Transcript
Sunday, August 27, 2023
7:09 PM
So as promised, we're going to talk a little bit about theology of Scripture as a understanding for source for Christian theology. This is particularly designed for the theology certificate, the theology course, for the certificate in pastoral ministry at the Center for ministry light training, housed at Phillips seminary, I should have said in the last video, the views are entirely my own. They don't censor me, and I don't speak for them. So that doesn't mean that they necessarily disagree with me and just saying, Let the definitions fall where they are. Okay. So when we talk about sources for Christian theology, we often use what we call the Wesleyan quadrilateral that says that we draw scripture or theology from scripture, reason, tradition and experience. And so in that, there are some related there was what to think about. It's the Scripture form of that or the source of theology that is drawn from Scripture and some theological terms that are related to that, or Revelation, Canon, exegesis, and hermeneutics. So we talked about Revelation, we're talking really about ways in which God discloses God's self to us, we can't know anything about God, except that God chooses to reveal that to us. And so we think about this, and really kind of two ways. One is general revelation, God's self disclosure, disclosure, through creation and the experience of Revelation through the human senses. So you think about Psalm eight, where the psalmist says, that they look up into the heavens, and consider the moon and the stars, and the heavenly beings, bodies that God has put in place, and says, what what am I what is humanity, that You are mindful of us and our children, that you care for them, and then you know, thinks about the world, the animals and the creatures that live in the sea, and evokes the praise of God? Oh, Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name and all the earth. That's it? That's a that's a human response or a biblical example of people responding to general revelation. But special revelation is God's self disclosure through the history of the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, Israel, Israel, Judah, Judea, Jesus Christ and the church. special revelation that really is rooted in Scripture, I would say is scripture, at least the ways in which I would say that the scripture is this is not my own language, but it is the verbal residue of revelation that, that people experienced God. In the Exodus, people experienced God, in the formation of the nation of Israel, people experienced God, in the captivity and disbursement by the Babylonian invasion. They experienced God in the RE formation of the people after that. Displacement was experienced people experienced God. In Jesus Christ coming he is Emmanuel, God with us and and then out of that experience, the Pentecost experience, the formation of the church, people experienced God in this movement built around the life death, burial and resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. And so that's special revelation. And it has narrated for us in Scripture, though, in some sense, I would argue it is also distinct from it drawn from scripture, but it's not necessarily identical to Scripture. And that was be maybe the one of the ways that I would be different from say, an evangelical or strong conservative theologian, I don't say that with any level of Guile toward them. But for me, a verbal inspiration is not a doctrine that I would adhere to, though they would they would say that the words themselves have been given to the writers by God that the special revelation is the verbal recognition that it is there. So that's revelation of the word canon refers to the list of writings which a religious group regards as authoritative for Protestant Christians, which I'm assuming most of us are. For Protestant Christians, this refers to the 66 books of the Old and New Testament, you will hear many of my colleagues refer to the Old Testament as the Hebrew Bible. If I could discipline myself to refer to it as the First Testament, I think that's a better way of saying that but Theologically speaking, the Bible as we experience it, really is in those two parts, the first Testament and the New Testament, and, and that's making a theological statement, not just a descriptive statement about the language in which the books are written. This is a snapshot of a little graphic that was in the back of the first Bible I ever received. Actually, I think it was the second bible actually received but like many churches, my church just growing up, gave you a Bible when you, I think entered the first grade, but it may have been the third. And in the back of it, it had that, you know, little description. So I point this out to suggest to you that the canon, not only refers to the books of the Bible, but also their ordering. So that ordering has a theology to it. The 39 books of the Old Testament for us are the same books that you would find in the Hebrew Bible in the Jewish Scriptures. But they would refer to the Bible as Tanakh, which is an acronym for the three sections of their canon, the Torah, the Nebby, EME, and the ketubah. The law, the core testimony of God that's found in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the prophets. And that doesn't just mean the text that we define as prophets, but also books like Joshua, and First and Second Samuel are considered prophetic books. But then the writings, the key to them, are things like proverbs and Psalms, and even Daniel, I think, is in the continuum. And so there is an selfconscious theological ordering within the Jewish canon, that we don't always reflect on or get from the ways in which we have organized our scriptures, but there was some theological discernment in the ordering of Scripture. For us as Protestants, we have five sections to the Hebrew Bible law, history, poetry, Major Prophets and minor prophets. And then we have four or five, depending on how you count them. Sections of the New Testament, the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the history which tend to read as just part two of the gospel of Acts, Paul's epistles, the general epistles, and then revelation. And so, again, that's part of that Canon, what is it? What do we mean when we talk about canon in for for Protestant Christians, we're referring to the the clarification or definition, that the 66 books have a special a particular role in our theology. They are organized in a particular way. And that what's peculiar about us is that we did not we did not canonize the actual text itself, that is, what is in the Gospel of John. Originally what was in the Gospel of John is up for debate. But but for, for the Hebrew Bible for the for the Jewish Scriptures. There is not only canonization of the books, but also of what text is regarded as authoritative. There are days I wish we had done that there are days, I'm glad we didn't. But whatever it is, we didn't do it. So we're left with what we have. So those are some questions that this is all raised, right? Who determined that these books were scripture? We talk a lot about the biblical authors in our churches. But how often do we talk about who defined that, and I did not grow up reciting a creed. I belong to a denomination that does not recite a creed. And one offhanded comment that a friend of mine made back 25 years ago made me rethink the creed. And he said, the same people who gave you the canon of the New Testament gave you the creed. So I started thinking about it differently from that point forward. But who determined the order of these books? And how does that shape influence our theology? How do we reconcile ourselves with the textual differences in manuscripts since the church canonized a list of books but not the content of the book themselves? Alright, so that's all canon and conversation about the the actual text that we're looking at. exegesis refers to the process of studying a text in an effort to articulate the meaning of the text when it was written by whom it