Scripture Engagement

Unusually, a theological topic. How are we to understand Jesus in the light of the Old Testament covenants? I've been helped on this topic by Alistair McKitterick who has been teaching at Moorlands College and is now off to the London School of Theology. Obviously his understanding of this topic is better than mine, so I'm giving him fair credit for much of what follows. Having said which, he might not agree with everything I write below. Most of us are fairly familiar with the covenants in the Bible, which are with Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and the the New Covenant prophesied in Jeremiah and found in the New Testament. The background to these is suzerain-vassal treaties between kings and their people, or between a more important and less important king in the ancient near east. The most important of these covenants, from a NT perspective, are the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants, but I will include the Mosaic covenant too: Abrahamic - the promise of land and descendants (Ge...

I frequently hear Christians say, 'We have an eternal soul!' But is that a) Greek philosophy or b) biblical teaching? It is mainly the former, and we have read it into our Bibles, a process called eisegesis (as opposed to exegesis - reading out what is there). There is no clear teaching in the Bible on this issue. Nor is there clear teaching that humans are tripartite in nature: body, soul and spirit. Grudem quotes Berkhof: 'The tripartite conception of man originated in Greek philosophy, which conceived of the relation of the body and the spirit of man to teach other after the analogy of the mutual relation between the material universe and God.' Grudem, Systematic Theology , p481 The fact that the Hebrew word nephesh is often translated 'soul' does not help. In fact it should be translated something like 'inner being' or 'life-breath'. Though there are some verses that talk about a dead nephesh - i.e. a corpse (Lev 21:11; Num 6:6)....

I had a chat with Graham Tomlin one time at New Wine after a seminar he led, and he really helped me regarding the New Testament teaching about predestination. His comment was this: that we are chosen in Christ . So what does that actually mean? In the Old Testament Israel was God's chosen people. You were saved in Israel   e.g. from the last and worst plague in Egypt, as long as your family had slaughtered a lamb and smeared the door jambs and lintel with its blood. As followers of Jesus we are saved in Christ . This is an eternal salvation. This means we are part of God's chosen people, which consists of those who are in Christ. We (as a whole) are predestined to be saved in Christ. Read Ephesians . Two groups are in focus, Jews and gentiles. Those who follow Jesus from either background are saved by grace. Our salvation has been won by Jesus the Messiah/Christ (Christ is the Greek for Messiah). This means it is Jesus who is the chosen one, first and foremost. Tha...

In my previous post I said that the Western church exhibits: 'A certain cynicism about miracles, so healing is thought not to be real, but in someone's imagination. This is a result of secularism, and what Paul Hiebert called 'the flaw of the excluded middle' in his article on the subject, which shows that Westerners don't believe in the middle realm between supernatural and natural. The Bible, however, constantly mentions dreams, angels, unclean spirits, and so on, which are very much to do with this middle realm.' This shows itself in two, rather extreme ways. The first is to deny that miracles happen. This is the secular approach to miracles. They don't happen now, they didn't happen then i.e. in biblical times and therefore somebody must have made them up, we think. It is possible to find a whole host of literature in theological libraries that is written from this position. Miracles are something outside our experience, which is much more re...

New English translations of the Bible are very popular these days. People often ask me which one is best, or which I prefer. The answer is complicated: I'm not keen on archaic words in translation, which means I don't use KJV much, or even NIV, which follows it to a certain extent Sometimes it's good to expand the meaning of the Hebrew or Greek to make it clearer, especially when there is an assumption made because the original audience would have known something that we don't. It should be implicit information though Genre is often ignored by translations. The Bible is rich and varied. We don't want Proverbs to be like a story or sermon. They're supposed to be short and pithy to have greater impact. Hebrew often skips verbs to achieve that. We may not be able to go that far, but translations should keep proverbs as short as possible. Likewise poetry should have rhythm, alliteration and other poetic features, albeit using the richness of the English la...