I have composed a basic Bible dictionary to demonstrate its prophecentric nature. It is by this demonstration of its consistency that it will become clear why its central theme must radically change exegetics and theology. If it is possible to show a single, unified, and consistent theme of Scripture that must also incorrigibly be held synonymous with Christ Himself, that theme being also that from which doctrine comes, rather than a dependent product of theology, then it is this prophecy from which any notion of God, and by extension, our salvation, directly comes. There has been a longstanding assumption of Christ’s person and any idea of a biblical theme being either dominated/absorbed in a Christ concept and handled in such a way as to effectively teach a thematic and Christ confluence to the mind instead of by the Messianic revelation.
It is vitally important to understand this point, because all of our exegesis is effected by this, without us realizing it. Tim Keller is one pastor who immediately comes to mind who is closest to a correction. The Christocentric nature of Scripture is hardly a new idea, Keller at least insisting on taking the emphasis off Scripture’s correspondence to individual lives and placing it back on Christ. But the invisible damage to theology caused by the earthquake which effectively transformed Christianity into this religion of the conceptual talisman cannot of undone or controlled unless we stop attempting to construct foreign ideas about Christ and using Scripture as a support for those ideas, instead of taking them directly out of the implications of prophecy.
For so many reasons it seems as if this is not the case, to continually make our interpretative results in service of what is effectively psychology, instead of allowing it to be directly affected by the phenomena of miracle and transcendence which the oracles exclusively provide by God, but it is true as long as we continue to construct our theological superstructure from various themes, through reason, through personal need and experience, through the “doctrines,” instead of directly and only through the narrow path of the Messianic revelation, with which these can never be confused. As long as the church is presented a gospel, and offered a salvation, which accommodates as well as depends on the idea of an encounter with self, with concepts, with philosophical formulations, systems, Bible stories, social, financial, psychological priorities and needs, sin as primarily a certain movement of the body, evangelism as primarily a “gift of grace” before it is a gift of a divine Person and Word of the prophets, the “church” will continue to be destroyed and its people lost.
Evangelism is radically reset to the first-century model, for which it was believed the self-sufficient witness of the historical prophetic was all that was needed to win converts, grow the church, and sanctify believers. Any prospective believer is then forced to look through the prophetic lens alone to a vision of God, his faith becoming only as real as his understanding and knowledge of that particular revelation, removing the possibility of a false ecclesiastical theology or self-interpretation of the grounding scriptural subject to determine an approach to God. It then becomes clear that it is Messianic prophecy alone that God intended for fallen man in any subsequent spiritual wanderings to keep him on track about Him. All of Christology, ecclesiology, soteriology, anthropology, and every part of a systematic attempt to gather God into that which is more like Himself. Sharply unique, articulated, unparadoxical, unconflicted, yet revealed to the world and bottomless. Messianic prophecy as this narrow track makes both Christianity and itself stop becoming easily seen as entirely an anachronistic, incompatible notion for the modern mind or only a handy helper to life’s problems. It becomes essentially Christ, His Word, and Christianity itself, and Christ faces the world directly.
It comes to mind the question of why this return to the closest revelational equivalent to Christ has been not so much as mentioned as a possibility in previous generations. Its suggestion is only found in the passing speculations of various authors and then quickly forgotten. I believe this truth became verboten because, knowing fallen Man, it was providentially set so by the Almighty. Knowing that Man will deliberately obscure the truth just enough so that he, when left alone and far from being in danger for his disloyalty, can reward himself for it. For this reason, the truth was divinely engineered as a unique symbolic obscurity in order to demonstrate for all time the true depths of depravity into which Man can fall: the length of time, and the degree he is willing to go to be rebellious to anything that resists his will in what is still only a virtual, not yet realized, Messianic Kingdom. In time, man becomes so invested in his own systems of revelational deflection he will decide, by his true love, the cost him searching out and returning to a divine one is too great. The divine one then becomes the parabolic stumbling stone in which hidden meaning becomes impervious to any attempt at its revealing for those who do not really want answers, but only approximations on their own terms. Upon that stone, one is either broken completely and rights himself or becomes the only necessary standard for God’s punitive judgment. Messiah becomes “hidden in plain sight,” the contrast between His ultimate value and His easy rejection being the perfect encapsulation of the reality of sin. The sin of rejecting a pervious screen which invites its breach in a search for real transcendent answers, for a hardened wall made by hardened people who want only it for the hanging of a large mirror upon which they can more clearly see themselves.
I believe that the truth has now come to light at this time because we are at the cusp of history in a way that the world does not expect. We will soon be in a time when all of man’s epistemic philosophies will have nothing more to offer, and Man can no longer afford to play forever around the fringes of meaning. He will have to then “fish or cut bait.”
Sadly, the return to the original faith becomes the only alternative when the faith of Man has proven itself unworthy of God and unredeemable. This return to the original faith will be again short-lived. As it did in the beginning, the World will come after it for its crucifixion. But until then, Man’s impatience will increase proportionately with the clarity, elegance, power, spiritual invasiveness, and implications of the original conception of revelation which forces the head of Man downward in the face of true deity in a way that cannot be credited to his wrought imaginative systems.
The Bible dictionary before you is not intended to be comprehensive, but only a primer. It is up to the reader to make the unhandled connections where they seem warranted.
Most of our examples concern New Testament symbolism because it deals directly with symbolic meaning as opposed to the symbolic form, form being the Old Testament function. The Old Testament presents a prophetic form with its fulfilled meaning promised but not yet realized. The New Testament presents both the form (symbol) and holds out its now palpable fulfillment (meaning). Here, the reference to the Old Testament in the meaning of a biblical symbol is often only necessary to the extent that a certain prophetic text is cited since it is the prophetic stream of Scripture itself that functions the symbol of its future fulfillment. But the New Testament resolution of that Old Testament symbol is the key to both all Old Testament symbolism and to its own.
The Bible dictionary here is intentionally written in unscholarly attention to detail because the world’s view of scholarship is one of the very reasons why this unique and original approach to scriptural interpretation has remained so foreign to exegesis, both within academia and on the church pew. The reader must accept the fact that “the world,” as I and the New Testament understand it, is an attempt by man to forge his own revelation by the sweat of his brow and brain, this being done by the technique of creating a gratuitous presumption and opacity of meaning so as to necessitate a long-term struggle for its eventual clarification, which never comes not only for the opaque method but no less because it is never really wanted. This struggle is our scholarship. The most earth-shattering and substantially transformative spiritual truths are simple and too accessible and obvious for the intelligentsia of fallen man.
Scholarship was never supposed to be anything that was unlike Moses standing in the gap between irrational fear and the sublime. The volume at which God spoke on the mount to the children of Israel in Sinai, at which they begged Moses not to allow their hearing of it again and thus necessitating the law and God’s mediation, is the same volume of Jesus’s preaching of a New Law and his own mediation, except that spiritual volume, although it is something just as palpable, is now something resonating quietly in the spirit. A refusal to hear it again necessitates a kind of symbolism to stand between man and meaning before he is proven worthy of it. When a struggle for meaning is not expected if it is revealed, New Testament exegesis requires a simple statement of its meaning which is so powerful and inarguable that any obscurity must automatically be shifted where it belongs: to the overwrought exegetical systems and methods of man and away from those of God. After knowing and being sure what is Revelation and what is not, and that it is not by Man’s efforts, Scholarship was ordained as brilliant people probing the limits of what is between us and God and trying to remove as much of it as humanly possible, not Schliermacher’s Dogmatics.
Without proof through application, this thesis remains only a theory. But we should know beforehand that the absence of a single integral theme of application which is not capable of becoming a mere novel religious tautology, such as “grace,” “love,” “sacrifice,” “sovereignty,” “religion,” “righteousness,” “debt,” “sin,” “forgiveness” are not what we are seeking application. But omitting the demonstration of an overarching, indispensable, unique miraculous biblical artifact of the divine for application is even worse, and its absence the main reason why so many theological theories have little to do with a single, stated, biblical overriding interpretative priority and have long ago determined only to apply religious ideas for consciousness.
In apologetics, for example, most recently this is the story of the presuppositionalism of Cornelius van Till. This is perhaps the most influential approach to the overall subtext of Scripture today. Van Till propounded what has become a slogan of his camp, that God is a properly basic belief, by making the distinction between an argument one argues to, and an argument one argues from, both declared to be quintessentially biblical. “God” is basic of faith logically and biblically because one argues from it, not to it.
Predictably, Van Till, who breathed only the rarefied air of religious academia, never did write a comprehensive exegetical demonstration for his theory. This omission was recognized by his supporter Greg Behansen, who wrote an albeit strained one (Presuppositional Apologetics). His lack of emphasis on interpretational application is telling. It is as telling that their foes, the evidentalists, don’t make any effort to apply the idea of God to a single kind of biblical evidence.
As presuppositionalism conflates God’s revelation first to a biblical concept (“truth”), which must be supported primarily by philosophical argumentation, and on the other side evidentialists reject this by insisting that knowledge of God is impossible without evidence. However, the evidentialists inflate God to a multiplicity of various biblical pieces of evidence, which must be supported by a fruitless scientific, methodological pastiche. Presuppositionalism argues from a God of concept, and evidentialists argue to a “God” of any and all “evidence.” Neither of these finds such a properly basic belief in God or singular dominating evidence of God because they operate under the assumption that no single kind of biblical revelation is strong enough to operate as both a truth and a method for biblical exegesis. But the fact remains that only a true biblical exegesis is able to produce a theology that is not antithetical to it.
But our thesis is that the truth of God and the method of God are the Prophetic Oracles of the Messiah. There is a rational basis for a basic belief in God in which nothing makes sense without. There is also a necessity of prior evidence for belief in God, but the biblical model is that the “evidence” and God are not two fundamentally separate entities, they are the same. They are together used in spiritual consciousness, and in the Bible, as metonymies in one great prophetic meta-symbol.
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Truth and Method
In Truth and Method (1960), Gadamer wrote his book on hermeneutics to state that a method of inquiry, particularly scientific inquiry, is not enough to understand the meaning of a text, but meaning transcends them. Therefore, the main question in hermeneutics is not discovering a new method for uncovering truth, but what are the conditions under which truth is possible. This is not to say that science has it wrong for the kind of truth it seeks to uncover by a method, if that truth is not of the metaphysical variety, but the problem is applying its assumptions to hermeneutics. The best two-sentence synopsis to Gadamer’s work is the following:
Hermeneutics is not merely a method of interpretation, but is an investigation of the nature of understanding, which transcends the concept of method. Truth is not something which may be defined by a particular technique or procedure of inquiry, but is something which may transcend the limits of methodological reasoning. The truth of spoken or written language may be revealed when we discover the conditions for understanding its meaning.[1]
I think Gadamer has it half right. He is right in that if applied to biblical symbolism, we are asking what the “conditions” are for understanding them, being whatever interpretative presuppositions, philosophy, and method. However, there would be a disagreement on what these conditions are for such as biblical interpretation. True, we are not mainly interested in finding a new scientific, inductive, systematic method of interpretation by which we seek to know its true meaning, because every time we do this we invariably lose the sense and access to truth, such as with Schleiermacher and Dilthey, whose idea was that we must seek as a priority to discover the original meanings of the writer in a particular cultural setting. It makes truth subsumed under method, and truth in time becomes as impossible as the ultimate original correctness of the method. All that we must hold to is that we are not going to assume that these symbols are supernaturally encoded by God to give a certain meaning irrespective of some kind of method by which we also assume He biblically ordained for us to follow in interpreting them as an equal. If not, this will also degenerate into naïve, uncontrolled, fideistic “what does this text mean to me” brand of biblical hermeneutics.
The solution is not to choose truth or method, like choosing either liberalism or conservatism, or a happy middle, that allows us to speak of truth and method to the exclusion or diminution of the other, but to exit them altogether for a negative middle. There we hold that maintaining our “method” and our “truth” must be the container and content of what is assumed to be a biblical symbol’s ultimately supernatural origin: non-prosaic, where our truth and method are different enough so that they can be seen, but close enough so that we can speak about one as we speak about the other.
For example, I mean that the biblical symbol, such as the staff, as a content of a truth, or its signification, is assumed to be/contain both a method and a truth that patterns itself after the central, most inarguable condition, fact, and symbol of the whole of the biblical revelation: that of prophetic revelation and Christ, or that of Jehovah’s promise and fulfillment. This is the quintessential biblical method and truth because they transcend, are of demonstrably transcendent origin, become mutually symbiotic, while also remaining identifiable as compatible with a “truth” and “method” within our common understanding. To find truth (Christ) we also find method (Prophetic Word), and to have God’s method (Christ), we also have His truth (PW). There is no way for them to be stratified, separated, or destroyed because one is only an internal or external expression of the other that comes from the same transcendent source.
We are interested in the original intent of the author only as addenda, as we assume only that the Apostles were using these symbols, consciously or unconsciously, in a way that took for granted the same prophetic faith motivation of a present and future believer in Christ, who is the Prophetic Word. They were inspired for their congregations and for the generations to come, through vastly different cultures, to transmit this one central truth. Today, this central truth is still as vital, present, and as strong as ever, as an absolute of interpretation, but remains unused because of the many possible permutations of how we can juxtapose various other biblical truths and methods that do not belong together and were never intended to be by the ancients.
When we think about it, every interpretative option has remained on the table and up for grabs for a particular text through the ages, and every faith motivator and central tenant of Christianity as well, except for those that are to be driven exclusively by that miracle and phenomena of Christ fulfilling the oracles, which is always relegated to apologetics so it will not get in the way. The oracles themselves are allowed to remain truth insofar as only a narrow one only for apologetics, and are certainly never a fundamental assumption for interpretation or seen as the primary source of doctrine.
Because the miraculous prophetic as a scriptural entity was in this way lost from the scriptures, this condition destroyed the unique character of Christianity and transformed it without a clear recourse to a common religion identical to all others outside of some novel ideas about “grace,” “love,” and “sacrifice.” Liberals know full well that if the miracle goes out of the oracles, if we were to believe that they were never fulfilled or where serious doubt remains, you might as well become a Buddhist. Conservatives know full well that if they completely cast it away as an apologetic, there is nothing left to prevent Christianity from not taking its epistemic and moral place as an equal among every other religion in the world, including Satanism. And so we know, at least by the way the world dismissively and dishonorably treats Christ, what the real meaning or the direct derivatives of such symbols as “staff” should be for the first century and well as ourselves: It means the truth and miraculous power of God to forever hold fast to his Word, which is Christ. The unique oracular method and truth of His revelation to the world.
Outside the Text
To restate this:
Exegetics in the 1st century way reconciles and reforms between liberal and conservative tendencies.
The two broad interpretive tendencies have always been either liberal or conservative. Both of these correctly assume a symbolic document wherein, for example, Jesus’ “the meek shall inherit the earth” refers to a meekness in relation to the worldly status quo or generally its cruel vicissitudes, in which faithful perseverance for either a just society or an ultimate place of rest leads to their reward. The staff similarly means to our exegetes their nomenclature “authority,” the general, revelationally unqualified concept alone. But “meek” here is not to be assumed an unqualified humility, or that not requiring interpretation to scriptural ultimates. Neither should the staff. Neither is “authority” merely the idea of the sovereign God without a necessary revelatory superlative. Generally, the need for interpretation is the need for a symbolic assumption, but not first. The first need is for the phenomena and knowledge which comes from it which necessitates representation by a symbol, such as a concept. When that knowledge it is finally applied is called the “signification” of the instrumentality of a symbol, but the symbol is never that signification. The symbolic assumption is that a revelation of the reality of transcendence forms our expressions of it, not the other way around. A biblical symbol’s meaning is not in a regressive manner another symbol, it’s a vision of Truth that is showing itself real, an essence, a thing in itself, and sharply unsymbolic.
Through this true symbolic assumption liberalism is broadly seen as that of over-personalization of the symbol. The meaning is not taken at face value, as it should not, but after this is accomplished it accepts significations only to certain carnal personalities, places, things, and systems. Conservatism also over-personalizes, but the signification instead, toward a religious, spiritual application to God who remains unqualified so that it can be made as personal as the one applies it.
It is not the purposed intention to reconcile the excesses of conservative and liberal exegetics, only to state that this is the result of such excess. The result is obtained at the start of the work which deliberately, consciously ignores established human systems that have that mark incorrigibly upon them, toward something pure which could only come from transcendence. Having found the only such mark that exists, the real first-century intention of the text is also found.
There is no case to be made that Christ’s original could have been just as well developed by Him as a head-on reaction to what is only the tendency of human selfishness in favor of a needed replacement derived from the results of only some true syllogism. That Christ just wanted his philosophy to replace another because it made more sense. That error is just a misfiring of neurons and the cure is the right firing of neurons. The excesses and errors of liberalism and conservatism needs only the right tweak to get them to play nice together. But in this Dictionary Christ does not couch sin as transgression against a cultural contrivance, but against what is transcendendly Holy. Since it is expected that the wholesale rejection of conservative and liberal exegetics is the effective result of His alternative for that which is Holy, knowing what this alternative is will not come from a a mere description of it, but a description of what Holiness cannot be.
It is essential to briefly point out not only what the true first-century interpretative principle is by its own biblical witness by document prevalence, but what it is if we set out to derive it by what it is not from that purely human, anti-revelational approach of left/right. Our argument can’t just be “this was what was used by Jesus” but “this is what was used by Jesus as an antithesis to a-revelational systems, for the following reasons.”
The 1st century type is doggedly conservative, but only in the sense of the obvious, indispensable need to rediscover and conserve something original that is not open to debate or change through time. But Conservatism early on reduced these to doctrinal statements, arguments, and creeds. “Jesus is the virgin-born Son of Mary,” “Jesus is the third person of the Trinity,” “only though the Son is forgiveness of sins possible,” are such doctrinal truths. Far from such orthodox results being false, these are of course true; however, I think they are even more true than Conservatism is prepared, able, or willing to biblically defend.
By raising high the New Testament’s greatest conclusions they do so only to a height in which they are willing to lower its greatest premise to a specialized, optional function. In the end, exegetically, this is conservatives rendering explanations that reach too far beneath what the natural meaning should go for a theology that is assumed of supernatural origin. For example, the Sermon on the Mount is a lesson in the morality of works. “Work” dimensionally and biblically unqualified. This limitation of “work” to the prosaic is not too far afield from Confucius and his own view of “work”, and is not a work that independently contains supernatural attestation as a transcendently moral action. In the same way “Jesus is the virgin-born Son of Mary” is true and speaks of transcendence, but it is not true to faith as a statement, but only by its place in a very non-prosaic biblical phenomenon of self-attesting information. To bind it only to a special scriptural stream, the only one capable of showing the existence, nature, and plan of God, is a road too far for Conservatives. How would the church pews be filled by such a thing that so many don’t know, understand, don’t care about, are incredulous of and mock?
Liberalism has always had the opposite tendency, to stretch the stunted human results for the sake of the exhalation of the human spirit, mostly so that the human realm and the person becomes the main biblical subject. Through this, we get doubt, false arguments, false evidence, the tendency to create cases of alternative conclusions out of little evidence, forced readings, and the discarding of history and language, in the end rendering explanations that reach too far beyond what the natural meaning indicates.
The liberal problem is with their primacy of subjectivism, and the Conservative with the primacy of objectivism, both of which eschew real revelation for the mundane since real revelation cant be turned to carnal use.
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The exegetics before you here, however, pulls back to the original principle and also forward to its proper place of being outside the natural reading of the text. Since the symbolic, hidden sense of Scripture and its main informational source of concern is paramount, both the original prophetic principle and that which is supernaturally above the text is the prophetic genre and phenomena. These two never capable of being separated and opposed to one another and represent the underlying subject context of scripture. Therefore, Jesus’ comment about the coin with Caesar’s image is not a call to render “love” or “reverence” to God, or to give our efforts to God’s work instead of the works of men (conservative), nor is it a call to civil obedience in paying our fair share of tax to the government (liberal), or generally a call not to expend our spiritual sustenance into anything which has man’s exclusive canral image on it, but only to that which specifically bears God’s supernatural mark of ownership which indicates Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah by His oracles. This is our debt and God’s due from us: the confession of Him by the prophetic scriptures, and by those prophetic scriptures alone, not a general conception of the scritpures.
In original exegetics, therefore, what is engendering faith, what justifies it as righteous, what proves Jehovah God as a reality, the source of all our doctrines, the basis of our love of Him, the fuel for our spiritual lives, and the ultimate destination of all our interpretive efforts come from and end at the same, one place: the Prophetic Word of Jesus Christ. [2]
The conception of religion to man has always been the avoidance of any basis which places man in relation to a revelation of God as entirely outside its power so as to augment the feeling that he may independently produce his own revelation within him, of himself and by himself. This does not mean that the problem is not man’s will, the specifics on how he handles the revelation or the problem of sin; it means that the religious idea of fallen man is that at some level God’s revelation is completed, altered, amended, augmented, or brought into view by something man is, feels, or does. Real revelation, both of God and that which occurs within man though contact with it, is independent of the parties involved while at once being that which is most intimately agreeable with them and like them without being them. In its true form revelation issues from a mediatory device, a symbol, which, as something truly existing between God and man, is neither in the world nor within the world, but both and neither; this view of revelation always keeps the relation in proper alignment while not debasing God or glorifying humanity.
Pharisaism and Sadducism were, respectively, the people of the Torah and the people of the Temple. Since the scriptures were God’s example of omniscient prescience and faithfulness as an objective informational expression, and the Temple was the example in a temporal expression, we may conceive of them as symbols of the Prophetic Word: the one pertaining to the spirit and faith, the other to God’s requirement for man to respond physically to it.
Fixing our eyes on this truth, that they woud represent either success or failure of man’s handling of the PW, the test first of their love of Messianic truth, not faith in a God idea, was played out in a period of time bracketed by the giving and conclusion of God’s most astonishing prophecy of all: Daniel 9:24–27, the Prophecy of the 70 Weeks, which begins at the “going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince” to “Messiah will be cut off, but not for himself.”
The prophecy calculates the time when Messiah was to appear in Israel, which would be 483 years from the decree of Artaxerxes to Nehemiah to rebuild Jerusalem after its destruction by Babylon.[3] Against the clear indication that Messiah would be crucified, both religious parties struck out on their own to disregard it and attempt to build an overbearing, but profitable, view of Scripture and worship that depended on the belief in a coming Kingdom behind a man as King Messiah, who would vanquish the gentile enemy and insert them into the highest positions of honor.
In order to do this, both parties had to push the idea of a murdered Messiah to the background, as well as a humbled Judaism, although this fact of the suffering servant is the central one of the whole revelation. This means, accordingly, that other priorities of Scripture and worship had to fill that void: namely, physical law-keeping and physical means of satisfaction with God. All of the usual reasons historians have given for their failure can be put behind the foremost one, which was a failure to subsume lesser scriptural thematic and theological streams behind the major Messianic ones, which has also been the persistent problem of the church.
This can be seen in the rabbinic literature which they were accumulating and creating, which in time came to replace the original object of reverence and focus instead of Christ and His ancient Messianic oracles. The two forms of rabbinic methods were, and are still, Halakah and Haggadah, respectively being translated “the path that one walks” and “telling.” Haggadah was recited at the seder, beginning as a simple homiletic retelling of the narrative of the flight of the children of Israel from Egypt, essentially the story of Jehovah’s fulfillment of the promise. Halakah is the Jewish oral law, which includes the Mishnah’s 613 mitzvot, most of the 613 being taken from the Pentateuch, such as (#1) to know there is a God (Exo 20:2), (#567) not to curse judges (Exo 22:27), and (#25) to give charity (Deu 15:8). The Mishnah (repetition), with the Gemara, commentary on the Mishnah, being components of the Talmud, is dated from about 200 AD as the first authoritative document from the rabbinic guild.
The idea behind Haggadah and Halakah is that spiritual life consists of gaining biblical knowledge, faith and response in bodily action, but not knowledge taken as any kind of biblical knowledge and response as any kind as long as its religious. It was centered on Jehovah through the coming of the Messiah. The rejection of Messiah, its real focus, was the ultimate expression that this inner meaning of Haggadah and Halakah had long past been given over to religion for its own sake. It sealed the doom of bot. That doom came in God’s recompensive action to reflect preceisely mans rejection: The Jew’s false Halakah pursuit, or the essential righteous law-keeping, was condemned by taking away its great symbol, the Temple (which is Messiah’s body). But since action follows on faith, this occurred as a result of their corrupt hagaddahic pursuits. God’s supernatural object of informational faith was rejected, the great symbol of exegesis (the PW), was first taken away by Man, the effective rejection of Messiah’s Spirit in His murder.
How the Jew’s came to this debased act is hardly unique to them, but its about all of us.
In overview of the literature of the Haggadah, it was clear that the Greek form of free, mostly philosophical spiritualization of a text would creep in to further corrupt the ancient Messianism. It perhaps started with Philo, as Edersheim puts it of his cannons: “essentially the same as those of Jewish traditionalism in the Haggadah.” “Haggadic interpretations were frequently prefaced by: ‘Read not thus—but thus’ as a fundamental rule. A principle of form, of reason, not Messiah.
Since all seemingly strange or peculiar modes of expression occurring in Scripture must flag the need for a special meaning, so must every particle, adverb, or preposition. The position of a verse, its succession by another, the apparently unaccountable presence or absence of a word, might furnish hints for some deeper meaning, and so would an unexpected singular for a plural, or vice versâ, the use of a tense, even the gender of a word. “An allegorical interpretation might be again employed as the basis of another.”[4]
There is nothing on the surface wrong with this. A hidden revelation is expected to be encoded to some extent, and one must expect that God placed clues and keys to interpretation within the text to which the interpreter must give attention. The problem comes not in the assumption that a plural when a singular is expected means something deeper for the text. The problem comes when what is sought deeper in the text is anything we are desirous or expect to see, not Messiah.
Now, there are replete examples of this extravagance being directed to Messiah as well, but it is not a “Messiah” idea, or a “God” idea, which God intended to be sought, since concepts are man-made constructions and invite more artificiality instead of transcendence. God intended that any of these clues would signal a possible insight into the existence, primacy and function of the entire prophetic phenomenon of the messianic oralces to faith. This is nota ceoncept, not of hman construction, and keeps the extravagance low and interperative prudence high.
The acceptance of Bar Kochba (“Son of the Star,” from Balaam’s oracle) as their Messiah was the most profound expression of this growing false messianism of essentially non-messianism. The result was the massacre of 580,000[5] Jews by the Romans (132–136 AD), and plowing under Jerusalem with salt by the Romans. This disaster accelerated the pace of the apostasy expressed in the Talmud of following years, where the imagination and mortal man would replace the true miraculous article with various stories, information about the world, medical advice, and legends of famous rabbis:
“Men craved entertainment in later times as well as in the earlier, only instead of resorting for its subject-matter to what happened under their eyes, they drew from the fountain-head of the past. The events in the ancient history of Israel, which was not only studied, but lived over again daily, stimulated the desire to criticize it. The religious reflections upon nature laid down in the myths of the people, the fairy tales, which have the sole object of pleasing, and the legends, which are the people’s verdict upon history—all these were welded into one product. The fancy of the Jewish people was engaged by the past reflected in the Bible, and all its creations wear a biblical hue for this reason. This explains the peculiar form of the Haggadah.”[6]
It is difficult to describe the astonishing contents of the Haggadhic literature, and the depths to which Jewish thought had fallen if one has not read it:
“The miraculous merges into the ridiculous, and even the revolting. Miraculous cures, miraculous supplies, miraculous help, all for the glory of great Rabbis, who by a look or word can kill, and restore to life. At their bidding the eyes of a rival fall out, and are again inserted. Nay, such was the veneration due to Rabbis, that R. Joshua used to kiss the stone on which R. Eliezer had sat and lectured, saying: ‘This stone is like Mount Sinai, and he who sat on it like the Ark.’”[7]
Such veneration of the human imagination, not God, not Messiah, led to the acceptance, over and over again, of one rabbi after another as Messiah through the centuries. Meanwhile, Kabbalah developed its magical theology of fanciful intermediary beings, the Sephiroth, or the “emanations,” through which God reveals His will to man, and the greatest Jewish minds, such as Maimonides, became obsessed with the satisfaction of the Jewish revelation with Aristotle.
Although Christianity knew the true Messiah, it followed a similar path after Jesus in its exegetical practices. This although it had the benefit of hindsight.
The early, free use of pseudepigraphic literature as an equal authority with Scripture is one such wide path. Justin used the additions to Daniel. The Didache quotes Sirach. Clement quotes Wisdom of Solomon 12:12. Polycarp quotes Tobit 4:10, 12:9. Irenaeus quotes the Gospel of Barnabas 4:36– 5:9, and Hippolytus, Susana. This crack that began to form reflected a growing deflection of exclusive attention on the ancient OT books which told of the coming of Christ, shifting to anything that could be brought into a religious discussion with the pagans that could address any ancillary logical and philosophical concerns, the issue of the fulfillment of prophecy itself coming off the table the more the church became distinct from the primitive synagogue.
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As pertains to symbolism and biblical interpretations, Origen and Clement of Alexandria spearheaded the allegorical method of the Greeks, ending in widespread acceptance. Origen, the converted Neo-Platonist, in particular, employed it mostly with Christological intention, to show Christ in the Old Testament. However, in allegory, the interpreter divines the meaning of biblical symbols in any way that serves an overriding philosophical or otherwise personal priority. “Allegory is the literary mode of [his] Platonism which interprets this world as the ambivalent image of a higher reality.” The whole material world is a great myth, its value lying “not in itself but in the spiritualmeaning which it hides and reveals,” and in the hand of Origen allegory was “a form of magic.”[8]
The key philosophical terms here are “higher reality” and “spiritual.” To be more specific, based upon Proverbs 22:20, Origen sought a three-fold meaning of each passage of Scripture: fleshly, psychic, and spiritual. Although well-meaning, he nevertheless conceived Scripture to reveal and effectively serve concepts of philosophy first and Messiah’s supernatural phenomenon of the Word second. These first processes can only but unravel by the seeking after better, more biblical concepts, not by simply seeking implications of the fulfillment of prophecy by Messiah.
A good overview of Origen is found here:
“the effect can be disorienting, and contemporary readers are either thrilled by the scope and depth of Origen’s approach — or they worry about willfulness and overreaching. The concreteness of the literality of scripture seems at odds with the abstractions of his great theological system, and it is easy to think that the union of the two in Origen’s mind forced and his approach to biblical interpretation arbitrary. A sensitive twentieth century reader of Origen, Maurice Wiles, finds himself stretched across the gulf between Origen’s focus on textual detail and the scope of his interpretive ambition. “In effect,” Maurice concludes, “Origen tries to have it both ways.”2 Origen wants a theological vision both saturated with biblical particularity and universal enough to encompass the great metaphysical questions of his day. Contemporary readers are not alone in their suspicions. Eusebius records Porphyry’s assessment of Origen: “His manner of life was Christian…, but in his opinions about material things and the deity he played the Greek, and introduced Greek ideas into foreign fables.”1
For Origen Scripture was difficult. The worthy struggle through it, through narrow gaps, until we find it opening up to a vast landscape and God’s light.2
You may greatly disagree with this analysis of Origen, since he used scripture so much to prove and explain Jesus as Messiah. But after reading Origen we have to ask ourselves why he came to the all these extravagant points of messianic fulfillment. Points that may have made sense to a Platonist, but few after him. What was in need was not to turn Scripture into a meaning that satisfied the reader as pointing to Jesus at any turn of fancy which presented an opportunity. It was to use Scripture only to probe the depths of how and why its unambiguous parts were chosen by God as the sole ground of faith. Christ’s view of illumination was not pressed out of the text with such difficulty that the imagination was needed to fill in the gaps, and the crucial illumination of Christ was did not come progressively from one subtlety ingeniously opened placed upon another, but mostly from one or a number of single moment of realization that the major parts of the revelation that speak of one who will come was fulfilled by Jesus of Nazareth. Other, less ambiguous verses about Him may open, or they may not, but if they do it will be because of a sudden meeting of Christ there, not on some summit after a long slough up an allegorical, quaking mountainside.
This was the second century. There was no turning back now that all the Patristic Fathers had accepted that the revelation of Christ was many things, coming from many different things.
In the fourth century, the now monolithic church’s great defining struggle was not how to go back to the Prophetic Word alone as the rule of faith and practice, but how to win theological battles fought on battlefields chosen by man, not Christ, the foremost being the Christological controversy of Arianism. This was akin to the Bar Kochba revolt of the righteous Jews against the gentiles: the Arians behind a human Emporor and the other behind a false messiah. They are both false messiah’s. But neither the Jesus of the Arians or that of Athanasius was not a false king/messiah because he was was fully God and man or only a man. This does not mean that Jesus was not the God/man; it means that their formulations of Messiah do not go far enough in defining an essential conception of a bad Christology, and both, in that sense, are false messiahs.
We may say that the false messiah at the head of the Christian army against the Arians was a false messiah for both participants, the Jews, and the Romans, Christians and Arians, who, like Bar Kochba, attempted to set up a by sharply mundane messiah only a mundane Kingdom, who lost in the end and destroyed the church. Messiah was a glorified concept to them both, his most important aspect and defining truth being, as pertains to Christology, about the amount or kind of man or God in him.
The answer to this question may be important, and it is not my intention to minimize the damage the Arian choice can wreak on a belief in Christ’s authority and, accordingly, the sovereignty of God, not to mention the sin of the relegation of Christ to a place that He showed ample evidence of being infinitely beyond. The problem is, Christ is not only a “person,” and the subject of His person alone is not the defining Christological subject. He is also a supernatural scriptural phenomenon: a personal entity and the informational entity of the Word
The sin of history is the relegation of Christ to the “person” concept for both Arians and Orthodox, when the crucial question is essentially what Christ ultimately, scripturally means as a genre, or what I call a certain informational “stream” of Scripture. The obsessions of the Council of Nicaea are symbolical pertaining only to the correct formulation of this concept, along with the judgments of how the symbol of Christ is constituted for Christendom. The results were guaranteed that Christ will increasingly become an insoluble philosophical question whose meaning will remain open to any and all self-serving interpretations. That effect is reaching an ultimate pitch today.
Although old pagan Rome, represented now by the Arians, was in time defeated by the hand of New Rome, the orthodox, those who put their shoulder to the plow of the instrument of the scriptures’ revelational destruction for any faith coming after them, would also plow into the soil of the scriptures the salt of its longevity as the only kind of people destined to inherit, elaborate, and strengthen God’s given hermeneutical paradigm. Today, Messiah is still this buried, seemingly irretrievable, impossible to understand “person,” since His ultimate religious signification has been left up for personal grabs. This is thought the proper place for Him, since it lends to Him a mystery, an uncertainty, a difficulty and, accordingly, necessitating new and more clever sermons, books, and interpretative assumptions and systems for the rest of time.
Plato became revered almost as much as Moses. The church structure hardened into a shop of spiritual technicians who owned the means of grace and who administered it to the faithful for a price. It is no wonder that the liberal spirit of materialism slowly began its ascent within the church. This was expressed by its new doctrinal innovations, foremost being the near deification of man in the Pope, the virtual deification of Mary as Christ’s equal and object of prayer.
Also were prayers to the dead (300 AD), the veneration of angels and saints (375) their indulgences, the reality of purgatory (593) and the payments the faithful can make to eject their loved ones from it into heaven, transubstantiation (1215), Mary’s immaculate conception (1854), and the assumption of Mary (1950). Yes, against the self-professed credo of orthodoxy as the restorationists and keepers of the original Holy thing, this is liberalism rising, a wave force that cannot and will not be stopped until the whole of the thing built on the sand is washed away.
It is interesting that following the time of Aquinas, St. Teresa, and St. John of the Cross, respectively, these intellectual and spiritual Dionyses of the church’s priorities of intellectual and emotional self-indulgence, and before the Reformation, the church also innovated the ecclesiastical removal of the offering of the Cup to catechumens in the Eucharist, beginning in 1415.[9] This is in force today, and this act has special symbolic meaning to the apostasy that is underway.
Since the wafer was essentially deified (Christ’s “body,” corresponding to “person”) the symbolical import of the offering of the Cup act the confirmation that the symbolical aspect of the Communion blood, being in reality that of the prophetic fulfillment of God in Christ’s death, was permanently removed from its ground of faith. This was to isolate as independneet and supreme the promise of man through the religious personal concept of Christ represented by the wafer, His symbol alone, not His signification. This in turn was symbolic of a satisfaction with God through a faith with no meaning and a ritual instead of that which is the only form of Christ to faith now in the world.
This instead of the oracular, OT promise which is the bread, the promise that the body of Christ was to be broken in His suffering, which demands his conclusory, prophetic death by the shedding of his blood, the bread, the broken body, was left to stand alone in the eucharistic symbol only a figure of Messiah Jesus’ humiliation and abuse by the Church. Each time the Host is taken without the Cup it is an image of a person and an organization hailing itself as a champion of Christ who is instead eating condemnation to itself as a believer in Jesus as a failed Messiah.
I do not wish to make to much of the Catholic Eucharist. I could care less the rites that they choose to perform, and there is something quite beautiful about theirs. I only point this out to emphasize the how through time we lost the ability to discern true Messianic meaning and chose instead religion, ideas, our feelings and anything that will give us power, comfort and stimulation.
The Reformation deepened this conceptualizing. But here, the problem was not the loss of the PW in church ritual expression, but its loss into what became Christendom’s primary scriptural expressions.
It must be remembered that the “Protestant Reformation” was fundamentally a protest against the Catholic Church to get back to the original scriptures as Church authority. Nothing in the “Reformation” concept would indicate that this restoration was a search for an original faith against and through the above Catholic defined fundamentals, only that there would be a reformation of something and it was against Catholic errors. The sounding board of the reformation, the “protest,” was therefore predictably about transubstantiation, candles, priests, Mary, purgatory, indulgences, “scriptural” authority, works plus faith as satisfaction with God. This is a battle for Christianity over not over religious ideas and constructions, but only of a certain kind. They were both fighting for the same reformulation of a bad, non-fundamental conception of fundamental righteousness and unrighteousness because it is to be based upon the other party’s operational non-fundamental conception of righteousness and unrighteousness.
The point of restoration should have begun with recovery of the PW as the religious ground, not a restoration of “bread” to “body,” “scriptures” to “body,” “faith” from “law,” “Bible” from “church,” “Christ” from “Mary,” “heaven-hell” from “hell-purgatory-heaven,” “grace“ from “sacraments,” or “faith” from “law.” But this was the conceptual war that was fought and in which no winners emerged, but only a chaos of unrestraint within.
It is not necessary to enumerate the all historical persons ad events that record the fallout of this, only to remark that it has become more apparent every decade since the Reformation that the “church” and “faith” are establishments that have little to do with Christ/PW as their fundamental meaning. Christianity is a religious entity, and barely even a religious entity anymore, where the faithful come to express their dreams of righteousness and piety, their fantasies of heaven, worship the conceptual “person” of Christ as some image of the imagination, to concoct their own idiosyncratic brews of scriptural ingredients for the awakening and nourishment of faith which has no “water” base. Even so, a waterless brew is made. With a sprinkle of false miracles (tongues, healing), a dash of base emotions, a dollop of Augustine or Graham or Edwards, a sweetener of heaven, and lastly, seasoned for longevity with the bitter hemlock of a prophetic apathy and bewilderment. Messianic prophecy is a religious fashion accessory, a religious toe ring and bangle for the intellectual, a list of interesting factoids for the historian, a convenient pie in the face for the skeptic, and to everyone else a big yawn.
If I have offended you, it is the last of my wish to inspire through emotionalism. But if you find yourself constantly referring back to the prophets as a place of refuge from the cultural religious refuse of the age, as you should, you should reflect momentarily on what a true “thinking out of the box” should be in regards to biblical truth, and whether you have been in the box or outside of it, where you’ll truly find Christ.
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Biblical symbolism is a simple thing: That meaning, or method, or that hermeneutical key to all Scripture is the Prophetic Word (PW) as a body of Scripture and its impression and phenomena on and in the spirit; its impact on the mind as a whole as a phenomena; its historical record of fulfillment; its superiority over all other claimed revelation from God; and its basis as a ground of faith which secures salvation and of which improving knowledge sanctifies the believer.
A biblical symbol’s meaning goes first into the service of redisplaying the phenomena of miraculous prophetic fulfillment to the reader before it becomes invested in any particular interpretation that may be conceived entirely independent of it. The first symbolic signification, if warranted, is the phenomena of the fulfilled oracles of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. All Bible symbols, whether they are called similes, analogies, metaphors, merisms, parables, all figures of speech used in the scriptures, are first taken to be methods of the PW and its truth rather than their own kinds of methods that distill lesser truths. In this way we are not to first judge what kind of symbol is in use and what is its meaning, as this has already been set by a prior judgment over all of biblical symbolism. Further, we are not to determine what kind of meaning applies to the symbol we are attempting to divine, but first a decision is to be made on whether that symbol is going to be dedicated to the service of illuminating the most crucial fundamental scriptural axioms, not given a meaning into the service of some artificial system. If so, it would make the whole transcendent enterprise worthless. Our attempt to apply transcendent meaning may fail or it may succeed, but from the outset we are determined in an attempt at transcendent success, not failure.
We therefore carry an assumption of the possibility of divine knowledge before any particular interpretation suggests otherwise, and this positive anticipation is before meaning and symbol.
This is one of several kinds of pre-understandings that go into interpretation, including:
These are not philosophical pre-understandings (Bultman’s New Hermeneutic), neither are they necessarily conscious ones. They do not have a prior requirement that sees the biblical text as the results of a process, where we deal only with the text as the reader encounters it (Process Theology), neither is it agenda driven (Liberation Theology). For the Orthodox, it is also not “the full work of the Bible… realized only by the work of the Holy Spirit, who illuminates the mind and witnesses to the veracity of the divine virtues,”[12] “the entire Bible is accepted as canon,” “God has revealed his message in the Bible progressively over time,” ”the whole of scripture best interprets specific parts,” “scripture’s meaning is clear and plain,” “the supernatural is affirmed in scriptures,” or the “Bible is a theological book.”[13]
This is not to say that none of these things are any part of a pre-understanding, as I regard them as indispensible to biblical interpretation, but the Orthodox, while they often stress the important of fundamentals, are guilty of sidestepping any fundamentals when those fundamentals could pose a threat to their more basic pre-understanding that Christian faith’s most crucial component is in ideas that do not self-reveal as symbols, such as concepts “Holy Spirit,” “Bible,” and the “supernatural.“ All of these are after the revelation, not before it, since all of them may be believed completely independent of the requirement for a historically demonstrated God. These are true, but only derived pre-understandings.
Our pre-understandings are not necessarily meditated requirements, or directly produced through the reading of some book; they are innate, attitudinal, rational, honest, affective states in respect to the nature of truth as a whole, and particularly of supernatural truth claims, which form the basis for the biblical agape, as not first the transcendent object loved, but first the transcendent object that is understood.
This signification or meaning of the idea of “Person” as miraculous information about a divine being is applied on three primary levels: a) as pertaining to the prophetic body of Scripture itself, of which Jesus Christ is its main external symbol, b) as pertaining to the individual believer who believes in Him exclusively because of that fulfilled word, c) to the body of believers who believe the same. In all three cases we speak only of the Prophetic Word, and then all these externalizations and embodiments of it, not the other way around.
I do not use this acronym “PW” to distinguish it from the Holy Scripture in a way that might be imagined, and certainly not as another concept to replace “the Bible.” Again, PW is not a part of the scriptures; it is essentially the scriptures, and is a particular scriptural revelation, not a general one.
The problem with using such designations as “the Word of God” and “the scriptures” (2 Tim 3:16)[14] to stand for the entire revelation is that in our time, when what it means is not taken for granted, these say nothing pertaining to its miraculous and essential nature as unique in comparison to other world faiths. All other religious faiths are taken by their devotees as transcendent truths without the need for any objective, attesting demonstration of those truths. “Truth” is naively accepted as a bare conceptual symbol. It and all other religious ideas of an unrevealed religion are what I call word-to-definition symbols. Word-to-definition symbols are ideas that are at home in all other faiths because we can play infinitely around with the definitions and change the symbols at will to our liking. In Christianity, this tendency is brought in with such conceptual symbols as “The Word of God.” That is, it is thought to be conceived first as a religious book, as an entirely prosaic creation of man, not a foreign document. A collection of various streams, motifs, doctrines, letters, and so forth, which do not necessarily point to anything remarkable in them.
“Word of God” requires an extra step of explanation to bring out its unique character if such character exists, because both “God” and “Word” are ideas, and as such could have a purely natural origin. “Word of God” deflects attention to religious ideas, not verifiable divine phenomenon. But the concept “Prophetic word” does not, forcing the issue of approaching this work as uniquely prophetic in nature, making prophecy the hinge upon which it stands or falls to the world. The Prophetic Word represents the end of the biblical signification process. It is its own truth and method. Between truth and method is an inscrutable yet indefatigable objective/personal revelation of God.
The purpose of biblical symbolism for any one symbol is the same for the Bible as it exists symbolically to us as a whole: a passive but powerful divine means for awakening our nascent love of spiritual truth and pointing it toward a distinctly prophetic comprehension of the Messiah and His revelation. This is much like a spiritual art form of the divine as presented to a largely passive viewer for his awe and approval.
In all other religious books, it can be claimed that God intends for Man that learning the greatest truth ever known God’s ends justifies His means, but both the means and the ends cany only be toward speculation about God. But in real faith, the ends and means are equals. In all other faiths, touted is God giving a method for a truth of some sort. The statue of its god, the almsgiving, the kind gesture, the ritual, the icon, the incense, the religious notion. If one practices or handles the method one will also have the divine truth which is claimed attached to it. But because the method is artificial it can only lead to a truth that is prosaic or artificial, typically another concept. This religion which is about methods, rituals, vows, creeds, philosophies, stories, feelings, intuitions, propositions, ideas, supposed to produce truth and lead to some revelation, but that revelation, since the method is unrevealed and un-verifiable, can only be the same: another insular and unrevealed idea of “God.”
But in Christianity, as in all other faiths, getting there is the same as being there. The difference is that in one getting there and being there is within spatio-temporal reality, and in Christianity getting there and being there are both outside of human influences. The method is not a human creation but a manifestation of God and the Truth is a manifestation of the Person of God, who are unified in the same divine concept. This method and truth are not purely subjective and idiosyncratic. Both are objective, open to examination for transcendent verification or disqualification. Again, not that we can see with our physical eyes the phenomena of Jesus appearing before us and the rest of the world, but that the phenomenon of Jesus that appears to all as an objective personal entity is through an objective and verifiable scriptural demonstration, or method.
In Matthew and Luke, Christ gives the story of Jonah and the whale as the only kind of sign that the Pharisees can receive from Him, in distinction from the example they requested from Him in a miracle that can be taken as scripturally disconnected. As Jonah was three days and nights in the belly of the whale, Christ will be three days and nights in the heart of the earth. Christ refuses to give them the kind of symbol they want and instead gives them one of His own designed to be righteously obscured to them to the same extent that God is un-righteously obscured by them. Christ, giving His without stating what He is doing, essentially forces the issue of whether or not we are to treat “sign” as a bare and general religious symbol, while not forcing us to accept the right kind of miraculous sign he has in mind. This becomes a means of opportunity for commendation or condemnation not only of the audience’s regard for the most important kinds of signs, but mostly on the issue of the meaning of the biblical sign itself. Jesus’ paraphrase is “since you refuse to accept the greatest of miracles and signs, and only want some thrilling and intriguing display, I will not give you that, but leave with you only the real thing. Make your judgment of that, which is whether or not I am fulfilling the prophets.”
But how do our famous divines interpret this? They don’t, because the case seems closed: Christ is flashing forward, telling them to accept the greater sign of the resurrection when it comes and to stop expecting relatively lesser Messianic miracles. But is the sign of Jonah, or the resurrection, not joined by a common thread? Of course, one is a prophetic, Messianic promise and the other is a prophetic, Messianic fulfillment. If Christ gives both as the real sign, is not the real sign that the Pharisees are to regard the sign of Messianic prophecy as their primary religious and scriptural priority, which itself contains the highest examples of the miraculous? We find that the NT issue is not only by the use of the prophetic, but it is the issue of the prophetic itself. In fact, this prophetic is primarily the symbolic meaning for the Person Jesus, and nothing about Him can be understood without placing this fact first before our eyes.
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The symbol “body,” for example, is more complex, We don’t want to go the way of Philo of Alexandria and allegorize every part of the body with some aspect of Scripture. But our issue here is in how we use it to teach these first things, as a method, and not to stop the signification process with things like “body of Christ” or “body of the church.”
If we see Christ as the object of all the scriptures, we also see and teach Messianic prophecy as His instrument, and they are both equal. Paul says that the rock that followed the children of Israel through Sinai was Christ (1 Co 10:4). He sees Christ in the Old Testament by interpretation, by inference, and we agree with this, because Christ is the object of the scriptures. Well then, what is the instrument of Christ? Is the rock not a prophetic type? Were the promises of God not following the children of Israel, those of His assurance of preservation by divine provision, to the Promised Land? How can Christ be separated from “rock” any more than prophecy be separated from rock? But this we casually do.
We do the same with “body.” We have opportunities to teach it as primarily the body of the PW, the Old Covenant, the law, and of course the body of Christ, the Eucharistic bread, the body of the individual believer, or the body of all believers collectively, progressing from its abstract but most essential form into greater manifestations of presence in the world. The lessons for the lower apply to the higher. Faith itself as a symbol given to God follows the same pattern by its first grasp of a divine idea, the essential need for a positive, evidential demonstration of the existence and love of God for mankind. Then, to its manifestation reflected in the entire earthly life of an individual sanctified in body. The middle portion, what Pannenberg calls the “prophetic word of demonstration,” which is Christ, as with the individual body of the believer in its particular vocation in the church body, is busy with the finer details of how it is to bring the strengths of the individual prophetic revelation of Him into an effective integral role in the church through demonstration of how that first idea and God can be appropriately glorified.
As for my organization of the subject of biblical symbolism, I also fell into this same trap of trying to classify the Bible’s symbols according to its various types. I invariably had to prioritize one type over the other and invariably dividing the scriptures internally by a general taxonomical arrangement. One of my initial outlines follows:
It occurred to me that all of these apply to each biblical symbol, no matter if they are parabolic, objective, theological, discursive, or moral. Whether they are metaphors, allegories, signs, synecdoche, or metonymies, we are to only keep in mind that we don’t want to call the scriptures “the Word of God” without the implacable prophetic implication.
This reverses the traditional constructions that make the prophetic subsumed under a generalization by a fideistic and prosaic impulse. I guarantee that I will close the scriptures up to my private individual interpretations and end up stirring up more of the wrong kind of controversy than I intend if I don’t do this. The end of the PW as the great biblical signification of Christ is only the beginning, but this is to be taken up by those wiser than myself (which, God knows, are not difficult to find).
I will say that the symbol of the “body” has a meaning of the prophetic Word of God, which includes the Law and the Prophets. Or the body denotes the Law and the blood the fulfillment of the prophets that spoke of the coming death of the Messiah. This might sound strange, but only because we are used to the signification for “body” being “the church” or the actual body of Jesus. But let the main challenge in interpretation primarily be that anyone denies that this biblically corresponds to Christ and His expectations of His people, the church. That this corresponds to the revelation they are mainly enjoined by Him to propagate in the world. Is this prophetic signification not both the truth and also the method by which the concept of “body” in the Word of God is to be taught?
In both body and blood, the cursing, lashing, nailing, piercing, and death of Jesus Christ is first the lashing, nailing, piercing, and death of the supremacy of the Prophetic Word by the wicked, a Word that resurrects again to life in fulfillment because it cannot fail as truth (Luke 16:17; Matthew 24:35, 5:18). Even the symbol “bone” is a correspondent to part of the aspect prophetic word in the same way it is to the physical body of Christ—that part which obtains a hardness in its sure degree of fulfillment, giving the whole body of the prophetic scriptures ridged definition under the skin of its exposed contact with the outside world, being its general claim to be an animated revelation from God.
The bones of Christ, as the fulfillment of the PW, cannot be broken because that would mean invalidation, that God promised but did not have the power or inclination to bring it about as true. That His truth had no strong, underlying definition by which it is raised to uprightness. This figure is vividly applied in metonymistic fashion here: John 19:36, “For these things were done, that the scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken.” If the prophetic is the most important single word by which man grasps the essential nature of the scriptures, this is the best way, most honest way, and demonstrably God’s only way to inculcate the reality of its power into the minds and hearts of individuals.
The four major categories of Bible symbols treated here are objective, theological, discursive, and parabolic.
Parabolic symbols are the only category that is unambiguously given as symbols, expressly (Mat 13:11; Luke 8:10) designed to hide a deep spiritual meaning behind the appearance of a simple story or saying. Because they are stated as such, their presentation involving a teacher of symbols, as well as His conscious knowledge of their precise meanings and ultimate spiritual gravity, they are the highest form of NT symbols. This means that they are assumed to be exemplary and instructive of their lower forms, which serve the foremost purpose of bringing the student into a noetic posture prepared for the complete statements of truth that are contained in parabolic truth.
The main background considerations that the exegete entertains are those for the identification, in inverse order of importance, of the symbol’s ultimate meaning are in its origin, plan, and outcome. If written out in a sentence these three considerations convert to the question: To what extent does the symbol or passage of Scripture serve directly as a revelation of the essential nature and existence of God, and what of spiritual truth does it teach by the prophetic paradigm of historical promise and fulfillment?
That is, origin, plan, and outcome are not containerless symbols themselves that allow uncontrolled self-definitions, but are fiercely centered on the phenomena of Messianic prophecy alone. Origin refers to the identification of its ultimate source: primarily as a natural/man-made/practical thing, which itself does not require further symbolic exegetics, or such a thing whose origin is supernatural, from God, which itself requires the exegete to search out its next level of meaning, its divine plan. This plan is its foremost function, meaning, and future application. It requires the student to think about where God is going and why He is doing it in a process of bringing the symbol into the world as a reality, not just as a current presentation of a reality. This corresponds biblically to history of the story of a people’s overall spiritual instruction of Messiah by the Word of God’s promise, such as the OT dispensation as a whole. Outcome identifies a symbol foremost and final meaning as it is presented concretely, historically, empirically in reality—its oracular fulfillment.
As pertains to the subject of what qualifies as prophetic fulfillment, I have foregone this discussion, not for the sake of space, and not because it is of no importance, but because it is not the orthodox problem, but the liberal problem. The liberal interpretative tendency is now fully married to its religious, spiritual sensibilities alone, and is unredeemable. You can’t reason someone out of something they were not reasoned into. It is the Orthodox, the presumptive holder of the Keys of the Kingdom, those professedly devoted to the scriptures, who are specifically addressed, who generally have little trouble with understanding the historical fulfillment, but are supposed to be its experts. To those thousands of books and articles that fill the world on the subject of fulfillment, which demonstrate them so firmly, I give it to those who want to take up this subject.
After the symbol’s origin is identified as spiritual and of supernatural origin, in all four of these categories four aspects of a quality of meaning are then sought for the symbol in two divisions: subject and object, practical or spiritual. In the first, a choice is to be made for the meaning of both; in the second a choice is to be made between one or the other.
Before this is explained it is crucial that it be applied to the whole subject of meaning and its historical presentation in order to establish our outcome.
First, as a worldview, it does not matter whether we are informed of a divine spirit and His actions directly by our proof texts or by intuition, but only that these be assumed fairly as finite possibilities, as heart confessions, before this process of interpretation begins. At minimum, the world is not an empty symbol from a meaningless process, but has a spiritual, intelligent origin. That is, if there’s an exposable, explicit meaning, a plan, to its existence by this supernatural intelligence. Finally, that there is a realistic possibility of a specific and future realization of that plan at some point in history, an outcome that is not of and by man.
After this, it is necessary to apply to all subsequent attempts at plan and outcome the question of natural or sacred, instead of working under the assumption that any naivety and mystery that might exist in an explanation of origin can apply also to our understanding of plan and outcome. The universe might be a symbol of God by origin, but for its plan, since it must exist before us as a recording of history, where man is directly involved in the process and also records history for non-spiritual reasons, a choice must be carefully considered for whether this plan is natural or sacred, where natural means for the ultimate purpose of the benefit of man for his flesh or for God.
If for flesh it corruptly means that God’s plan can be for the general advancement of social programs, racial equality, technological progress, good religious feelings, or a new and better style of theology. If for God it means the plan is partially kept by God and intended purely for the spiritual advancement of man and his relationship to Him. The plan can be natural in that it is intended at least partially for human history, but there are limitations to what can be done in history to man’s benefit which do not apply to the spirit of man. The plan is also partially an exclusive proprietary knowledge kept by God of which man is not privy until the time of its fulfillment comes due. This keeps the interpretative process on track to allow the collaboration of God to reveal and man to reveal the next outcome. Outcome is the plan which has already been historically fulfilled or the plan which is understood to be fulfilled in a certain way. Applying again natural or sacred to it, its outcome is natural only in the sense of concrete fulfillment, not a natural messiah, but one of wholly spiritual and sacred origin who still holds mysteries and keeps the future for Himself.
This keeps us honest about the limitations of our knowledge and builds an appreciation for the importance of what God has so far allowed us to see.
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Subject and object are also up for close consideration. This is much simpler but easier to overlook. Subject is the inferior position of the observer; object is the superior position, if we are speaking of humanity as he exists before God. Each symbolic meaning so proposed must be either before God or after Him just as each proposed symbol must be before or after the biblical text in which it is being used. That is, they either are of secondary, linguistic importance, or crucial, hermeneutical importance as a kind of sacred thing in and of itself. When this issue is forced, it then becomes impossible to assign certain traditional symbols, which may not even be identified as symbols, as a textual subject or object for which it was not designed by God to function. Furthermore, the question must also be forced as to the overall subject and object of Scripture itself for which tradition has allowed it to stand as already answered.
Barnes, in his exposition of Matthew 13 and the Parable of the Sower, seems to innocently explain the parable as having the function to “convey truth,” “teach spiritual truth,” “convey some offensive truth,” and “conceal” truth, but these “truths,” so presented, are given by Barnes as human scriptural subjects when they should be objects. The identification of the “seed” and “sower” is also given as “preaching” the “gospel.” Linguistically, they are given then as containerless biblical symbols, since the concept of “truth” is given without an accompanying qualifier, such as “moral truth,” “theological truth,” or prophetic truth.” If we choose as qualifiers the first two, they also do not themselves qualify as the sacred containers that place them truly outside the ability of humans make a choice for them, when we assume that God has already made a precise choice, where the choice is itself so biblically indispensible that it has the ability to autonomously stand as its own subject.
“Prophetic truth” suffices more as the choice of a scriptural symbol with a proper container, since Christ and the Word (PW) are as interchangeable as subject and object and also mutually capable, unlike the exclusively man-made “theological” concept, being before and after man. The passage in which the Parable of the Sower contains revelation is very plainly stated, but in parabolic fashion, it is hidden from those unmindful of this persistent duality and quality. “And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive” (Mt 13:14).
This is a prophetic symbol because it is a prophecy about a prophecy about Christ and His meaning, each being true, co-equal, and irreducible biblical subjects and objects. But because we only see the human object, we think that this is only Christ using for apologetic reasons some Old Testament passage, and its function as sacred symbolic container is, according to religion in the fallen sate, is dismissed or forgotten.
The simple hermeneutical key for the interpretation of all biblical symbols is given in the symbolic example of Christ + Word of God. But, again, this is a modern construction, which informationally blurs and de-centers the “Word of God” so that a religious industry can be accommodated out of its confusion. Christ is the historical, “symbolic” expression of divine knowledge as a Person. The “Word of God” is His signification, meaning, and truth. Christ is the personable symbol or, as I say, idiosyncratically the “content” of the Father, without which no one can see the Father, and without which no one can be saved, the word of divine knowledge being Christ’s informational container, without which no one can know or relate to Christ. It is only for us to be careful, if we wish not to deconstruct Christ to an essentially containerless symbol, to not functionally strip His “Word of God” as its own symbol of what makes it an exclusive revelation of the true God. If it is so stripped, this debases Christ and the Word as no more urgent and demonstrable than the groundless musings of any other world faith. The greatest of all possible sins is stripping Christ of His clothes, His scourging, humiliation, torture and murder, but if Christ is specifically this Prophetic Word (not “Word of God”), the minimum requirement for a Christian church is not to carelessly participate in such ultimate humiliation, abuse and murder.
Failure of the Independent “Person of Christ” Concept
What makes the allegorical method problematic is not that it is assumed that the text hides, as intentionally made by God, a deeper meaning that is irresistible, but that historically the preoccupational, categorical end in which any particular interpretation would rest has always been unable to control it.
Allegory from Philo operated correctly on the assumption that only the wisdom of the reader prevented the text from giving up its secrets. However, the categorical priority of his allegory was given to the cosmos, the soul, or the sensate world. The Tabernacle is a representation of the universe, circumcision is a symbol of the exclusion of passions, the Sabbath means the day of purity and incorruptibility, the number seven aligning with the seven human senses, the seventh being the mind.[15] Philo pursues these ends while admitting unwittingly that an end product of a philosophical principle leads to the natural tendency to annul the literal imperative of its container, such as the Law (see Book 16 on the Migration of Abraham). The Law to him is a symbol of higher affections, but the symbol becomes diminished when its superior product is expected only as another abstract. This in turn releases the symbol from its place of weight on the conscience, giving it a sense of unreality.
Philo is carried over into Origen, who seems to straighten it out, but only by making the end of his scriptural allegory the Person of Christ , which makes his scriptural meaning more concepts. The Person of Christ as an ultimate ending signification of Scripture makes one concept (Scriptures) mean another conceptual symbol (person of Christ), since this person, as all symbols, is by definition only ephemerally conceptual since it requires empirical credentials. The person of Christ in Origen’s thought, like Philo’s Law, is a principle framed by his neo-platonic philosophy—something that to the conscience is to stand alone as independently real out the heavenly midst, which places His otherwise correct biblical type as its occasional servant of support, which will give in time the same unreality to the scriptures and to the person of Christ. The Law, which then no longer commands because its co-equal prophetic import, was kicked out from under it. With Origen, the Person of Christ is no longer palpable because of the same. Much of Origen’s time was spent coming up with a way to read Scripture so that the inelegant parts would not be offensive to pagan seekers, such as those passages which speak of God being brining evil (Deu 32:22, 1 Sa 15:11, Amo 3:6, Mic 1,12; See First Principles).
As with Homer, the goal of allegory was to freely support an underlying philosophy, to “present absolute, eternal, ahistorical, or at least trans- historical, truth.” Origen accordingly was looking for “wisdom,” which he leaves undefined and therefore philosophically controlled. This view of divine Scripture forced into being from the staunchly historical document of Scripture obscured mysteries where there were none, and early Christians accordingly thought with the pagans that if a document was said to be of divine origin it must be capable of an allegorical interpretation. History was phenomenal, and not important.
Celsus, and Christiain antagonist, recognized the difficulty of this allegorizing of Scripture and argued from this that the Bible could not therefore be said to be divine (Contra Celsum 1.17, 18, 20).[16] Augustine used allegory to “open up scripture for pursuit of the Christian ideal of holy living within the philosophical framework of Neo-Platonism,” to get at the “doctrines underlying to words of the text” for the “increase of Christian virtues: faith in God, hope in God, love of God.”
This tendency led directly to an early and progressive loss of substance to an overall conception of the scriptures as a diviner of an ultimate meaning of Christ as a symbol of that same objective informational locus, and simultaneously a conception of the scriptures as a whole as having itself a superior objective locus beyond that of theological confessions. The “person of Christ” became uncontrolled.
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Double Meaning
This term, the so-called sensus plenior, the“fuller sense,” describes the New Testament interpretative habit of citing mainly the Old Testament in ways that appear out of context, without regard for prophetic understanding or historical setting, with the assumption that God intended His words in more than one sense to all succeeding ages. But the true “double-meaning” phenomenon of the NT has been hidden by this term. This is something that I will state once and then leave up to the reader to make his own connections. I am inclined on this most important of subjects to follow the example of Christ at least to the extent that an obvious truth should not require anything more than a hint. The double-sense phenomena of the NT more crucially lie in two distinct levels:
In Luke 10:28, the young man supplies the topical answer and Christ adds: “Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.” If taken at face value, this flies in the face of orthodox soteriology, for any kind of purer conception of the love of God that does not involve a knowledge of Christ is by definition the universal “godist” religion, or the fervent, essentially emotional worship of an unrevealed god who has no historical presence, no empirical attestation, and no son. Christ means you shall live if you obey the meaning of this distillation of the law. He then gives an example of this meaning by returning the original question of the great commandment by asking His own question pertaining to the importance of the prophetic revelation of Messiah: “Saying, What think ye of Christ? whose son is he? They say unto him, The Son of David. He saith unto them, how then doth David in spirit call him Lord, saying, The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool? If David then call him Lord, how is he his son? And no man was able to answer him a word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions” (Mt 22:42–46). This double meaning is also the main subject of the Sermon on the Mount: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Mt 5:43–44). Christ says previously to this persecution, “For so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.” These sufferings are prophetic sufferings for the prophetic word which they preached. They are no more to be taken as suffering for a prophetically de-centered “good news” any more than the “love thy neighbor as thyself” is a call for a more complete form of the same OT love.
What Constitutes Fulfillment?
This is a subject which preoccupies the academic world with great intensity, but it has produced little, in my opinion, of anything useful. The reason is that same problem, that of assuming fulfillment is primarily of apologetics value instead of the faith locus of Christianity itself and a fundamental symbol.
It must be kept in mind that the interpretation of anything, here that of fulfillment, is a kind of distillation of meaning from the prophetic symbol. The reality of fulfillment is the main revelation from that interpretative process, but it’s not the only one, since the prophetic symbol reveals a lot more and implies a lot more for the entire Christian faith, experience, and practice.
That being the case, the interpretative strategy has to be broader to the service of fulfillment. The extent to which we can back up our claims that a prophecy has been historically fulfilled is the extent to which the scriptures will be held out with importance. But the Christian symbol as a “fulfillment” means more than its historical fulfillment, justifying the creeds, to the value of our moral walk, the time in our more oblique speculations on the faith, our emotions in the Christ experience, our satisfaction and security in Christ, our final justification and redemption. It goes to the entire reason for the Christian faith to exist at all. Our method is to demonstrate how this transcendent symbol controls fulfillment, instead of how it controls one thing about fulfillment.
It is sufficient now to say that the certainty of historical fulfillment flows from the more obvious and certain ones, which require the least argumentation (Daniel 9, Isaiah 53, et.al.), and with which we are to go public, to those which are more nuanced, which are discussed only in the church to the converted. It is also sufficient to say that if historical fulfillment is denied on this top-level, either frontally or through indifference, it is “fulfillment” of our symbol to God as failures in our deontological duties in the heart of moral conscience. Confidence in them can still be achieved through time with this holist method which I propose, but a final denial of historical fulfillment is a denial of Christ, which is an unredeemable spiritual action.
More on the later.
Convergence. The principle of what is called symbolic convergence with biblical figures is the most important to keep in mind. In this, biblical symbolism is to be treated by a bottom-up interpretation from the major biblical symbol to its subjects, instead of indiscriminately from any one symbol irrespective of the others, as in the liberal way, or holding a bottom-up foundational influence from a major biblical idea to another in the conservative way, such as ascending from “God” and “Christ” to “sovereignty,” “Word of God,” “power,” and “grace.”
In indiscriminate symbol interpretation, biblical symbolism is a meaningless, haphazard, evolutionary, and sharply human language matrix of temporary impressions, certainly with no necessary supernatural basis in themselves. Symbolism has passed out of being treated as a divine language into an academic subject. In conservatism, subjective religious concepts, as symbols, are the superlative supernatural basis for interpretation, certainly not an objective, existential biblical entity in the form of a living, articulated fact, for Christ is of “God” or Christ is “grace,” but He is not the prophetic oracles. This results in an essentially unregulated system in assigning symbolic correspondences, stretching historically from the Catholic Church and its establishment of the “church” as foundational to interpretation to modern Protestantism where it is whatever idea serves the individual’s psychological needs at the moment. In “convergence” of meaning, either the meaning of a symbol is directly set as another expression of the illuminating, powerful, graceful prophetic knowledge of God in Christ taken as a whole, or meaning is always of a particular aspect of this PW. In each case, they all converge simultaneously as the hub of the PW, because that PW is not just cold information; it is the presence of Christ Himself as living with us in the absence of Christ the person, which, when present, is its local, manifest symbol. When Christ’s symbol is non-local, the prophetic word is the supreme meta-symbol of God in His physical absence and Christ’s primary meaning in His, both conditions being removed only when this absence becomes rectified. The PW then is simultaneously the highest kind of symbol and meaning available to fallen man, shifting emphasis depending upon our focus on the OT promise of God or NT fulfillment in Christ.
For example, the horn. We see that it represents in the traditional dictionaries, against this notion, “power,” strength,” “prominence,” “rays of “light,” “illumination,” “protection,” and “royal dignity.” We also typically see the following:
Fire: symbol of deity
Eyes: calamities and diseases inflicted by God
Dove: purity and innocence
Door: shutting or opening anything, particularly of light
Ashes: human frailty
Key: government and authority
Light: ruling powers
Fat: fertility, abundance, and wealth[19]
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Of course, the implications do apply. But this is nothing more than the passing of an object which is presumably a pointer to a divine meaning for an opaque one. They are biblically regressive, not progressive. Although all of these concepts can be applied to the person of Christ, the reason why we have historically resisted making the person of Christ the interpretative meta-symbol for “horn” is naturally because Christology has historically been intentionally kept uninformed by the idea of a symbolic, which is ultimately cursory, trivial, and man-made. If Christ were conceived as a symbol of His obvious meaning, then the transition would be automatic, but Christ can’t be a symbol because “symbol” carries the connotation of “unreality” and “artificial” to fallen man. The irony is that, although we resist calling Christ a symbol because of its connotation with the triviality and artificiality of man, the physical absence of Christ that causes us to desire and even demand a demonstration of His reality causes us to avoid the Christ “symbol” for Christ in thoroughly human and locally integral references, but such that they are rendered prosaic and pedantic—ideas limited to correspondences that point back in circular fashion to human spheres in this quest to recapture Christ’s assumed objective accessibility. This reflexive descent into puerility of meaning for biblical symbols is in academia often defended by purporting the importance of classification, to the ends of retaining a controlled methodology of interpretation, but the result, as time goes on, is classification without any method at all.
Christ the person, the historical figure, who to man is the promised Messiah before He is to be believed “God” or “Savior,” because He is a historical figure and not merely a concept, is meaningless without that meaning being made up substantially of His proven and supernaturally displayed credentials for such a title. The prophetic word has always been open for consideration for this fundamental meta-symbol, but it is even more undesirable, as the whole stream of Messianic prophecy has always been relegated as information of an occasionally useful sort in apologetics.
The issues for consideration of the great symbol of Christ/prophetic word include: ultimates and fundamentals, accessibility (historicity), and miraculousness. What satisfies all of these is not what is called a “properly basic” concept, such as “God,” as in reformed theology, but a properly basic biblical symbol, being so because it is capable of assuming equally the place of biblical meaning. It is a concept to the same extent that it is “with us.” The situation of the PW directly between the two causes it to produce the “revelation” of divine supernatural power, locality, and superiority.
“God,” the conceptual symbol, as with “human frailty,” “fertility,” and “power” for “horn” in the above symbols, is, in contrast:
“Illumination,” “protection,” and “royal dignity” for this horn is, of course, accurate, but this traditional horn is without any of the above. “Power” and “prominence” for “horn,” on the other hand, that is inextricably affixed to the prophetic word, corrects this: horn = the prominence of the oracles of God among man’s knowledge, being also the course of the strength, power, and truth of God in Christ. This does not mean that we can’t read “horn” in one of these generic fashions, as we must. It is only asserted that no biblical symbol that is rightly interpreted can fail not to steer hearts and minds to its education by the only thing that remains in the world that displays God’s supernatural power and nature: the revelation of Christ by the prophetic oracles.
Although, with predictable failure, all the above Bible dictionary concept definitions, as well as “God,” can be applied to the person of Christ, but Christ the person is not locally accessible, as is God. Being inaccessible makes “Christ the person” also only a concept. Something has to stand for Christ as a local, miraculous, understandable reality in His absence to make the “person of Christ” real to faith. This is the prophetic word, which is present as an existential reality in human language, is staunchly historical, demonstrably miraculous, and self-authenticates itself as true, and by those implications claiming to be the basis and limits of all knowledge. It must be pointed out that “he was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and by his stripes we are healed” is a completely different thing than “God,” the “person of Christ,” neither of which force the miraculous historical display of the fulfillment of this prophecy as recorded in Christ, but the prophecy contains and forces “Christ” as well as “God” within the lines. It might be argued that study and work and the process of interpretation is required to make the Messianic connection, as all symbols do, but the crucial difference is that with the perspective of history the PW symbol inexorably points to God (miraculous fulfillment ) and Christ (only person who could qualify as vicarious sacrifice for the sins of the world), which facts themselves then demand a student to biblically glean more of the same to continue a process of authentication and substantiation. This is unlike the “God” concept, which, as creature of pure abstraction, is not coming out of the box integrated with any particular revelation.
We must pause to recognize that the “God” concept requires nothing of an individual except what that individual brings to it. We tend to think this “just as I am” approach to faith, in which no conditions are placed on an individual for salvation, is piety and a display of God’s grace, but only if we are speaking of any conception of sin that is excusable, inexcusable sin being axiomatically those attitudes and states that define man who in so many ways rejects and abuses Christ. The Messianic revelation brings its conclusion and reality of Jesus Christ and Jehovah God directly to the individual, and demands an urgent response and faith that is consistent with God’s claim of being by demonstration, not by opinion, a God of truth.
Why, then, is not the prophetic word “properly basic?” It is Christ’s strength, His illuminating knowledge, it tells of and applies by faith His divine protection over believers, it bestows honor and establishes for them dignity as part of the royal family and it is the highest, most prominently displayed, most obvious miraculous sign of God which is present in the world, upon which hangs Christ Himself. When the meta-meaning becomes equivalent to a locally accessible person, it is then easy to use all biblical symbolism to converge at that existential, scriptural person for teaching Him of that world. We then make the reasonable assumption that “eyes” = “fire,” “dove,” “ashes,” and “door” converge at some point on the PW itself as a means of teaching its centrality, power, self-sufficiency, sovereignty, and demonstrability, which is then given back to God and Christ Himself.
Contextual Hermeneutic
“The first stage in serious Bible study is to consider the larger context within which a passage is found. Unless we can grasp the whole before attempting to dissect the parts, interpretation is doomed from the start.” If we are to be loyal to this principle, we must be honest about the overall context of scripture as a whole.[20]
In the consideration of context in hermeneutics, we have historically been given many false choices. Osborne above gives us:
I do not take away any of the prudence of using this, except to say that the one contextual consideration that is most important is missing here, but our given offerings for alternatives are also false choices because they re-label them in a way that they are not used as a context. Instead of the idea of context, the word “theme” is used. These are principally redemption, covenant, Christ, and the Kingdom of God.
At first glance we see that surely these themes qualify as superior context for any Scripture to the extent that without this background knowledge we are attempting to understand a mere work of literature in scientific fashion, which does not necessarily press a single overriding theological idea, particularly a unique and exclusive one needed for the salvation of man. Osborne sees the hermeneutical spiral (from Heidegger) moving from text to a context, but a context that is inductively classifiable hierarchically in relation to others in that text. This means that this conception of context is used by hermeneutics for the understanding, much like paleontology, of the orientation of one bone fossil to another within the same species, in the same geological layer, and in other geological layers. “Context” here deals with the soil of Scripture, not with presuppositions, the most distant origins, or beliefs. In hermeneutics, this is of course expected and right, but it makes our hermeneutics bad: neither a bone or the Parable of the Tares in the Wheat scream out “God!” except by our own private spiritual connections. That is the exclusive function of faith (ala the Enlightenment). In paleontology, this is a given, but is it for Scripture?
In science God is optional, and more likely to be forced out by the competing industry of the science at hand, which produces its own form of revelation that carries weight because one can put his hands on it and examine it, and renders a positive, inarguable conclusion that creates a feeling of security that our faith in a non-symbolic reality of mere matter is the right one. In Christianity, the same produces a feeling that our faith in “God,” the unattested theological abstract, is true. What is missing in each is their abstract concept and evidence of demonstration that can act with full authority for each other in the other’s absence. For hermeneutics, this would assure that a faith in God could never become optional before and during demonstration, and the idea of a superior scriptural demonstration is one that can only produce a certain salvific faith. Scripture has its own demonstrated, positive revelation of God: the historical, prophetic record, which is also the biblical faith and God Himself.
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The augments for the major theme of Scripture always assume, rightly, that it would include and unify and all others under it. It might seem that the choice of “Christ,” according to my view, is clearly superior, but if you read these theologians, you will soon come to understand that the “Christ” they speak of is the person of Christ. Although using exclusively the prophetic record to show how the OT and NT are brought together, and how redemption, covenant, and the Kingdom are its sub-themes, the result is still the aspect of Christ who has departed the earth, rendering Him as a “person” of abstraction. “Covenant,” “redemption,” and “Kingdom of God” could never be a superior theme, our superior “context,” simply because they can be taken as pure conceptual creations independent of the biblical revelation. Messianic prophecy is the only thematic biblical example that cannot be separated from God into its own independent theological/philosophical category, and is, accordingly, metonymistically used in the Bible with “faith” and “God.”
Our “context” is not a proper one, even with Osborne’s, because it is not any more “God” than it is the most complete, palpable, exposable, textual component of the line of Scripture under the eye of the hermeneuticist’s microscope, albeit hidden under the typological/parabolic method of Christ and the New Testament.
Are the Scriptures Deity?
The claim of bibliolatry will inevitably arise. The claim is that Christ can be deity, but the fact is that that which is His primary meaning can’t be, joining John in referring to Christ as “the Word.” The PW is not deity; we only use it, like any symbol, to channel and to mediate deity, which is God’s reality and Christ’s person, and do so with exclusivity that produces the impression of an unnatural devotion. This is radically unlike the devotion given to its competitors, such as a wafer, Mary, a crucifix, sola fide, ”Bible,” or “Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin,” regardless of their truth. The PW is incapable of taking the place of deity because it is information, dependent on a divine person, which is deity. It is not a talisman (either physical or conceptual) because it is not an inert object with a mere touted power that does not self-reveal. This is idolatry: the worship of a symbol which is transferrable to any god only by a change in the God concept or talisman. The PW always exclusively, inexorably, doggedly refers to the person of Christ and the Father as deity. The PW always shifts away from itself to reveal a particular God in the heart, other claims being humbled before Him. It is a divine channel that has no elbows or alternate outlets. However, “God” the concept can, as with a wafer and sola scriptura, can be treated as deity in faith, albeit a cruel one, to the extent that it is, like an idol, only an informational shell that attracts to itself alone no particular content and can reign supreme over faith without its dependence on a positive revelation of itself. This is why the historical church likes it, however: In the face of a historical acquiesce to people like Kant and Schleiermacher, where God is taken as an undemonstrated reality, their final refuge is a generic, colorless, universal idea that is made “God” for people looking only for themselves.
In that way the “scriptures” are of course deity in this negative sense, but the PW is not deity. The world’s “scriptures” are worshipped but not seen, are quite mean, and only a conceptual product of the mind so as to allow them to remain slippery enough to pull into the church scores that would otherwise have little to do with them because they are of a too narrow kind for easy personal, ecclesiastical, or academic manipulation.
[1] (http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/gadamer.html)
[2] In my discussions with conservatives there is always a violent reaction to such a proposition. A pure orthodoxy, such as this, is not welcomed in conservatism because conservatives instinctively know that, much like the actual arrival of the person of Christ in Judea in the first century, it ends myriads of “Christian” projects, invested philosophies and education, the current conception of a Christian vocation, changes the meaning of the tithe away from that which is primarily money, and separates us from like-minded “Christians.” Liberals despise it because it is too restrictive on personal wishes and conceptions of spirituality, and what they want the text to mean to them.
[3] There is controversy between those who put the last week of the prophecy as yet future and those who see it as having been fulfilled already. The former are generally premillenialists, the latter are at least partial preterists. I am not dogmatic about either view, both sides having strong arguments. For those who see this final week having been fulfilled, I recommend http://www.daniels70weeks.com/about.html.
[4] (Edersheim, The Life and Time of Jesus the Messiah 1907
[6] (Ginzberg 1909, Preface)
[7] ibid
[8] (Bostock 1987)
[9] See SESSION 13–15 June 1415 of the Council of Constance. The only reason given, even while affirming that the bread and wine were an original practice, was that, in Catholic Communions, the bread contained both the body and blood of Christ. Today, it is often option to those participating whether they drink from the cup, but in many churches only the priest drinks from it.
[10] Attributed to D.A.Waite, Ephesians, p.10. I have not seen this work.
[11] (Sanford 1902)
[12] (B. Ramm 1970)
[13] (Klein, Blomberg and Hubbard 1993)
[14] This is a corrupt idea of using “the scriptures” to denote some writing in general, which destroys objective inspiration in favor of subjective experience, and gives the question of what are the most important aspects of the revelation over to the judgment of science, is not new with me. See (Bavink 2003, 437) in Reformed Dogmatics.
[15] (R. Goldenberg 1979)
[16] (McCartney 1986)
[17] (Pelikan 1985, 21)
[18] It’s a great book, but read with caution. Pelikan ends with the “The Man Who Belongs to the World” as somehow a solution to all these failed Christ conceptions, but it is only an admission of Christ’s final dissolution into a senseless, indistinct hodgepodge.
[19] (Wemyss and Daubuz 1840)
[20] (Osbourne 1973). Chapter 1.
What is the Word of God?: A Prophetic Think Tank
https://jsrforum.lib.virginia.edu/writings/RenOrig.html, R. R. Reno and Esubius’ Ecclesiastical History, VI.19.7 ↩
First Principles IV 2.9 ↩
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