Dempster

"Humanity is called to be the image of God, fails in its task and is replaced by Israel, who is regarded as God's son. A tribe is singled out within Israel a family within the tribe, and an individual - David - becomes the focus. And yet David, his sons and their failures, point forwards to a just Davidic king who will bring the benefits of the rule not only to Israel but to all of humanity. Similarly, the dominion of Adam begins over all creation, and then the land of Canaan becomes the focus, and next the city of Jerusalem and the temple. And from this particular place, the rule of God extends outwards to Israel and the nations, even to the ends of the earth."

--Stephen Dempster, Dominion and Dynasty, 231.

Adorare Mente Volume 1

A couple of months ago, I posted about a new theological journal coming out by SBTS students called Adorare Mente. Volume 1 is here. Download the whole journal here or download each essay:

Hyun-Gwang Kim, Imitating Christ: An Exegetical Study of Philippians 2:5-11

John Meade, The Meaning of Circumcision in Israel: A Proposal for a Transfer of Rite from Egypt to Israel

Blake White, Christ as the Last Adam

Trevin Wax, The Centrality of Christology in the Marburg Colloquy

Nathanael Copeland, Pastoral Presuppositionalism: Lessons from the Life and Work of Francis Schaeffer

9 Marks Weekender

Last weekend, thanks in large part to my lovely wife, I was able to attend a 9 Marks Weekender at Capitol Hill Baptist Church (CHBC) in Washington D.C. It was phenomenal. I was challenged, informed, convicted, and encouraged. Pastors and aspiring pastors, make every effort to do a weekender. Here is a sample itinerary. Seminary is great, but can only do so much. There is much I could write about the weekend, but I think I will limit the post to what struck me most about my time at CHBC. The elders (lay and staff) were godly, informed, humble, and committed. They serve as men under the authority of Christ who will one day give an account for their flock. In many ways they are driven by Hebrews 13.17a: "Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account." This verse came alive in a new way for me this weekend. It has serious implications for the way we "do church." My love for the church was kindled like never before and my trust in the faithfulness of God to his church was strengthened.

Goldsworthy & the New Covenant

Alicia and I are reading through Graeme Goldsworthy's "Gospel and Kingdom." I really appreciate Goldsworthy's writing ministry and recommend everything he has written for a better understanding of the unity of Scripture and its message to the church. However, the other night, I had to pause our reading to sermonize on the importance of developing a biblical theology that is rooted in the text. Goldsworthy is right on, for the most part, but on pg 101 he writes,
"There is in fact an essential unity to all the covenants. Jeremiah shows the unity between the Mosaic covenant and the new covenant (chapter 31:31-34), for the new covenant is not a new thing replacing the old, but rather the old renewed and applied in such a way that it will be perfectly kept."
I certainly agree that there is an essential unity to all the covenants. They are an essential unfolding to the one plan of God (Eph 1.10), but Jeremiah does not show the unity of the Mosaic covenant and the new. Quite the opposite. Jeremiah says, "I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke" (31.31-32). I am not sure how much clearer Jeremiah could have been. God is going to make a new covenant, not like the old one. It will be new, not renewed, or a new administration of the old! There is radical discontinuity between the old and new covenants. The new covenant is an eschatological covenant that fulfils all the other covenants. Within this covenant, all will know the Lord and have the Spirit, unlike Israel of old, who for the most part was apostate. Significantly, when Hebrews quotes the long Jeremiah text (8.8-12), he immediately says, "In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away" (Heb 8.13).
Of course Goldsworthy (and other Covenant Theologians) don't like the idea of a new new covenant because of its implications. If there is discontinuity with the new covenant and all within it know the Lord and have the Spirit, that means that by definition the new covenant community (the church) is a believing community! That means that only a Baptist ecclesiology is faithful to Scripture, and hence, infant baptism must be abandoned. But the Westminster Confession won't allow that, will it?

Resources

Dr. Schreiner's New Testament Theology is now available! Order here.

Visit Christ Reformed Church's Academy lectures here, where you'll find a host of helpful mp3's.

Doug Moo has joined the web, and has posted several articles online for free here. Moo is a very clear thinker and has been particularly helpful to me on the issue of the continuity/discontinuity of the Mosaic Law.

Hamilton Joining SBTS

A while back, Graeme Goldsworthy gave some lectures on the importance of biblical theology. His second lecture addressed the need for seminaries and bible colleges to require courses on biblical theology. It seems that Southern is heeding Dr. Goldsworthy's call. Dr. James Hamilton has joined the faculty of Southern Seminary as associate professor of biblical theology and will begin teaching in the fall. He received a Masters of Theology from DTS and his PhD here at SBTS under Dr. Schreiner. He also has coordination, having played baseball at the University of Arkansas. Dr. Hamilton is scheduled to teach Hermeneutics (TR 11:30-12:45) and Studies in the OT: Messiah in the OT (TR 8:30-9:45). Sign up!
Here is the story, Dr. Hamilton's blog, and his first book.

Evangelical Subculture

I am very interested in the surrounding culture's view of evangelicalism. This being the case, I am always looking out for articles, books, and movies dealing with (or usually mocking) the Christian subculture. Sadly, usually the secular world is right on. I love going to bookstores, but usually get nauseous when visiting mainstream Christian bookstores. Anyway, all that to say, read this review by Hanna Rosin of Daniel Radosh's recent book, "Rapture Ready: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture." Here is an excerpt:

A Christian friend who'd grown up totally sheltered once wrote to me that the first time he heard a Top 40 station he was horrified, and not because of the racy lyrics: "Suddenly, my lifelong suspicions became crystal clear," he wrote. "Christian subculture was nothing but a commercialized rip-off of the mainstream, done with wretched quality and an apocryphal insistence on the sanitization of reality."

For more, see:

Friends of God

A Field Guide to Evangelicals and their Habitat

The Christian Culture Survival Guide

And from a Christian perspective:

All God's Children in Blue Suede Shoes

unChristian

They Like Jesus but not the Church

All of David Wells' books. Wells is a little more difficult to read, but does a great job of applying Refomed theology to contemporary culture (a sociological systematic theology).

Gentry in SBJT

The Spring 2008 issue of The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology was released last week. The theme of the journal is the kingdom of God. Peter Gentry, OT professor here at Southern, has an important article for the kingdom and biblical theology called, "Kingdom Through Covenant: Humanity as the Divine Image."

Many theologians with a Reformed slant have affirmed that there is at least some sort of covenant in Gen. 1-3. Many hold to a covenant of works, but others hold to a covenant with creation and reject any notion of a covenant of works. Gentry is not a traditional Reformed covenant theologian. He follows the work of Dumbrell, who has convincingly shown that God did indeed make a covenant with creation. Paul Williamson has done a lot of work on covenant lately, and he avidly denies any covenant before Noah. Gentry lays out the biblical-theological framework of Gen 1.26-28, explains covenants in the OT & Ancient Near East (ANE), then walks through the major covenants in the biblical metanarrative (Creation, Noah, Abraham, Mosaic, David, and New Covenant) showing that the covenants form the backbone of the biblical story. Next, Gentry gives several linguistic and theological arguments for a covenant with creation, noting along the way that Williamson "appears to base his research on the study of Weinfeld instead of examining all of the evidence himself" (20). Gentry, on the other hand, has "carefully examined all instances of berit [covenant in Hebrew] and in particular, all expressions in which berit is the modifier of a verb in the Hebrew Bible. My research is based on two independent and separate studies of all the evidence conducted ten years apart" (40).

The next section of the article is on the divine image in Gen. 1.26-28, showing from the literary structure that humans are the crown of creation. Before exegeting the passage, Gentry surveys the various views on the divine image. Gentry's exegesis is careful and laborious (get the article!). The ideas of rulership and sonship are behind the terms likeness and image. Both terms refer to the divine-human relationship, but "image" focuses on the idea of a king under God. Humans rule as a result of being the image of God. "Likeness" indicates the father/son relationship.

Next Gentry spends a couple of pages on the meaning of the prepositions "in" and "as/according to." God created us as the divine image. In the ANE, only the king is the image of God, but in the Bible, every single human being is the image of God. Gentry writes:

"Man is the divine image. As servant-king and son of God mankind will mediate God's rule to the creation in the context of a covenant relationship with God on the one hand and the earth on the other. Hence the concept of the kingdom of God is found on the first page of Scripture. Indeed, the theme is kingdom through covenant." (30)

He then spends 4 pages on the meaning of the first person plural "Let Us." After a nuanced argument from the linguistic, theological, and cultural background, Gentry believes Gen. 1.26-27 "provides a strong argument that God is addressing the heavenly court" (37). "God has communicated to the divine assembly, that his rule in the world will be effected largely through humans, not through "gods" or "angels" (37). He concludes the article with a section on the garden of Eden as a separate place and sacred place (sanctuary) with Adam as a kind of priest-king worshipping in the garden sanctuary (38). "Only when the father-son relationship is nurtured through worship, fellowship, and obedient love will humankind appropriately and properly reflect and represent to the world the kind of kingship and rule intrinsic to God himself. Kingship is effected through covenant relationship" (39).

This short post does not even come close to doing justice to the argument in Gentry's article. Maybe it will wet your taste buds to pick up or order the journal though. I thank God for men like Dr. Gentry who are so careful, and labor so meticulously to be faithful to the text.

SBJT has posted the editorial, where Dr. Wellum gives a helpful and brief "mini-biblical theology" of the kingdom, and a good article by Brian Vickers on "The Kingdom of God in Paul's Gospel." Tolle Lege!

"This is one use of television -- as a source of illuminating the printed page."

-Niel Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (83)