Conclusion
Christological Reading or Personal Application?
It almost should go without saying that a truly Christian reading focuses on Christ. He, after all, is our Lord and Savior; nothing is more fundamental than that. One can rightly read the history of Israel and the failure of various human forms of government as pointing toward the ultimate kingship of Christ, the divine yet Davidic ruler whose kingdom culminates Old Testament hopes. 1 The message of the prophets points toward Christ (Acts 3:18, 24; 26:22–23, 27).
At the same time, biblical theologians who find only larger strands of theology in massive strands of Scripture may miss something that some less academically trained readers intuitively find. The Spirit who actualizes the law’s principles in our lives (Rom 8:2; Gal 5:18, 22–23) certainly will apply Scripture to us personally as well. Moreover, correct understanding about God invites worship of God; the disconnect between theological reading and personal experience is misplaced.
If our approach is solely oriented to personal application, that says more about our culture in the West than something distinctively charismatic. Although Western Christians read Scripture especially for personal edification, Jesus invites us to seek first God’s larger kingdom agendas (Matt 6:32–33; Luke 12:30–31). We naturally expect the Spirit to lead us to see in Scripture first God’s and Christ’s honor, because this fits the Spirit’s interest. The Spirit came to reveal and exalt the person of Jesus Christ (John 16:14–15; 1 John 4:2–3; Rev 19:10). The disciples understood Scripture retroactively in a new way in light of Christ (John 2:17, 22). 2 Likewise, the Spirit led the church into cross-cultural, ultimately global engagement in bringing the good news about Christ (Acts 1:8; 8:29; 10:19, 45; 11:12, 15; 13:2, 4; 15:28).
Some interpreters, however, have focused on christological interpretation virtually to the exclusion of recognizing other positive and negative models for our lives in Scripture. Is the correct focus on a central, overarching theological theme a reason to exclude other applications that may also flow from careful exegesis of biblical books?
Granted that we can view even every exhortation and encouragement in light of Christ, if Christ is our life then this also has personal implications (Rom 8:10; Gal 2:20; Phil 1:21; Col 1:27; 3:3–4). The prophetic model in Scripture includes personal engagement with God (e.g., Jeremiah’s struggles, Jer 15:15–18; 18:19–23; 20:7–18) and personal hearing from God. Indeed, the Spirit regularly pours out God’s love for us in our hearts (see Rom 5:5–8) and reminds us that we are God’s children (8:15–16). It also includes hearing from God for others. Some of us may be more gifted in one way or another, but clearly the present-tense, experiential reading of Scripture is limited to neither personal nor christological dimensions.
Ideally, a charismatic, prophetic, or continuationist hermeneutic is one that in addition to exegesis considers how we can live in light of the message of the text. Again, such a consideration is not unique to pentecostals; it is, however, fundamental to the identity of pentecostals. 3 I have experienced in edifying ways this personal spiritual experience of the text in Pentecostal and charismatic settings.
Too often interpreters force an artificial choice between early Christians’ christological interpretation of Scripture and applying Scripture in other God-honoring ways consistent with the text’s message. Although some texts were considered expressly messianic, in many other cases christological readings were simply application par excellence, applying principles about God’s way of working with his people to the ultimate embodiment of his people’s salvation.
Some emphasize reading Scripture through the eyes of subsequent Christian creeds. Valuable as these creeds are for addressing the issues that they had to confront, early Christian interpreters were not interested exclusively in how to explain the relationship between Jesus’s divinity and humanity (essential as both of these affirmations are; see, e.g., Rom 10:9, 13; 1 Cor 12:3; and 1 John 4:2–3). They also rightly valued imitating Jesus (1 Cor 11:1), for example, his love (cf., e.g., John 13:15, 34; Eph 5:2; 1 John 2:6), sacrifice (2 Cor 8:9; Phil 2:5–8), and humility (2 Cor 10:1). Likewise, though Luther’s approach was heavily christocentric, he also applied this concern to pastoral application. Indeed, without Luther’s pastoral application of Paul’s teaching (generalizing to legalism Paul’s more specific concern about misapplying Torah), the Reformation as we know it might never have happened (although a more gradual Erasmian reform movement may have also had some advantages). 4
Stephen’s Christocentric Interpretation
Acts 7 fleshes out the kinds of interpretation that Luke presumably had in mind when he spoke of Jesus’s application of the OT to himself (Luke 24:27, 44–45). Charged with speaking against the law and the temple, Stephen shows his own respect for and knowledge of the law, while also challenging his critics’ theology of the temple.
Further, following the common ancient forensic strategy of returning charges against one’s accusers and the occasional strategy of connecting evildoers with evildoing ancestors, Stephen charges his critics with continuing the ancestral pattern of rejecting God’s deliverers. Because Scripture already promised a supreme prophet like Moses (Deut 18:15–18), Stephen can observe one way that Jesus would be like Moses: he would be a rejected deliverer (Acts 7:35–40, esp. 37). Stephen highlights the same characteristic for Joseph.
Stephen’s linkage of Joseph and Moses, however, is not a mere rhetorical connection contrived for the situation. Instead, it draws on literary connections already evident in the early biblical history of God’s people. 5 This makes sense as a canonical reading of Hebrew Scripture as a unity; it makes sense even from the standpoint of narrative design, since the Joseph and Moses narratives in something resembling their current form certainly appear to have belonged to the same cycle of narratives (see table on p. 240). 6
The history that Stephen surveys in Acts 7 climaxes with Jesus, and it is appropriate for scholars to speak of Luke’s ancient Christian approach as christocentric. Posing a diametric either-or between christocentric interpretation and all other applications, however, is unhelpful. The narrative also climaxes, appropriately for one returning accusers’ charges, in a hostile response; this narrative evokes the familiar ancient Jewish motif of the rejected prophets. 7 Stephen teaches about the unfaithfulness of God’s people as well as that, contrary to ideas of some of his contemporaries, God’s supreme presence was not limited to any one earthly site.
Moreover, in the conclusion of Acts 7, Stephen himself fits the rejected deliverer paradigm; his hearers continue to “resist the Holy Spirit” who had inspired the earlier prophets (7:51–52; cf. 7:55). During his martyrdom, Stephen deliberately echoes Jesus’s passion in Luke’s first volume, committing himself to his Lord and praying for forgiveness for his persecutors (7:59–60; Luke 23:34, 46). That is, biblical leadership ideals sometimes not only foreshadow Jesus, the ultimate leader, but sometimes they also apply to those who more knowingly follow and imitate Jesus. 8
Joseph (Gen 37–50)
Moses (Exod 2–12)
Brothers sold him into slavery (37:27)
Family, who were slaves, rescued him from slavery (1:13–14; 2:2–9)
Midianites sold Joseph into Egypt (37:28, 36)
Midianites received Moses when he fled Egypt (2:15–22)
Joseph became “father” to Pharaoh (45:8)
Moses became son to Pharaoh’s daughter (2:5–10)
In one day, Joseph was exalted from slavery, over Egypt
In one day, Moses lost his royalty in Egypt by identifying with slaves
Joseph made all Egypt Pharaoh’s slaves (47:19)
Moses freed slaves; through him God judged Pharaoh’s might
Joseph from Jacob’s house to Egypt as a deliverer
Moses from Pharaoh’s house from Egypt as a deliverer
Joseph’s God delivered Egypt in famine
Moses’s God struck Egypt with plagues
Joseph, exiled in Egypt, married an Egyptian (41:45, 50)
Moses, exiled from Egypt, married a Midianite (2:15, 21; cf. Num 12:1)
Asenath’s father was priest of On (41:50)
Zipporah’s father was priest of Midian (2:16)
Asenath bore two initial sons, the name of the first reflecting his father’s sojourn in a foreign land (41:51)
Zipporah bore two initial sons, the name of the first reflecting his father’s sojourn in a foreign land (2:22)
God raised him up to bring Israel to Egypt
God raised him up to bring Israel out of Egypt
Future deliverer’s leadership initially rejected by his brothers (37:4, 8, 11)
Future deliverer’s leadership initially rejected by his people (2:14)
This broader interpretive paradigm continues in Acts. Indeed, a doubly confirmed 9 vision leads to transforming centuries of the dominant approach to a significant portion of the law. 10 The book’s final narrative scene, culminating in its final biblical quotation, revisits Jesus’s explanation of Isaiah 6 in Luke 8:10. Quoting Isa 6:9–10, Paul, like Jesus, recognizes the hardness of God’s people (Acts 28:26–27). Paul recognizes that Isaiah addressed the prophet’s own generation: “The Holy Spirit rightly told your ancestors through Isaiah the prophet . . .” (28:25). Yet Luke’s context makes it clear that Paul is applying that same principle to his own generation. Acts’ open ending probably suggests that Luke also expects his audience to recognize their own mission as part of his narrative’s trajectory. 11 This application is ecclesial and missional.
Matthew’s Christocentric Reading
Few NT passages have been criticized for taking the OT out of context more than Matthew’s use of Hos 11:1 (“Out of Egypt have I called my son”) in Matt 2:15. 12 In context, Hosea plainly refers to God delivering Israel from Egypt (the verse’s first line reads, “When Israel was just a child, I loved him”), whereas Matthew applies the text to Jesus. Yet Matthew appears to know the verse better than we assume: instead of depending on the common LXX version of Hosea here (“his children”), he offers his own more precise translation from the Hebrew (“my son”).
The apparent problem arises because we assume that Matthew was reading Hos 11:1 exclusively as an express messianic prophecy, when in fact Matthew’s own context suggests that he was making instead an analogy. This is not the only place where Matthew compares Jesus with Israel: for example, as Israel was tested in the wilderness for forty years, Jesus was tested there forty days (Matt 4:1–2). Moreover, Matthew also knows Hosea’s context: as God once called Israel from Egypt (Hos 11:1), he would bring about a new exodus and salvation for his people (Hos 11:10–11). 13 Jesus appears here as the harbinger, the pioneer, of this new era of salvation for his people. 14
In the same context, Matthew applies Jer 31:15 (where Rachel weeps over Israel’s exile) to the slaughter of infants in Bethlehem (Matt 2:17–18), near which Rachel was buried (Gen 35:19). Again Matthew may evoke the quoted verse’s context: offering an implicit connection with Hos 11:1, which Matthew has just cited, Jer 31:20 calls Israel’s God’s son. 15 Further, after announcing Israel’s tragedy, God promises restoration (Jer 31:16–17) and a new covenant (Jer 31:31–34; cf. Matt 26:28). Matthew thus may compare this tragedy in Jesus’s childhood to one in Israel’s history because he expects his first, biblically knowledgeable hearers to recognize that such tragedy formed the prelude to messianic salvation.
Matthew also seems to know the context of Isa 7:14, the verse that he quotes in Matt 1:23; the context apparently remains fresh in Matthew’s mind when he quotes Isa 9:1–2 in Matt 4:15–16. 16 In the context, Isaiah was warning Judah’s king, Ahaz, not to join the northern coalition of Israel and Aram against Assyria. As a sign to him that God would be with Judah (“God with us”), a child would be born. This child would signify that Israel and Aram would be crushed by Assyria while the child was still young (Isa 7:15–16). This child is undoubtedly Isaiah’s own son, who portended the swift defeat of those kingdoms (8:3–4).
Yet Isaiah himself also apparently looked beyond the immediate fulfilment to an ultimate deliverance through a greater son (9:1–7; cf. 11:1–10). Isaiah’s sons’ names were intended as signs to Israel (8:18), but ultimately there would be a son born to the house of David who would also be called “the mighty God” (9:6–7), a phrase that Isaiah surely intends in a divine way (10:21). (Surrounded by cultures that believed in divine kings, Isaiah would hardly dare have employed such language for the future king if he did not genuinely intend divine associations.) 17 That the LXX renders the mother in 7:14 a “virgin” surely seals the connection for Matthew, but he already had reasons to view Isaiah’s son from Ahaz’s day as a precursor and sign of the ultimate arrival of the one whom the same verse calls “God with us.”
Far from ignoring context, Matthew is comparing Jesus’s ministry with Israel’s history and the promises that those very literary contexts evoke. He makes after-the-fact analogies between God’s working in Israel’s earlier history and the new culmination of its history in Jesus. Although it may not be familiar to modern exegesis, Matthew’s exegesis is hardly unsophisticated.
Matthew’s attention to larger contexts continues in Matthew 12. Because Jesus is empowered by God’s Spirit to cast out demons (12:28), he fulfills a prophesied mission. 18 That mission is clear to Matthew’s audience because Matthew has just quoted a passage in Isaiah about God’s servant endued with the Spirit (12:18). Isaiah’s servant would initially be gentle rather than like a warrior (12:19–20; cf. 11:29; 21:5). That passage would be particularly noteworthy in Matthew’s Gospel because Matthew has conformed its translation to fit the language of Matt 3:17, where a heavenly voice announces Jesus’s mission. 19
In the context in Isaiah, God originally gave this servant mission to Israel, but because Israel disobeyed (Isa 42:18–20), God raised up a figure within Israel to bring the people back to himself (49:5; 53:4–6, 11). The context in Isaiah further shows that the servant would bless not only his own people, but also the Gentiles (42:6; 49:6; 52:15), perhaps also announcing good news of God’s reign (52:7). Because Matthew may find in Isaiah itself a connection between the mission of God’s people and that of the one who would fulfill that mission on their behalf, Isaiah might even serve as a model for Matthew’s connections between Jesus and Israel.
Matthew’s Interpretive Interests
Matthew’s use of Scripture is primarily christological; because he is writing a biography of Jesus (in the ancient sense) it comes as no surprise that his interest is particularly in Christ. Indeed, given Matthew’s (and our) belief in Jesus’s divine status (e.g., Matt 1:23; 18:20; 28:18–20), focus on Christ and therefore christocentric applications of Scripture would undoubtedly be paramount for him (and us) in any case.
But Matthew’s approach is not exclusively directly about Christ. Recall his emphasis on compassion more than sacrifice (9:13; 12:7), or comments that he includes about the law’s true demands (5:21–48), the obduracy of God’s people (13:14–15), God’s design for marriage (19:4–6), the temple’s desecration (21:13), and so forth. I briefly treated some of these themes above.
Exegetes today will also recognize that Matthew’s approach is considerably more sophisticated than the undisciplined sort of typology found later in the Epistle of Barnabas, Origen, and others. 20 Even Hebrews is more disciplined than later works; it does not, for example, actually allegorize all the details of the tabernacle the way some popular interpreters today do. (Its correspondence between heavenly and earthly sanctuaries fits the Middle Platonic ideals of Alexandrian Jewish interpretation in this period, but is also consistent with ancient Near Eastern links between the heavenly house of the deity and earthly imitations.) 21
Even when the earliest Christian interpreters recognized that Christ epitomized a biblical model or principle, for example the righteous sufferer of the psalms, that does not mean that we cannot extrapolate additional lessons from those principles. Early Christian application to the righteous sufferer par excellence does not strip these texts of the value of their earlier, more general application. (The psalmist himself was probably thinking more generally than the christological application, and most of us would not want to say that the psalmist’s applications to himself or to Israel were mistaken.)
Early Christian christocentric interpretation rightly warns us to keep our focus on Christ, as did Jesus’s first followers. 22 Matthew’s example, however, illustrates that their christocentric focus does not minimize the possibility of other, additional applications. 23 That is not to suggest that all exegetes today should handle these texts the way that Matthew did. It is simply to say that if we must interpret our lives and experience in light of Scripture, we will have to apply Scripture as well as exegete it. And in doing so, we should keep first the most central matters, such as God’s plan that climaxes in our Lord Jesus, and how that plan invites us to respond.
Other Analogies in the Gospels
Biblical analogies are not exclusively christological. If many charismatics have sometimes overapplied analogies by transferring primarily apostolic or other individual gifts (or occasionally, in the worst cases, messianic prerogatives) to all believers, they have often simply overcompensated for the lack of adequate transferral offered by many other inattentive observers. Evangelists such as Luke and Matthew naturally had particular interest in analogies with Christ, given both their biographic subject and their (and our) faith in Christ. Nevertheless, they also recognized other analogies between more recent saving events and those of earlier Scripture.
One may note, for example, the echoes of Hannah (in 1 Sam 2) in Mary’s song in Luke 1, toward the very beginning of Luke’s two-volume work. 24
1 Samuel 2:1–10
Luke 1:46–55
God exalts lowly (2:1, 4–5, 8)
God exalts lowly (1:48, 52–53)
I rejoice in your salvation (2:1)
I have rejoiced in God my savior (1:47)
No one holy like the Lord (2:2)
Holy is his name (1:49)
Proud brought down (2:3–5)
Proud brought down (1:51–53)
Humble exalted, proud brought down (2:4–5)
Humble exalted, proud brought down (1:52–53)
Celebration of God’s sovereignty in such reversals (2:3, 6–9)
Celebration of God’s sovereignty in such reversals (1:51–53)
Barren given children (2:5)
(Context: Elizabeth’s pregnancy)
Poor vs. rich (2:7–8)
Rich empty-handed (1:53)
Hungry vs. full (2:5)
Filled the hungry (1:53)
Poor displacing nobles (dunastōn, 2:8)
Brought down rulers (dunastas, 1:52) [same term]
Raises up from death (2:6)
(Implicit Lukan subtext?)
Shift from personal deliverance to God’s anointed king (2:10)
Shift from personal deliverance to Israel’s deliverance
In fact, they were ready to recognize parallels among events of recent saving history, just as they did regarding the Old Testament. Not only does Luke recognize parallels among Joseph, Moses, and Jesus (as in Acts 7); he also recognizes parallels and contrasts among figures from the very beginning of his Gospel. Thus one may note the conspicuous parallels and contrasts between Zechariah, the respected, aged priest serving in Jerusalem’s temple, and Mary, a virgin in the village of Nazareth: 25
Luke 1:12: the vision’s recipient troubled
Luke 1:29: the vision’s recipient troubled
1:13: do not be afraid
1:30: do not be afraid
1:13: reason for miracle
1:30: reason for miracle
1:13: child’s name (John)
1:31: child’s name (Jesus)
1:15: child will be great
1:32: child will be great
1:15: filled with the Holy Spirit from the womb
1:35: conceived through the Holy Spirita
1:16–17: mission
1:32–33: mission
1:18: question
1:34: question
1:19–20: proof or explanation
1:35–37: proof or explanation
1:20: Zechariah muted for unbelief
1:38, 45: Mary praised for faith
1:80: child grows
2:40, 52: child growsb
a. For the contrasting role of the Spirit in John’s and Jesus’s prenatal experience, see Tatum, “Epoch,” 188–89.
b. I have omitted less obvious parallels such as circumcision (Luke 1:59; implicit in 2:21) or “favor” for both Elizabeth (1:25) and Mary (1:30). Flender, Theologian, 29, helpfully views the contrast between Mary and Zechariah in light of a series of contrasts, often between religious insiders and others, in the Gospel (Luke 7:36–50; 10:29–37; 14:15–24; 15:24–32; 18:9–14; 20:45–21:4).
Yet Luke also follows with conspicuous parallels between Jesus in Luke’s Gospel and Jesus’s movement in the book of Acts, both in the Jerusalem church movement (exemplified especially but not exclusively in Peter) and in the Gentile mission (exemplified especially in Paul). 26
Some of these parallels appear already in Mark (not surprisingly, since ancient narratives often included such echoes and parallels). 27 For example, John’s coming in the wilderness prefigures Jesus’s time in the wilderness (Mark 1:4, 12); his execution foreshadows that of Jesus (6:16; 9:11–13); the faithfulness of John’s disciples in burying him highlights the unfaithfulness of Jesus’s disciples at his passion (6:29; 14:50), fitting a Markan theme. Likewise, the summary of John’s message in Matthew (Matt 3:2) prepares for both Jesus’s message (4:17) and that of his followers (10:7; 28:18–20).
In Mark, Jesus’s suffering prefigures that of his followers (Mark 8:34; 10:39; 13–15). Even in Mark’s concise introduction, Jesus the Spirit-baptizer (1:8) becomes the model of the Spirit-baptized life: the Spirit descends on him at his baptism (1:10) and then thrusts him into the wilderness to face testing from the devil (1:12–13). Afterward Jesus begins expelling demons (1:25–26) and continues facing hardship; he expects his disciples to share both his power (6:7; 9:28–29; 11:21–25; perhaps 4:40) and, as noted, his sufferings. 28 Application does not, therefore, stop with Jesus, but follows to the lives of disciples through the example of Jesus.
Scholars use the term “meaning” in different ways; some define it in a way that includes what I mean here by “application.” Some, for example, speak of respecting both the “plain meaning” and the “multiple meanings” that texts can acquire in usage 29 —what some earlier interpreters called a meaning with multiple applications. 30 Regardless of nomenclature, meaning functions differently for different contexts. Thus, for example, by “All men are created equal” the framers of the Declaration of Independence in fact meant only men, and in practice only adult, property-owning free males. Yet most readers today happily approach the valid element of the principle in light of our fuller understanding of humankind than the original authors embraced. 31
Distinctions in terminology can be helpful for practical reasons; although exegesis and contextualization overlap, for example, distinguishing them allows us to conceptualize the process more precisely. 32 Nevertheless, different labels used by different approaches sometimes overlap in meaning more than their detractors admit. 33 Words communicate meaning because they connote a range of ideas within particular linguistic and cultural frameworks; the general English meaning of “meaning” is broad enough to include a range of ideas, and arguments about which sense of the term is normative may be essentially struggles to control a definition within a particular community.
Because I have little interest in semantic arguments over definitions here, I explain here how I am using the contested but by themselves polyvalent terms, so as to define more specifically the aspects of the broader concept that I address here. I am distinguishing the senses first communicated in an ancient setting (the inspired author’s sense designed for an intended audience insofar as we can discern it, and the senses received by real early audiences) from the ways we can receive these texts today.
I suggest that we receive the original communication most respectfully, and recognize its authority most fully, when our understanding for new situations (our “application”) flows from our understanding of the sense it was originally designed to communicate. Relevance theory shows that a wider linguistic and social context must inform our understanding of a communication; acquiring such context requires even more work in the case of secondary communication—when, as in the case of works originally addressed to a different setting, we are reading someone else’s mail (e.g., Rev 2:7a, 11a, 17a, 29a; 3:6a, 13a, 22a).
Admittedly, my academic commentaries tend not to emphasize application. This is not because application is unimportant to those who read biblical texts as Scripture. It is because, first of all, the genre of academic commentaries focuses on ways of reading that are more widely embraced by the academy. It is also because, second, appropriate application is generally indigenous, and is as varied as the contexts to which the principles are meant to be applied. One cannot produce universal applications except in a generalized and usually obvious form. 34 Nevertheless, when I read Scripture personally, I do hear the Spirit applying it to my concerns (and should-be concerns), whether to my life or to the needs of the world more generally. Likewise, when we preach, sensitive pastors care about their congregations’ practical reception of the message. Whether reading Scripture for personal devotion or for preaching, we are hopefully moved to pray regarding its message. 35
In Scripture we often learn of those who heard God’s voice for their generation in connection with earlier Scripture; it was not simply a matter of historical interest. Deuteronomy already foretold severe judgment for God’s people if they broke his covenant (Deut 27–28). In 2 Kgs 22:15–20, however, the prophetess Huldah applies the prophetic message accurately to her generation. Many judgments proclaimed by the prophets echoed the curses of the covenant that Israel had broken. Jeremiah expressly cites his predecessors the true prophets (Jer 26:17–19; 28:8).
The psalmist can emphasize God’s kindness in the events of the exodus (e.g., Pss 74:13; 78:11–16; 105:25–45; 106:8–12; cf. Neh 9:9–15), evoking praise (Ps 105:45). Yet the psalmist can also use the same events to highlight Israel’s disobedience (78:11, 17–20, 32–37, 40–43; 95:9–11; 106:7, 13–33; cf. 78:8; Neh 9:16–18), to highlight God’s mercy and powerful acts of covenant love (Ps 78:4, 23–29, 38–39, 42–55; Neh 9:19–25, 32) and the righteousness of his judgments (Ps 78:21–22, 31, 34), to challenge the sins of the psalmist’s day (95:7–8; 106:6), to explain the reason for Israel’s sufferings (106:40–43; cf. Neh 9:33–37), and to cry out for mercy and deliverance (Pss 74:19–23; 106:44–47; cf. Neh 9:32).
When Daniel considers the message of Jeremiah (Dan 9:2), he wants to see the relevance of Jeremiah for his own era. He is not merely interested in the causes of the past exile out of curiosity. He repents for the sin that led to exile (9:3–6), and looks for the fulfillment of God’s promises, which he expects in his era. Jeremiah’s seventy years become seventy sevens of years in the new, inspired application received by Daniel (Jer 29:10; Dan 9:2, 24). We may dispute which promises pertain to our own era, but since the outpoured Spirit clearly does (Acts 2:17–18), we, like Daniel, should expect that we live in an era of fulfillment.
New Testament writers often understood present experience in light of analogies with earlier figures in the Bible. For example, the conspicuously visionary (hence necessarily “charismatic”) book of Revelation regularly reapplies OT images. Revelation’s Old Testament allusions rarely apply OT language such that the OT passages are taken as direct prophecies of the events mentioned in Revelation. Rather, they involve events of the same kind. The author inhabits the text so thoroughly that he envisions for almost everything he depicts prior biblical analogies and expectations based on the way that God has worked.
When Revelation pervasively alludes to OT texts (though it never explicitly quotes them in the traditional way), then, it is not elaborating an exegesis of those texts. For example, the judgments associated with trumpets and bowls of God’s anger evoke the plagues on Egypt in the book of Exodus, but virtually no one suggests that Revelation is simply rehearsing what happened to Egypt centuries before. Revelation is examining God’s judgments on the world through the lens of God’s past activity; thus the “great city” on which judgment falls is called “Sodom and Egypt ” (Rev 11:8).
Likewise, when John hears a lament over fallen Babylon, borrowing the language of Isaiah and Jeremiah for the fall of an oppressive empire, he is not contemplating merely historical information about the Babylon that fell to Persia centuries before he wrote. He is thinking of another evil empire that was now oppressing God’s people and that had destroyed the temple, and probably more generally of the spirit of evil empire that has continued in history beyond his day. 36
Perhaps most strikingly, John’s revelation sometimes even supplants the literal sense of OT promises. Thus, for example, his contemporaries who heard Ezekiel 40–48 would presumably expect a glorious new temple, with specified dimensions, when God restored his people. 37 John, however, saw no temple in the New Jerusalem—because God and the lamb would be the temple (Rev 21:22), and God would dwell among his people (21:3). Because the New Jerusalem is shaped like the holy of holies and is unimaginably more magnificent than Ezekiel’s vision (Rev 21:16), no one could complain.
Ezekiel’s symbolic vision had offered only a partial glimpse of glory, one expanded in the symbolism of Revelation. “In the expansive tendency of ancient Jewish and Christian end-time expectation, a greater fulfillment was never an abrogration of less exalted hopes. Rather, it was a yet better way to envision that which was beyond mere words and images to describe.” 38 Ultimately, in human language only poetry and symbolism can attempt to evoke the glory that awaits; only the Spirit can provide a fuller taste of what that glory means (1 Cor 2:9–10).
Personal Applications Consistent with Scripture
Applying by analogy a principle on which the text draws often helps us to hear that principle more concretely. Reading about the Lord swallowing up death in Isa 25:8, a teenage Pentecostal took encouragement about God’s compassion and power. 39 Another highlighted God’s defense of the needy in 25:4 and applied it to her own situation in which a nonbeliever in crisis had just asked her for prayer. 40 Such readings do apply genuine elements of the passage’s message about God’s character.
Likewise, it seems clear that texts can convey implications beyond the original author’s direct concern, where the author draws on principles that communicate in wider settings. Thus, for example, the admonition against being drunk with “wine” in Eph 5:18 originally applied to the typical ancient admixture of water and fermented grape juice; but the principle applies no less to being drunk with beer, vodka, or other substances. 41
The Spirit Speaks through Scripture
Some scholars, appropriately focused on the larger covenant implications of Scripture, sometimes overreact against the modern Western emphasis on individualistic fulfillment by downplaying any role for personal application. A characteristic of the new covenant, however, is that all believers are to experience the Spirit’s activity in our lives (e.g., Acts 2:17–18; Rom 8:4–16; 2 Cor 3:3). Surely at the least this recognition should include the Spirit bringing to our attention the implications of biblical principles for our lives as we read Scripture (see 2 Cor 3:15–18). Thus the Spirit may draw from texts wider analogies, beyond the direct communication to the first audience, that are nevertheless consistent with the text and with the larger framework of the Spirit’s message in biblical theology.
Unlike continuationists, in fact, some cessationists treat personal illumination of Scripture as the Spirit’s nearly exclusive way of speaking today. 42 Yet both continuationists and cessationists affirm the Spirit’s role in illumination, 43 even if many charismatics emphasize illumination more heavily, 44 and, like others, sometimes incorrectly. 45 Church fathers also insisted on the need for divine illumination in understanding Scripture. 46 Some theologians today emphasize a continuity between original inspiration and subsequent illumination; 47 while such language is open to abuse, 48 Christians in general agree that the Spirit who acted in inspiration remains active in providing understanding. 49
Affirming illumined application does not mean that every reading of Scripture in light of our situation stems from the Spirit’s illumination. Obviously anyone can simply read their situation into the text. At the same time, issues in the text do address fundamental issues in our lives, and we do not usually need an extraordinary sort of revelation to recognize that.
By way of illustration, when a senior colleague at one institution was apparently seeking to discredit Christian faith and I was seeking to defend it, I wanted to simply withdraw from debate, but I discovered that Proverbs warns a righteous person not to give way before the wicked (Prov 25:26). I maintained my position, and by God’s grace the students largely came out all right. Yet I had also prayed based on Prov 16:7 that God would give me peace even with my enemies, and the colleague and I became friends.
Sometimes guidance comes in ways that are, to varying degrees, extraordinary. At other times, including often when we read Scripture, we simply do our best to discern what God is saying or at least what is the wisest course (Prov 14:15; 22:3; 27:12), and we live with some ambiguity (cf., e.g., 1 Kgs 21:29; 2 Kgs 2:3, 5, 16; Prov 25:2; Luke 7:18–21; Acts 21:4–14; 1 Cor 13:9; 14:30–32; Rev 10:4) but trust God anyway. 50 Our trust is not in the perfection of our ability to hear God, but in his power to direct our steps (Prov 16:9; 20:24). If we do our best to hear him and obey what we sincerely believe is his will, he will lead us even in ways that we cannot recognize at the time.
Models for Personal Application in Scripture
Scripture indicates that believers have long appropriated many biblical models personally as well as corporately. For example, the ram in the story of Abraham offering Isaac (Gen 22:13) functions sacrificially like a “lamb” (Gen 22:7–8), probably on one level prefiguring Passover for Israelite hearers. But ancient hearers would have also learned other lessons from this passage, including a lesson about God relevant for their own lives. Gen 22:14 shows that this account was still being applied in the writer’s day as a saying: “In the mountain YHWH will provide.” Some Israelites probably were using this saying proverbially as a statement of their own faith in God’s provision.
Paul’s Jewish contemporaries often read the story of Israel’s election in the Old Testament as a story of an ethnic people; Paul reads it especially as a story of God’s grace to the undeserving (witness the behavior of most of Jacob’s sons toward Joseph!). In Paul’s view, it could be applied personally to all who, like biblical Israel when they kept the covenant, embraced God’s grace without claiming to deserve it (cf. Rom 9; also 8:28–30).
Thus in Romans 4, Abraham is not simply the historical ancestor of the Jewish people; more importantly, for Paul, Abraham is the father of all who, like Abraham, have faith, trusting God’s faithfulness. Paul applies Genesis here to all who individually become members of the covenant people.
Basic to Paul’s use of historical narrative is looking for models for believers, and Jewish people already used Abraham and Sarah as moral models in addition to their function as ancestors of God’s people. Of course, the reason Paul selects Abraham in particular is also salvation-historical, but this foundational role of Abraham’s faith (even in God’s promise in the face of deadness, Rom 4:19; cf. 4:24) grounds rather than reduces the application value in Rom 4:1–5:11. In 1 Corinthians 10 Paul uses the sinful wilderness generation as a negative example (cf. also Heb 3:7–12, 15–19; 4:6); as already noted, it was already being used that way in ancient Israel (Ps 78:5–8).
The writer of Hebrews similarly looks to earlier biblical characters for models, most extensively in Hebrews 11. For example, Joseph foresaw Israel’s return to the promised land when he instructed his relatives to take his bones there when God would bring them there (Gen 50:25; Exod 13:19). The author of Hebrews is correct in seeing this as an example of faith in God’s promise (Heb 11:22).
Reading Biblical Narratives for Models
Here, in the context of application, I revisit earlier comments about reading biblical narrative. Sometimes readers read positively negative models in Scripture, or read desired models into passages that do not offer them. Looking for models can be done in an undisciplined way that ignores the shape of the inspired texts; careful handling of context is always paramount. (I address some negative examples later in the book, pp. 268–73, although that is not the primary focus of this book.)
Nevertheless, reading Scripture and experience together has a long and positive legacy; it is the way the NT writers understood the OT (in light of their experience of Christ) as well as the way that many people throughout history have read Scripture. Thus, for example, in 1 Corinthians 10 Paul read Israel’s sin in the wilderness as a negative example for his day, recognizing the continuity of God’s character, and hence of God’s judgment, for Paul’s time (1 Cor 10:1–10). Paul narrates the judgments Israel experienced for its sins, and warns, “These things befell them to provide an example, and they were written down to provide a warning for us, on whom the ends of the ages have come” (10:11). Indeed, patristic writers also appealed to biblical characters as examples to follow. 51
As noted earlier, one particularly in-house debate among Pentecostal scholars has been whether the narrative of Acts provides a normative model. In contrast to some traditional Pentecostal scholars, the careful exegete and Pentecostal scholar Gordon Fee expressed concern with deriving theology from narrative as confidently as we derive it from Paul’s letters. He acknowledges the value of repeated patterns, but argues that the specific teaching of a narrative must be limited to its intention.
Fee’s current way of expressing his position would likely arouse less dissent, 52 but I believe that we can learn more about narrators’ intention—or at least narratives’ purposeful shape—than some of his earlier discussions of the subject appeared to recognize. Ancient historians and biographers expected us to find models in their narratives, whether positive or negative ones. How we identify which ones are positive, negative, or mixed of course requires a great deal of careful thought (part of Fee’s point), but the same is (as Fee would agree) no less true of Paul’s letters, which themselves address concrete situations in the lives of churches. That is, even Paul’s letters have a sort of narrative context.
Clearly not all models in narratives are positive, and most significant characters are round mixtures of positive and negative features, as was usual in ancient biographies and histories. Nevertheless, narratives often provide internal cues concerning how to learn from them. Sometimes narratives indicate explicitly that a character is positive. For example, Matthew specifies that Joseph, Mary’s husband, was righteous (Matt 1:19). While this observation does fulfill a sort of christological function—ancient biographies could praise protagonists by reporting pious ancestry or upbringing—it also offers Joseph as a positive moral model.
Custom mandated divorce if the wife or betrothed were deemed unfaithful; Joseph could have profited by divorcing Mary publicly, but even though he believes that he has been wronged, he chooses a private divorce to reduce her shame (1:19). He also embraces that shame in obedience to an angelic message (1:24), and exercises self-control, abstaining from intercourse so that this would be not merely a virgin conception but also a virgin birth (1:25). Connections with Jesus’s teaching about lust, divorce (Matt 5:27–32), and compassion (9:13), as well as contrasts with Herod’s sinful lack of self-control (14:3–11), reinforce this emphasis.
Sometimes narratives praise a character but also qualify that praise. John as more than a prophet (Matt 11:9) correctly understands that Jesus will baptize in the Spirit and fire (3:11), even though pouring out God’s Spirit was an exclusively divine prerogative. Yet John also doubts Jesus’s role, precisely because he hears about Jesus’s ministry (11:2–3). Jesus is healing some sick people rather than baptizing in fire; Jesus has to reframe his ministry in language that evokes for John Isaiah’s prophecies of restoration (11:5–6, evoking Isa 35:5–6; 61:1), showing that these acts do indeed portend and reveal the kingdom. John is a positive character but by virtue of his location in history he is also limited in his knowledge.
Often characters appear side by side, allowing us to learn by comparison and contrast. Greek and Roman speakers often compared figures in their speeches, 53 but the practice is much older than that. In 1 Samuel, for example, one may note the contrast between humble Hannah and proud Eli (as well as Peninnah); the contrast between Samuel and Eli’s sons (1 Sam 2:12–18; 2:26–3:1; 3:13); and the contrasts between David and Saul.
Patterns for Us, Not Just Annals
Just as I have heard some popular charismatic teachers ignore literary and historical context, I have listened to some rigorous historical scholars (and, for different reasons, some biblical theologians) deny that some biblical texts, such as OT historical books, should be used for pastoral application. Such use, they contend, violates the texts’ original function as annals.
Granted, the controlling thrust of such texts in their current form is often to explain the causes of exile, justifying God’s anger and promising future restoration. But the same thrust warns against the sins that led to the exile, such as idolatry, sexual immorality, and the shedding of innocent blood. Even more to the present point, such sins also include neglecting or refusing to heed and implement the message of the Scriptures and the warnings of God’s true prophets who stood in continuity with the earlier biblical message.
Should we search Scripture only for salvific events that are of interest to us for purely historical reasons about our heritage? That seems doubtful. We cannot deny, of course, that the narrative frame of Scripture concerns itself primarily with salvation history and God lovingly seeking to restore us to himself. God is the character about whose ways we learn consistently, and many of even the most positive human characters are weak.
Scripture focuses on David not because he walked closer to God than some of his less prominent prophetic companions, say Nathan or Gad, but because his life was a strategic step in salvation history and his line was intertwined with the promised destiny of God’s people. At the same time, if we cannot learn from his actions, then Jesus made a mistake in appealing to them in Mark 2:25–26 (cf. also Heb 11:32). If we cannot learn personally from Abraham’s walk of faith, we must discard John 8:39–40; Rom 4:1–25; Gal 3:6–7; Heb 11:8–19; and Jas 2:21–23.
As charismatic OT scholar Michael Brown asks, “And how do passages like Joshua 3, where the priests had to step into the river before the waters parted, or Luke 5, where Peter had to launch out into the deep before catching a miraculous amount of fish, speak to us today?” 54 Such texts function as models by inviting us to obey in faith whatever God commands. Certainly their emphasis is on God’s miraculous power, but they also invite a response to that power. 55 They invite us not only to praise God’s power in the past but also to trust God’s power in accomplishing his purposes today.
Returning to 1 Corinthians 10, Paul does not cite the examples from the OT and say, “That is interesting history that gets us where we are today.” He cites the judgment experienced by ancient Israel as a warning relevant for God’s people in his own day. That is, Paul reads the Bible as if it offers patterns for God’s dealings with his people. Paul expects believers to read the Bible from within its world.
An extreme cessationist could object at this point that this hermeneutic was appropriate only until the completion of the canon; yet this objection would implicitly concede that the extreme cessationist lacks any canonical evidence for their own approach, which is far more extrabiblical than the more experiential approach is. Early Pentecostals who believed that they lived in “Bible days” read the text in a sympathetic way that many purely academic approaches and hard cessationist approaches missed.
Biblical narratives offer repeated models of believers willing to be changed by their experiences of divine encounters, as we have noted in Acts 10 and other cases. This does not mean, as it did not mean for the earliest church, discarding Scripture or making one’s hermeneutic so flexible that texts can mean anything (as some might wish to do). It does mean that incontrovertible experiences invite us to reread Scripture with new questions in mind, a process that sometimes requires us to set aside previous presupposed frameworks for interpretation.
Even reading the Bible carefully often summons us to do this. As a new convert I approached the Bible with rigid expectations of how it should be written, expectations that did not fit the biblical text itself. Later, after working my entire way through a synopsis of the Gospels prior to attending seminary, I had to further adjust my expectations for how the Gospels should be written in light of the way they were in fact written. Respect for the biblical text compelled me to adjust my theological expectation to fit the text, rather than the reverse. Readers who rule out the value of experience in affecting our theology are imposing a theological construct on the Bible rather than accepting the narratives as a model.
Consistency in How We Apply Scripture
We should avoid two extremes. The first extreme treats the Bible as a series of omens, in which verses or phrases out of context speak directly to our situation. Here relevance to our interests overwhelms the original message so that our interests become a compulsive interpretive grid.
The other extreme is to read the biblical text purely for historical interest. In academic biblical studies, we often read the text this way in order to provide a necessary common ground for discussion by atheists, Christians, and other readers. This approach focuses on reconstructing the historical sense, a necessary and foundational step in understanding, and is not objectionable in itself. (My academic publications generally work within this expected paradigm.) But if we as Christian readers stop there, the text becomes simply a museum (or a mausoleum); we are not reading the text distinctively as Scripture, as God’s Word.
Indeed, questions of inspired functions aside, the historical sense of many or most kinds of texts goes beyond this. Ancient historians and essayists often had deliberative and epideictic interests—promoting improved behavior or praise of a subject, for example—rather than providing information solely for information’s sake. 56
With some kinds of texts, cessationism often, and historical criticism by virtue of definition, profess a merely historical interest. To be fair, virtually all Christians, including continuationists, believe not only that the cultural situation has changed, but that some matters change with developments in God’s plan in history. Yet most Christian readers do value principles even from texts that belong to other eras—for example, we may learn principles in Leviticus about sin, atonement, thanksgiving, and so forth without practicing all the specified sacrifices. When a cessationist interpreter must screen out the direct relevance of even testimony from Paul’s letters, however (e.g., 1 Cor 14:39), the interpreter seems to believe that Christians today live in a different era than the “last days” of Acts and the Pauline church. What is the exegetical, biblical basis for such an assumption? Or is it a theological imposition on the text?
Of course, even the most diehard cessationist will normally apply to himself some principles such as justification by faith. Such cessationism is selective; not all of Scripture is of merely historical interest. One may learn from Abraham’s faith in Gen 15:6 because Paul does so. But should we not also learn from examples more generally because Paul models how to do this? This approach provides a more consistent hermeneutic that seeks God’s living voice in all of Scripture.
Here, too, there might be wide agreement in principle, with disagreement focusing on particular genres, especially the narrative genre. Yet even in the epistles, 57 we read affirmations of spiritual gifts, exhortation to pray a prayer of faith for the sick, a prohibition to forbid speaking in tongues, and so forth. One cannot consign biblical letters to an occasional genre only where convenient. They are letters occasioned by circumstances, yet they contain principles relevant for today.
Granted, sometimes a change in culture or even a change in salvation-historical circumstances requires a significant change in how we apply the principle. Yet cessationism presupposes not a cultural change, but a supposed change in divine activity, activity that, for a gift such as prophecy, already existed before the New Testament and merely proliferated more fully in the New Testament era. The supposed change in salvation-historical circumstances that would support cessationism is nowhere directly attested in Scripture. Nor does early Christian history support the idea that miracles or a selective list of spiritual gifts, such as prophecy or tongues, ceased. And again, early Christians’ understanding of their time as the eschatological time leaves us little room for relegating the epistles to a spiritual era different from our own. 58
Yet when it comes to experiencing some other aspects of Scripture, such as appropriating in life Paul’s emphasis on justification, affirming that we are risen with Christ, and so on, a selective cessationist may equal or even surpass a charismatic reader if the latter fails to apply a consistent continuationist hermeneutic. In other words, we all need to be more consistent in applying the continuationist approach.
The Sinai covenant included outward writing on tablets of stone; the promised new covenant, by contrast, was to be written on the heart (Jer 31:31–34). Paul points to this contrast in 2 Cor 3:3, evoking also Ezek 36:26–27, where the Spirit would enable God’s people to keep his laws. 59 (Paul’s “hearts of flesh,” used in a positive way in the Greek text of 2 Cor 3:3, directly evokes the hearts of flesh that replace hearts of stone in Ezek 36:26.) 60 As servants of the new covenant, Paul explains, he and his colleagues are empowered not as ministers of the letter but as ministers of the Spirit, and therefore of life (2 Cor 3:6). 61 It is the Spirit that writes the law on the heart and therefore enables the inward righteousness to which it points.
The “letter” probably refers to “the mere written details of the law”; Jewish teachers played even with matters of spelling. 62 In antiquity, legal interpreters often distinguished between what we would call the “letter” of the law and its intention. 63 Our modern way of speaking of a contrast between the letter and spirit of the law probably goes back to Paul’s usage, though Paul refers to God’s Spirit rather than merely the “intention” of the law. 64 Grammar is valuable because it helps us to hear and obey the message, but we must not stop there. By itself, understanding textual grammar is not the same as embracing the heart of God that the text is designed to communicate.
In fact, Paul contends elsewhere that believers have been liberated from the law insofar as it is understood as letter; instead we serve God as new persons by the Spirit (Rom 7:6). Paul is not demeaning earlier parts of Scripture, or the nature of Scripture as something written. Paul is here, as we have noted elsewhere, correcting a way of approaching Scripture that, in light of Christ, can never again be thought adequate (cf. 3:27; 8:2; 9:30–32; 10:5–10). God once used a civil law to restrain sin in Israel; it is from God (7:14; 8:4), and we still may learn from it (1 Cor 9:9; 14:21). But righteousness comes from Christ, and his Spirit inscribes the heart of the law within us, so that we fulfill the real principles that the law was ultimately meant to point toward anyway (Rom 8:2–4; 13:8–10). (When Christians do not live this way they miss Paul’s point. Teachings that associate grace only with forensic justification and not also with transformation have played a tragic role in this deficiency.)
If our focus with regard to the Torah should be the Spirit’s message more than mere grammar, how much more should that be true of the prophets and what we call the New Testament? 65 Again, I should clarify that I am not demeaning exegesis; for many years I have spent most of my teaching time instructing students interested in application how to do exegesis first. Exegesis is the needed foundation for genuinely analogous application, in stark contrast to eisegesis. My point is that if we teach students or members of our church communities to stop with exegetical observations, or to simply figure out our own applications that may run contrary to the Spirit we encounter in the gospel (such as a legalistic approach to the text), we are not hearing the Spirit who inspired the text to begin with. When we truly hear the Spirit’s message in the text, we commit to it. It becomes heart work and not simply homework.
Exegesis in the usual sense focuses on the text’s original horizon; reader-oriented approaches focus on the present horizons. The former without the latter is informative but requires the life-giving breath of the Spirit to transform us. Exclusive attention to a present horizon without attention to the original one can lead to overwriting the original, inspired meaning with an unrelated one. 66 If the goal is merely fusing horizons, insufficient objective distance remains to hear the text as something other than mirroring one’s thoughts. 67 Gadamer warned “against a premature fusion of horizons which fails to preserve any tension between the past and the present.” 68
Yet the hearer must also be apprehended by the text; both horizons must be maintained. 69 “[I]f a text is to be understood, ” Thiselton notes, “there must occur an engagement between two sets of horizons. . . . The hearer must be able to relate his own horizons to those of the text.” 70 Connecting the two horizons, without obliterating either of them, is often considered the role of hermeneutics. 71 The Spirit can guide us in exploring and researching both horizons, but the Spirit is especially helpful in bridging the gap between them, in applying the principles of the text to our lives and communities. 72 As Pentecostal scholar Russell Spittler notes, “Exegesis puts one into the vestibule of truth; the Holy Spirit opens the inner door.” 73
Even John’s Gospel’s prologue sets up the epistemic contrast we earlier noted with respect to Johannine epistemology. John could have spoken of Jesus as divine Wisdom, the most common Jewish image for a preexistent divine agent, but he shifts to a related expression, the “Word,” because of the comparison between Jesus and the Torah he will offer in John 1:14–18 (most explicitly in 1:17). I have argued elsewhere that John probably responds in part to an academic, text-centered, Torah-centered critique of Jesus’s movement from people who claimed to know Scripture more accurately than the Jewish believers in Jesus that John especially addresses. 74 John responds by arguing that Jesus himself is the Word of God, embodying all the divine revelation of the Torah but now revealed more fully. 75
Various allusions to Exodus 33–34 evoke the giving of the law there, elucidating both Jesus’s continuity with earlier divine revelation and his superiority to it as a fuller revelation of God’s heart.
Exodus 33–34a
John 1:14–18
The revelation of God’s word, the Torah
The revelation of God’s word, Jesus
God dwelt among his people in the tabernacle (33:10); Moses pleaded that God would continue to dwell with them (33:14–16)
The word “tabernacled” (literally, in 1:14) among people
Moses beheld God’s glory
The disciples beheld Jesus’s glory (1:14)
The glory was full of grace and truth (34:6)
The glory was full of grace and truth (1:14)
The law was given through Moses
The law was given through Moses (1:17)
No one could see all of God’s glory (33:20)
No one could see all of God’s glory (1:18a), but it is fully revealed in Jesus (1:18b)
a. Based on the research in Keener, John, 1:405–26, this chart is taken from Keener, Background Commentary, 250.
Moses could witness only part of God’s glory, full of grace and truth, but Jesus revealed the fulness of God’s heart. Although Jesus reveals his glory also in signs in this Gospel (e.g., 2:11; 11:4), the ultimate expression of his glory begins in the cross (12:23–24; cf. 7:39), his “lifting up” (3:14; 8:28; 12:32; cf. “will be lifted up and glorified” in Isa 52:13 LXX). The place where humanity’s hatred for God came to its ultimate expression, when we nailed God to the cross, is the very place where his love for us found its ultimate demonstration.
John affirmed Jesus’s continuity with the Torah, but mere intellectual mastery of the Torah was not enough. “You pore over the Scriptures because you expect to have eternal life in them,” Jesus warns his critics. “Yet these are what testify about me, and you don’t want to come to me so you may have life” (John 5:39–40). The accuser who hauls you before the Father, he continues, “is Moses, in whom you hope,” since Moses wrote about Jesus (5:45–47).
Ultimately, for a Christian, christological reading and personal reading cannot be incompatible. As we learn our Lord’s character from the Gospels we live our relationship with him in light of that character. For example, although Jesus privately corrected his disciples when necessary, he took up their defense against their detractors, sometimes at risk to himself (three examples in Mark 2:15–28; another in John 9:38–41). This is the heart of the same Lord who went to the cross for us. He compassionately granted healing to those rejected by society (Mark 1:41) and welcomed and transformed those viewed as moral failures by their contemporaries. He challenged the proud, unafraid of the consequences, consequences that inevitably would lead to his death. As we grow to know the Jesus of Scripture, putting ourselves in the place of his first followers, we can see why they loved him and were loyal to him. One who encounters the heart of Jesus encounters the heart of God—the way he truly is, far different from human imaginations about him.
The heart of the truth that God spoke in one era will be fundamentally consistent with the truth that God speaks in another. (Note the same kind of application of principles surrounding God’s word as the Torah to the message about Jesus in Rom 10:6–8.) Christians all agree that Jesus is the climax of biblical revelation (Rom 10:4; Heb 1:1–2), but we do not always agree about the epistemology that got the apostolic church there. They made the application because of their experience of Christ. Then, of course, they had to deal with those they considered false prophets, bringing conflicting messages based on different experiences; but we cannot simply eliminate the problem of counterfeits by limiting epistemology to texts apart from experiences, for our canonical texts testify to experiences. Instead, we must learn to read the texts in tandem with the sorts of experiences the texts describe: a personal relationship with God in Jesus Christ.
A pure exegete can find many intellectual treasures in Scripture; but only a true disciple can experience the fulness of those treasures in his or her life. Again, my point is never to play down exegesis; my point is that a step beyond mere academic study of the text is embracing the text with active faith to live in the sphere of its realities, a worldview about God that transforms us. The ideal exegete, then, would be like a scribe of the Torah who becomes a disciple of the kingdom, bringing forth treasures both old and new (Matt 13:52). 76