Again, the following is for my friends who are following the Westminster situation: The Westminster situation is quite confusing to many of us. If you are not confused, you should be. Just this year there have been two startling departures of well-respected and effective faculty members. Chris Fantuzzo was let go by the administration with no departmental involvement for no stated purpose. He is a promising young scholar who had excellent student evaluations. Doug Green, after teaching for around twenty years, was forced to retire when he was told that he had violated the Westminster Standards. Though the seminary has not substantiated the claim, there were references made to Doug’s treatment of Psalm 23 in “’The Lord is Christ’s Shepherd’: Psalm 23 as Messianic Prophecy,” in Eyes to See, Ears to Hear: Essays in Memory of J. Alan Groves). This is the work that the administration told Doug that he had to revise and republish if he wanted to keep his job. (Al by the way deeply loved Doug and would be devastated at what has happened in the years since his death). Apparently somehow Doug’s Christotelic interpretation violates the unity of the Old and New Testaments according to the opinion of the administration and board of Westminster. Considering that Doug thinks that the unity of the Old and New Testaments is found in Jesus, it is hard to imagine how this charge can be substantiated. Indeed, the session of New Life Church (PCA) after reviewing Doug’s views and interviewing Dean Jue as a representative of the seminary has said that he is in conformity with the Standards. About one hundred former faculty and students of the seminary have disagreed with the seminary in a letter signed and delivered to the board and faculty. And Doug’s future employer, the seminary of the Presbyterian Church of Queensland Australia, who has been kept in touch with Doug’s views as well as Westminster’s charges, also has disagreed. This presents quite a problem for Westminster’s public relations. In spite of multiple attempts to solicit explanations, first privately and then publicly, none have been forthcoming from the seminary. They have often hidden behind “executive session” or have tried to elicit sympathy by suggesting that they are not speaking because of “loving concern for Doug.” Both are misleading in and of themselves. I may speak more at length in a future post about executive session, but anyone who knows anything about the parliamentarian process knows that it should never be used to protect the institution, but only to protect the individual, in this case Doug. The statement about not speaking “out of loving concern for Doug” is particularly egregious because it makes it seem as if Doug has something to hide. Let’s be clear: Doug does not talk because he has been bound by an agreement, but if the seminary would allow him to talk without repercussions, I have a strong suspicion that he would be willing to do so. So what does the seminary do in such a situation? It starts talking about how Jesus is the center of the whole Bible. This explains why we are suddenly deluged with a campaign asserting that Jesus is found in the Old Testament. The two most recent are David Garner’s blog post ( placefortruth.org/placefortruth/column/sine-qua-non/the-jesus-of-the-old-and-new) as well as a pamphlet mailed out to “supporters” of the Seminary by Iain Duguid. A third part of this public relations campaign is the “retirement party” being giving by the seminary for Bruce Waltke who only taught at Westminster for five years and left in 1990 and, ironically, at least he told me at the time, at least in part because the conservative constituency was constantly harassing him for being too “liberal.” After all, Bruce does affirm evolution, has no problems with multiple Isaiahs, and doesnt think that Moses wrote every word of the Pentateuch. First of all, as someone who takes Luke 24 seriously, let me say that I am happy that all the parties involved believe that Jesus is the essence, center, goal of the Bible as a whole. What is mystifying is why they have a problem with Doug who is one of the best Reformed interpreters we have today. While, as I said, I am glad David Garner sees Jesus in the Old Testament, the blog is basically filled with platitudes with which few people will disagree. But there are two telling sentences that ought to make everyone who cares about a proper reading of the Bible cringe. The first is “to read any biblical text even once without Christ obscures its real meaning.” Certainly he can’t be asking us to believe that the original audience or the human author had Christ in mind when it was written and read in the Old Testament context? Take Isaiah 7:14 as a prime example. The immediate context is clear that by the time the child of the ‘alma “knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings [Rezin and Pekah] you dread will be laid waste.” The New Testament appropriately cites this passage, but as a result of a second reading, an ultimate fulfillment that according to a fair reading of the passage would not have been in the mind of the prophet at the time. In other words, you cannot get the New Testament meaning through historical-grammatical exegesis, but only from the post-resurrection perspective of the apostles. This example could be multiplied. It is true that the broad contours of Jesus future messianic role was available before his coming (why else would he be upset with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus)?, but Garner’s position (and it appears what is becoming the official Westminster position) does not allow for the element of surprise which, of course, the New Testament itself attests to. After all, no one, and I mean no one, got it right until after the resurrection. There is an even more bizarre statement in this blog, or at least it is bizarre coming from a Reformed theologian. “Christ then comes front and center in the New Testament, because he has already done so in the Old Testament. The range of this living reality extends from individual words in isolated texts to the aggregate of the Old Testament canon. From microanalysis to macro-analysis, Jesus Christ is the substance, the Protagonist, the essence, and the completion of biblical revelation.” OK, it might be that he is just getting carried away by his own rhetoric, but if you take this seriously, he is saying we can isolate texts subject them to microanalysis and find Jesus! Wow. He sounds like Hippolytus who saw Jesus as the sachet of myrrh lodged between the woman’s breasts that stand for the Old and New Testaments (Song of Songs 1:13). Maybe he sees the Trinity in the “three stranded cord” in Ecclesiastes 4. Looks like he and Iain Duguid may not see eye because Garner’s statement leads right to the approach that Iain criticizes in the section “How Not to Read the Old Testament” Further, in both these statements he is at odds with his present New Testament colleague Vern Poythress. Poythress may not use the terminology but he advocates a two reading approach to the Old Testament. Here is a quote from Poythress: Vern Poythress, “Divine Meaning of Scripture,” WTJ 48 (1986): 241–79. Fuller-Canonical Readings are not “In” the Earlier Texts: “As a second, later, step [beyond grammatical-historical], we relate Psalm 22 to earlier canonical books and finally to the NT. Whatever we find as this stage must harmonize with the results of approach (a) [i.e., grammatical-historical reading of the passage in question]. But we come to ‘extra’ insights and deeper understandings as we relate Psalm 22 to the NT. These extra things are not ‘in’ Psalm 22 in itself. They are not somehow mystically hidden in the psalm, so that someone with some esoteric key to interpretation could have come up with them just by reading the psalm in isolation from the rest of the Bible. Psalm 22 in itself gives us only what we get from approach (a). The extra things arise from the relations that Psalm 22 has with earlier canonical books (approach (b)), with the NT, and with the events of Christ’s death. These relations, established by God, provide the basis for our proceeding another stage forward in understanding…the ‘extra’ understanding comes from the biblical canon itself, taken as a whole” (273, emphasis original). “But I am also concerned to distinguish, from a scholarly point of view, between what is ‘in’ the passage and what arises from comparison of the passage with later revelation” (276). I have some more quotes from Beale, Poythress, and others that seem to side with Doug Green’s approach to Christotelic interpretation than to Garners. Indeed, in future posts I anticipate interacting with Iain Duguid’s book Is Jesus in the Old Testament? as well as Bruce Waltke’s interpretation of Psalm 23 which is very similar in both approach and conclusions to Doug Green’s. Why then does the seminary think that Doug’s interpretation of Psalm 23 violates the unity of the Old and New Testaments? Does seeing meaning beyond that which would have been in the mind of the Old Testament author and his audience violate that unity? What about the divine Author’s intention? Does the human author’s intention exhaust the divine author’s? If so what does Peter mean when he says, “For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21) Anticipated future Posts: A Retirement Party for Bruce Waltke, Really? I love Bruce, but this is pure political theatre and Bruce knows it…. Executive Session, a Cowardly Administration’s Reason for Not Telling Us Anything Also, I have received a number of emails from current students who have encouraged me to communicate their thoughts about the toxic environment on campus
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 21:41:40 +0000
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