Jordan often says very striking things and leaves you to chew on things. One of the things that he noted from Romans 1 is that “people are crazy” – professing to be wise, they became fools, because they suppressed the truth in unrighteousness and failed to respond to God’s revelation with pistis (faith, faithfulness). He also noted that Jesus is the alpha and omega - i.e. the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. And he stressed that we must let the Bible teach us how to read itself. We learn to read the Bible, not by approaching it with a set of autonomous rules, but by reading it over and over again. (Rules are spectacles, paradigm-providers. If Scripture does not provide these spectacles, our reading is in fact tending to stand over it, rather than in submission to it.)

Putting all of this together, it strikes me that what we’re really talking about is learning a new language. Jesus is the Word of God by whom all things were made and are sustained; He is the divine language, and in the Scriptures the Holy Spirit speaks Him.

When you have a baby and start to talk to him or her, the sounds you make are not very significant to that child. The slate is too blank; the child has not yet been enculturated into the language you’re speaking.

In our case, as we’ve noted, we are crazy. We’re not merely dealing with a blank slate; we’re unlearning all sorts of things that we “know” which in fact are not true.

But in both cases, it is constant exposure to the language by which the child or disciple is taught the language.The child picks up on the particular syllables you’re using over the course of time, as he or she hears them repeatedly, day after day, month after month. This is how the child learns to speak the same language you do.

By the grace of God and the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, the same thing happens to us when we are brought into repeated and constant exposure to the hearing of the Word of God. Christ is communicated to us; and He is communicating with us, so that we learn to speak the language of God.

I think this is a good reason for ongoing exposure to Scripture. No matter how well you think you know what the Bible means, the truth is that in this life, you’re not a native speaker of the language of God. You need more than the nice doctrinal data that you’ve systematically assembled; you need the communicational training that you’re not going to be done with for a good long while.

One other thing that struck me about the lecture was that the Bible as a whole is like the parables which Jesus spoke. Contrary to common assumptions, Jesus said He told the parables precisely so that those who did not have ears to hear would be confused and hardened. Jordan says that all of Scripture functions this way; if one is not reading the Bible in the community of the Church, and if one’s heart is not right, the Bible becomes more and more tangled, confusing, a stumbling block. And almost as a throwaway line, Jordan added that this is also true of natural revelation. The more men who are separated from God study it, they do not clear up matters but confuse them more and more, because they are not looking at things by way of the divine language by which the world was created and is upheld.

I think there are all sorts of ramifications of this for apologetics, particularly when the primary attacks of unbelievers against the existence of God tend to revolve around things like epistemology (how things are known). The unbeliever says that if God really exists, that would be demonstrable, but in fact Christians cannot prove that God exists. But the truth is that no revelation, still less a rational argument or even appeal to material evidence, will prove to such a person that God is. Because he has, by the nature of the case, set himself fundamentally at odds with the possibility of a true epistemology. When someone is suppressing the truth, what they need is not proof.

Ultimately, what things boil down to is authority. God created man, and He did so in a certain way. He created man within community, and subject to Himself. This is the light of all seeing. When one rejects God’s community and God’s authority, there is simply no way to arrange the pieces of evidence to his satisfaction. Because the problem is not one of evidence to begin with. It is one of idolatry: worship of my own authority and reason and will rather than thankful glorification of God as God. This is the way to profess wisdom and become a fool.

That’s a bit of a macro view of the unbeliever on a basic level, but it seems to me that our lives are made up of micro versions of this. Most basically, if I stand with God and His community, I am going to have a completely different relationship to the faith once delivered to the saints than I otherwise would. But it also goes further; the matters that I tend to find objectionable in Scripture – that cause a “gut” reaction, or an “intellectual objection” – are not matters to which I should take exception and try to study in some naturalistic way. The way to genuine resolution can come in one way, and one way only, and that is to learn to speak the language of God better. I must, as Jordan says, continue to “learn to read the Bible by reading the Bible over and over again.” Not because the Bible is magical, like a mantra that does something because the syllables have some sort of talisman-like power, but because the Bible is God’s language written, and wherever I am tempted to question God, that shows I am still insufficiently equipped as a speaker of His language.

Now, of course, God does lay requirements upon man, and God does grant forgiveness of sins apart from works. But the Bible’s use of the terms “gospel” and “law,” particularly in Paul’s writings, where Protestant discussion on these subjects tends to centre around, is very different from these definitions.

Paul always uses nomos (“law”) to refer to Torah, whether in the sense of “the Mosaic covenant” (by far his most frequent usage) or in the more general sense of “the five books of Moses.” In the second sense, his focus is on Torah as Scripture, as e.g. the Genesis narratives concerning Abraham are referred to as nomos in Galatians 4.24 and, given the immediately following context, likely in Romans 3.31 as well.

Similarly – and not surprisingly, given the content of the books we call Gospels – the term “gospel” is a very concrete term with definite historical connections (after all, it means “good news“). While free forgiveness of sins has always been God’s way of dealing with sinners, the term “gospel” is tied to God’s concrete and dateable historical actions related to what some scholars call “the Christ event,” with Christ’s death and resurrection at the center (see e.g. 1 Cor 15.1-4).

I have become increasingly convinced of the importance of abandoning the abstract usage of these terms, not because the general theological point is wrong; it is not. God saved us, out of His own sovereign mercy, not because of works of righteousness which we have done (Titus 3.5). But the problem with using the specific terms law and gospel in the way that we do means that inevitably those “synthetic” meanings get read into all the biblical texts where the terms appear. And that is not a good thing.

What follows is a lightly modified version of a private post I made on this subject. I have tried to clean up the style slightly, as well as eliminate points that were really germane only to a narrower discussion. To aid clarity, I have also added a couple of brief statements that distill thoughts I had made in the more extended discussion.  I trust making this public will prove somewhat helpful in terms of clarifying the importance of the fight for biblical language.

Nobody in my sphere denies that one’s acceptance with God is not dependent upon anything they do, but rather God’s love in Christ. Not only do we not deny it, I doubt that anyone of us are the slightest bit unclear on it either.

That is not at all the point of my tirades regarding the terminology of law and gospel. My point is that by using the terms “law” and “gospel” to give this assurance (and ubiquitously, as people prone to use the terms generally do), the possibility of reading the texts correctly is effectively destroyed. And that does far more harm than anyone can imagine.

Now, taking Galatians as a sort of example. If we go to what Paul is actually talking about, where will we derive application? Is it really such a big deal that we skip the circumcision issue and jump right to “the heart of the matter”?

It’s all well and good to say that we don’t face the circumcision issue in our churches. But just because we need to make an extra step in application doesn’t mean that understanding the text properly to begin with is unimportant. To the contrary, the applications that would be much closer to the heart of the issue are completely lost because certain preachers think that all those Pauline texts are harangues about law and gospel, defined in their traditional Protestant terms.

There are all sorts of issues much closer to the surface application than dealing with some supposed merit theology that dwells in every man’s Pelagian heart. Frankly, paedocommunion and “close communion” are a lot more relevant to Galatians than is merit theology. Does paedocommunion have to do with assurance? Absolutely, but it’s a lot more practical and on the ground than the gospel-law treatment ever makes possible.

The whole matter of Jew and Gentile, which Paul broadens out explicitly into barbarian, Scythian etc – these are the immediate implications of the gospel, and if the churches had been preaching what Paul actually says rather than hammering on a pet doctrine, racism could never have taken hold anywhere.

Then too the use of “gospel” and “law” with a different, extrabiblical meaning and then reading that meaning into Scripture not only buries the native and should-be obvious applications. People express concern about the fine distinctions which systematic theology makes. Some of those distinctions are valid. Fine. But I worry about the distinctions that Scripture itself makes, distinctions which become not merely unaccented but unallowable because systematic theology’s forcible takeover of the key terms cannot allow the texts like James to say what they actually do say. They do not allow the texts like Galatians 5.4 to say what they actually do say. They do not allow the texts like Galatians 6.7-9 to say what they actually do say. Ad infinitum.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are all sorts of implications that hardly anyone has even begun to think about. How does it affect the church that while the NT is all about Israel, it wouldn’t make a difference to most preaching if Jesus were born in Quebec?

I preach free grace clearly and quite consistently as well. I have no problem with that. But I will not bow to this confusion that has been wrought by distorting the biblical terminology. It has done more damage than we can possibly know.

Frankly, I increasingly think the ubiquitous law-gospel thing is a crutch. I wonder if where it’s preached most strongly is in fact where it least needs to be preached – where folks are much more prone to feel secure when they ought not, because they believe “the right thing” about justification.

In his new book Deep Exegesis, Peter Leithart warns about treating the actual words of Scripture as “husk” which we can safely discard as long as we have what’s really important, the “meaning.” (And all too often, “meaning” is boiled down even further, so that it is not even merely a summary of the text, but a systematic statement of the supposed “doctrine” we are to take from the text.)

If we actually understand the text, we can revisit in every generation and every situation and come back with a fitting application. But if we boil all the meat off and say it’s all about free grace in the abstract, we will lose any particular witness (or at least, the most biblically-relevant) on the ground to what the gospel is about.

The battles in the early church over the law were not about theological theorems. Every last one of them were battles over practical issues of
fellowship and exclusion, and if we learned those lessons, church life would be much different than it is in conservative Reformed-dom. The exclusivism of conservative Reformed and Lutheran churches bears eloquent witness to the fact that their law-gospel construct is a monumental hindrance to actually living by the letters that Paul really wrote.

Part of the problem with working through this issue clearly is that biblical theology can mean more than one thing. Is it the historical-critical method as developed quite recently, or is it something more organic that in fact the Church has always practiced? Does practicing biblical theology entail that I look at the Scriptures as made up of a bunch of “theologies” of the biblical writers – and if so, is there implicit in that a subtle compromise of the belief in Scripture as God’s own self-revelation?

Then too there is the matter of saying that biblical theology ought to influence and shape systematic theology, rather than the reverse. Are those our real choices?

It is my belief that a faithful “biblical theology” (BT) and a faithful “systematics” (ST) are mutually informing – and not simply de facto (this is what actually happens) but ideally (this is what should happen).

What I mean by faithful BT is passage-by-passage exegetical work that pays attention to the Bible’s own themes (I’ll qualify this in a moment), and particular attention to contextual layering, such as how a given biblical writer uses a terms, what themes recur in his writing and so on, outward to how all of this fits into that writer’s place in overall redemptive history. Good biblical theology pays careful attention to what is said when (before Torah is introduced, after David, prior to the cross etc etc). And this work cannot be described as “faithful” if it pits one passage against another as not merely in mysterious tension, but in contradiction.

I think that careful reflection will show that BT is not quite the same as exegesis, but they are utterly bound up with one another and cannot be carried out properly apart from mutually informing one another.  If the exegesis of a given pericope leads to a conclusion that is at odds with the biblical theology derivable from the redemptive historical period in question, for example, that means that (1) the exegesis is faulty; (2) the BT in question is faulty; or (3) both. Something has gone wrong somewhere.

Now, as soon as I attempt to determine where the error is, you can see that BT itself is a functioning as a form of ST. Drawing from the materials of the broader biblical theology we have built up in connection with a given era of redemptive history: that just is a systematic-theological exercise for that period.

BT is not something uncorrectable any more than either ST is, nor the exegesis of a particular passage. All of these exercises are human exercises, and must be carried out in a fashion that is mutually corrective.

As you might guess, this is true also at the broader BT-ST level as well, keeping in mind how the differing eras in redemptive history will affect a unitary reading of Scripture. (E.g. Torah is a temporary covenant, not a timeless set of norms.)

There is, however, another set of concerns which we can raise regarding ST, which is this: What questions does a given ST pose, and how are they formed? If questions are posed in a manner unknown to Scripture; if the governing assumptions behind these questions are drawn from outside categories, then the answers can be problematic, because the project as a whole is predetermined by something unbiblical. A badly chosen question will not generate a good answer. (You’ll see this sometimes in Jesus’ own ministry, where instead of answering a question directly, He appears to talk about something else.)

Just some basic reflections. Much more, of course, could be said.