Prayer is the essential part of the dialogical action at the heart of the theo-drama. Responding to the Bible as the word of God is not merely cognitive but a communicative and spiritual act. Will we pray the text, or simply peruse it? To pray the text is to acknowledge its author, to admit its claim, and to bring our desires into accord with those of God. Prayer is that canonical practice whereby we do not merely envision the theo-drama but indwell it and assume a speaking part. Nothing better expresses the relationship of the covenant servants to their covenant Lord than prayer. Our praise, supplications, and petitions all reflect our utter dependence on divine grace. Prayer tacitly acknowledges how God’s transcendence and nearness are to be understood with an eloquence that eludes the most explicit theological formulations.
Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Drama of Doctrine, 224
Monthly Archives: July 2009
The Bloody Triumph That Heals Apostasy
But I am the LORD your God from the land of Egypt; you know no God but me, and besides me there is no savior (Hosea 13:4).
In the midst of God speaking judgment against His covenant people, we see the hope of their salvation. He is speaking to people who are ‘bent on turning away’ (11:7) and yet He has compassion (11:8). In fact, the basis of His compassion is the reality of His holy-otherness. One expression of His foreignness to humans, that He is utterly transcendent, is the astounding truth that He shows grace to those who have infinitely offended Him. We cannot begin to grasp the magnitude of the offense our sin is to God, our Creator, the Giver of life. He demonstrates His glory by His grace (cf. Exod 33:18-19; 34:6-7; Joel 2:12-13).
And this grace is nothing cheap. It does ‘sweep under the rug,’ It is not a ‘moral lighting up’ on God’s end. The grace is effective and it is bloody. It is grace that heals our apostasy and absorbs the just anger of God against us (14:4).
The grace is Jesus Christ, God the Son, dying for us in our place.
Jesus Christ is God
The affirmation that this God has so radically identified himself with Jesus can rhyme with Israel’s confession of the singularity and incomparability of God if and only if their relationship is eternal. There is only one God, YHWH, and relationship to Jesus of Nazareth is somehow intrinsic to this God’s identity from everlasting. There is only son God, but the one God is never without his only-begotten Son…
The Church’s acclamation of Jesus and the witness of the scriptures of Israel can therefore be rhymed only if the exaltation of Jesus implies, not that the one God shares his glory with another, but that the glory of the one God is manifested in the exaltation of his Son, who belongs intrinsically to the reality of the one God.
David S. Yeago, “The New Testament and the Nicene Dogma: A Contribution to the Recovery of Theological Exegesis” in The Theological Interpretation of Scripture, 92.
The Apostle Paul said that (Phil 2:6-11).
(an exercise in concept, judgment, and sameness)
The Best Part of Waking Up is Not Folgers in Your Cup: A Morning Catechism to Start the Day
Why am I awake today?
Only because the sovereign Lord Jesus Christ has preserved my life on this earth by His upholding word of mercy and grace.
Why has Jesus preserved my life?
Because in the grace and mercy of the triune God, He has a mission for me today.
What is this mission?
The glory of God—Father, Son, Spirit.
Am I deserving of this calling?
No. I, a sinner, am deserving only of eternal death as the holy judgment of God against me. My sin and idolatries merit the wrath of this Most Holy Judge. The only thing that I deserve is the penalty of my guilt.
Then why are you called to this mission?
Only because Jesus Christ, the Righteous Son of God, died for me. The eternal Son—by Whom, in Whom, and for Whom all things were made—bore the wrath owed to sinners by being crucified on a cross. He was crushed for all those whom the Father had chosen in Him by unconditional grace before the foundations of the world—a people from every tribe, and tongue, and nation. Jesus was raised from the dead on the third day, in accordance with the Scriptures, ascended to heaven and is seated at the Father’s right hand, reigning over His coming kingdom.
What does the mission look like today?
A heart broken and surrendered to Christ, longing for His communion, a will led by the Spirit and devoted to His Word, eyes opened to behold His beauty, a mouth speaking the good news that is meant to be told, hands that work in the mind and energy of Christ—humble and compassionate—zeal for God’s holiness and love for His person, and my neighbors.
Who is your life and where is your boast?
Jesus Christ is my life, and all. Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of Jesus my Lord, forever. Come, Lord Jesus! Amen.
On Study Bibles and Hermeneutical Propagation
“Until the historical-critical method becomes critical of its own theorectical foundations and develops a hermeneutical theory adequate to the nature of the text which it is interpreting, it will remain restricted–as it deserves to be–to the guild and the academy, where the question of truth can endlessly be deferred.”
David C. Steinmetiz, The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis in ”The Theological Interpretation of Scripture,” 37
(On that restriction part)… The historical-critical method would be inherently restricted because it requires tools that the average Christian does not have. But, then again, that is why we have the ‘Study Bible.’
The Geneva Bible may have been the first, and it was a little more explicit in its endeavor to propagate a particular way of reading. Yet, in a similar way, all study bibles exist because they necessitate a way of reading the Bible that is inaccessible to the average Christian. They seek to overcome a felt restriction. And for the large part, they have enjoyed success in the evangelical world.
In the South, that would explain why good-ole’-simple church folk of my grandfather’s generation know the word “dispensation.”
On Brian Brock’s ‘Singing the Ethos of God’
I can’t read another book right now. One book at a time demands enough of me. That is okay.
This morning I casually opened up a newer book that a friend recommended that I purchase and read–Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture by Brian Brock. I folded back the paperback and planned to just browse. The browse became a perusing as I settled into the Introduction. My guard was up, in a discernible and generous way. But initial uneasiness dissolved into doxology as I read on. My soul was moved to worship, to the praise of God in Christ. This page glows of yellow highlight…
In the final analysis, it is not our historical or moral distance from the Bible that renders it foreign to us, nor the gap between time and eternity, but the gap between the ways of God and those of humanity. God is not foreign to us on some general criterion, but as another person: it is precisely in God’s incarnation that God’s difference from us becomes visible (John 1:14). The Psalms are foreign because they open into the manifold life of the trinitarian God; and this conclusion allows us to theologically clarify how they are foreign. The foreignness proper to faith is an eschatological foreignness. Christ is the chorus of a new song that, in its announcement of good news to the world, unleashes a critical impulse within history. Singers are made “strangers and aliens” in a rebellious world by having their eyes opened to the profundity of the Godhead and the perfection of God’s works…
In being part of God’s path to us, Scripture is foreign with Christ’s foreignness, but not a stranger that we cannot come to know, not an otherworldly alien… Its foreignness finds its origin in God’s inexhaustible holiness rather than Scripture’s effectiveness as a moral source of guide. Because it is outside us, the verbam externum, it can, as gospel, console and teach us.
Brian Brock, Singing the Ethos of God, xvf
I’m Glad My Daughter Likes Books, I Hope One Day That She Loves to Read
The Voices Around You: A Few Reasons to Go to Your Brothers
I am grateful for the kindred spirit of brothers who surround me. There is a common Christ-exalting intensity in the air. We not only believe the same things, we want to do things in the same ways. Theology and philosophy of ministry are hand in hand.
If you don’t have people in your life like this then pray for God to send them to you. If they are in your life, then thank God for them and embrace their wisdom. Grace in their lives means good for you.
In line with my personal benefiting, here are a few reasons why you should send most of your theological thoughts to your discerning brothers in Christ, before you go public with them…
- You have blind spots and those around you will see things that you miss.
- It honors your brothers and gives them a chance to invest. It is mutual edification at its best.
- It is the practice of humility. Making yourself vulnerable to those who you trust unleashes a sanctifying grace. It is good to put yourself out there and allow a loving brother to say “No” or “Fix this” or “That is stupid.” It acknowledges your fallibility and the reality that others will see things better than you. And this is very good for the soul.
The Word as Living and Active
“For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.
Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience. For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
(Hebrews 4:8-12 ESV)
The nature of God’s word, that it is living and active, is the basis here of why we should apply it to our lives. What was first mentioned in the Pentateuch, later reiterated in the Psalms, is now applied to us by apostolic interpretation. This happens because the word of God is not stagnant or irrelevant—It is living and active.
God Says What He Says: A Helpful Sentence By Vanhoozer In Critique of Cultural-Linguistic Theology
It is important not to collaspe the act of authoring (logos) into the church’s act of reception (pathos). To suggest that the way the church receives the word determines what God is saying and doing in the Bible is to wreak havoc with the economy of divine discourse.
Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Drama of Doctrine, 193
