knowledge of the gospel,might understand it apart from divine enablement. This has, in effect, cut Christ out of much of thescriptures.To use one clear example (although we could find many, many similar cases), consider thefollowing explanation of Psalm 110, by respected, and in many cases truly insightful, reformed scholar Tremper Longman III:

Most scholars believe, as I do, that God is addressing the Israelite King David and his descendants here. The psalmin its ancient setting was likely a coronation song. Others, however, believe that the psalm is a messianic psalm inthe sense that is narrowly prophetic. In such a case, it would have no ancient reference but would have its onlyfulfillment in Christ.This latter view is both unlikely and unnecessary. It is unlikely because it would be the only psalm that would haveno Old Testament background. Since it is a difficult psalm to translate and understand, it would not be a good ideato make this psalm an exception to the rule. Nor is it necessary. It is better to think that as Hebrews associatesChrist’s name and function with Melchizedek, this connection flows from Psalm 110:4, Where God says, ‘You area priest forever in the line of Melchizedek.’ After all, Christ is a descendant of David, in fulfillment of prophecy,and indeed, David’s ‘greater son’ (Matt. 21:41-46). Therefore, this royal coronation hymn is naturally applied toChrist as a descendant of David – though, as previously stated, its Old Testament application was originally toDavid and his dynasty.

In assessing this all-too-representative interpretation, we must be struck with several very grave problems. First, the contention that David was the one originally addressed as “my Lord” is in blatantcontradiction to Christ’s understanding of the psalm. In Matthew 22, Christ confounds the Phariseeswith a question: “If David in the Spirit called [the Messiah] Lord, how then is he his son?” And insubstantiation of this assertion, he quotes Psalm 110. Now, Christ’s contention here is not that, althoughthis phrase “my Lord” was originally addressed to David, it has application to Christ as well. For hisquestion to have effect, it must be admitted that David was intentionally speaking of Christ as a referentutterly exclusive of himself. And furthermore, from the Pharisees’ reaction, it is equally evident that allof the Jews in the presence of Jesus, even those without the advantage of understanding the truths of Christianity, had no doubt that this was indeed a case in which David was intentionally referring to theMessiah. It seems not even to have entered their minds to answer Christ’s question by saying,“Actually, ‘God is addressing the Israelite King David…’”.Furthermore, this idea of primary reference to David would completely overthrow the

5 Tremper Longman III,

Immanuel in our Place

(Philipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing Co., 2001), pp.154-155.