Prophetic Theory: Prophecy as Fact, part III: A Prophetic Think Tank
Prophetic Theory and the Necessity of Messianic Prophecy
“Prophecy as Fact” is meant in two senses: Messianic prophecy is self-attesting, and therefore God’s method of self-attestation, used to show himself, and messianic prophecy is in its fulfillment a historical fact.
This article is not an attempt to prove certain fulfillments as historical. Its purpose is to describe a necessary theory behind the prophetic phenomenon itself that makes it supremely important to a faith assumed not driven exclusively through the emotions or tradition. We establish the necessity of its fact and that of its sole faith motivation in a faith that claims to be revealed.
If Christianity is a revealed faith then it needs something revealed, and if revealed from and about Transcendence it is a necessity that it bear the marks of its non-conceptual origin. If so, its an appearance of God in the mind by the force of objective, palpable information proving Him. Any alternative to this locus for faith is by definition idiosyncratic and not of intrinsic divine origin. This should cause us to refocus on Messianic Prophecy itself as a historical reality and theological center.
Prediction
The most common calculus is in the range of 20% to 28% the Bible that is predictive, as an Ankerberg, Weldon and Burrough’s The Facts on the Bible.1
Of the OT’s 23,210 verses, 6,641 contain prophetic material, or 281/2 percent. Out of the NT’s 7914 verses, 1711 contain predictive material, or 21 1/2 percent. So for the entire Bible’s 31,124 verses, 8352 contain predictive material, or 27 present of the whole Bible.
Then there is then J. Barton Payne’s results in his monumental Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecy2 There is a table at the back that shows the number of predictive verses broken down by Old and New Testament book. One count is by a number of predictions; the other is by linguistic forms, which are Oracles, Figurative, Symbolical and Type. But this leaves out potentially a massive amount of material, which he hints at in p. 149 and 150. He goes to great care in distinguishing such things as a prediction of the future and optimistic hope, such as in Philemon 22. This is correct. However, he avoids what he calls “allegorizing methodology” that, it seems to him, has been used to interpret, for example, the Book of Ruth as messianic, rendering it devoid in his opinion of predictive material.
Payne and others like him are in the business of scholarship, which lives on collation, classification, and codification. Although he agrees that the Bible is for the revelation of Christ, classification and learning mean that certain parts are also not to be interpreted as functioning in that service. This is not to say that there is not a lot that is not intended as prophetic and should not be taken as such. But if the Bible is for the purpose of serving and revealing Christ, and Christ is a prophetic person, it can’t be forgotten that the Bible, regardless of incidental interpretations, is a prophetic book, not a textbook or a classification table. Therefore our application to Christ may stop somewhere, but not at ourselves and our own schemes.
Payne codified criteria for identifying prophetic passages and fulfillments. Please go to the following link that uses criteria that assume both a prophetic subject (Prophetic Word) and object (Christ as the enfleshment of the Prophetic Word) that are unified, acting as the subtext of the Book of John.
Jesus and His Prophetic Speech in John: Passing by Nehushtan
Other schemes exclude as essential prophetic speech vast swaths of the text which clearly are.
Allegorization is not the identification and signification of symbols in an uncontrolled fashion as much as it is one of doing so to teach doctrines that can originate and receive signification and importance through reason alone. Symbolic identification and signification are not to decode encoded messages from God, it is used to teach Christ and the importance and nature of his revelation to faith. In that sense, dysfunction in symbology is not in the rules it uses except when that one rule is violated that would make the importance of the fulfillments of Jesus of secondary or tertiary importance. There might be a return here to the complaint that this opens up meaning so far that that rules will be routinely broken, but Boaz and Ruth as Christ and the Church cannot be one of the examples. It is not to be taken primarily to our own glorification, as, for example, a homey story on why it is better to in the difficulties of life have faith. There seems to be a defect in our style of thought that tends to make a moral distinction between lawlessness and law, but in fact, this depends entirely upon what kind of law and lawlessness we are speaking about. Obeying with great passion the law of another god is not moral, nor is believing the Hebrew Law as a Christian as a means of satisfaction with God, but in Christ, an essential freedom from the penalty and letter of the Law is a sign of an understanding of how Christ fulfilled it, why faith in this fulfills that law, and salvation. Jesus walking on the stormy waters and saving Peter is not about Jesus comforting us through the storms of life, but about him saving us from confusion, misunderstanding, bad exegesis of the scriptures which obscure the believer from Christ and cause us being overcome by such dissimulation. It’s about the primacy of the prophetic pertaining to Christ in faith. It is not about our own priorities. Achieving that happy middle is a concern not to be taken lightly, but the greater concern is what is routinely and casually taken lightly in our scholarship that is, in my view, essential.
Foretelling and Forthtelling
This distinction is not so important as scholarship makes it out to be, which is mostly for the purpose of deemphasizing the miraculous in a view of faith.
Forthtelling is the prophets call to holiness in this source:
True foretelling as usually in the service of forthtelling. The pattern frequently was “in the light of what the Lord is going to do [foretelling], we should be living godly lives [foretelling].”3
Payne also says that the purpose of prophecy was to inspire people to holiness.4. This is, of course, true, but not the kind of holiness that scholarship believes. This goes to the entire unifying function of the prophetic in religious faith.
Forthtelling and foretelling is an accurate description of the role of the prophet and the two different kinds of his utterances. However, not with the effect of the subjection of prediction in a call to holy living.
1. The distinction is Old Testament biased. Despite the call to physical morality in the Pauline epistles, this is always predicated upon knowledge of and faith in Messiah Jesus from the prophetic Scriptures. The following is typical, often with no concomitant reference to physical morality:
- Romans 1:1-3 Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God, (Which he had promised afore by his prophets in the holy scriptures,) Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh;
- 1 Corinthians 1:5-6 That in every thing ye are enriched by him, in all utterance, and in all knowledge; Even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you:
- 2 Corinthians 4:6 For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
- Ephesians 1:17 That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him:
- Philippians 1:9 And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment;
- Colossians 1:9-10 For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God;
- 1 Timothy 2:4 Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.
In the gospels, the call, from the greatest prophet, Jesus, is to repent (μετανοια)5, or to change one’s mind. The separation of the change of mind from physical morality as a display of this change is in Acts 26:20: “But shewed first unto them of Damascus, and at Jerusalem, and throughout all the coasts of Judaea, and then to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance.” This change of mind is indicated in Acts 26: 18: To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me. This preaching is a call for a change in belief, opinion, and allegiances over the claim of Jesus Messiah from the OT prophets. The essence of New Testament prophetism is revealed as a spiritual change, not a physical one, which is impossible without this decision being made. Therefore, the call to holiness in the Old Testament is figurative of the spiritual change that will be asked at the advent of Messiah over the entire nature of religious faith.
2. If holiness is permanently converted to the holiness of thought and faith, this changes the original purpose of forthtelling as being itself prophetic of coming holiness and particular kind of apostasy of mind instead of one about the Law of physical obedience. Foretelling is the telling of the future. If Christ is a result and predictive prophecy is his premise, the purpose of OT foretelling is in the service of ultimately predicting of Christ and the purpose of forthtelling is his fulfillment of it. Therefore, forthtelling of prophecy in holy living is subsumed under its fulfiller Christ the person. This is then transferred to the believer through repentance around the truth of his messiahship, that truth being both premise and fulfilled conclusion. The function of the prophetic is then unified as evidence of the existence and nature of God through the historical fulfillments of Christ and to automatically cleanse the conscience for the turning of it to the service of God’s Truth and its Christ.
“Holy Living” is not removed as a goal in the sense of physical demonstration of morality. Holy living as an externalization is ended as the only means, which was always impotent, of indicating a just spirit before God. Holy living as a kind of physical action is not possible without being illuminated first by the revelation of Christ, without which it would be the personal equivalent of false prophecy (prophecy being the externalization of the mind of God in his contingent creation). Physical action is deceptive as to its motivation. However, the spirit contains both motivation and what motivates. It is what it is. An internal holy living is a subjective life dominated by Christ and his prophetic revelation, without which no physical expression is holy. This represents the fulfillment of the primitive but hopeful Old Testament moral theory.
It is obvious in our day, and progressively through the ages where even the existence of “truth” is called into question, the emphasis on morality shifts slowly to what we can show ourselves from what has already been shown by God. The ethos is increasingly that the actions and natural affections of people, of science, of philosophy, will vault them past themselves in a transhuman resurrection. Therefore, moral action in the physical sense, of all kinds, fails, but the truth, and its people to which are exclusively dependent lives on unchanged.
Self Attestation
We often hear how prophecy is God’s method of self-attestation. This, however true, is a bad linguistic formulation.
The prophetic of the messiah is not only a means of proving something. It is also its own authority, as prophecy is both a means of showing the reality of its author and an end in showing that it is self-sufficient in carrying all biblical meaning.
In this, the latter aspect contains and is the superior of the former to consciousness, in the sense of being that of the first contact. Whether God to the consciousness of man is a reality or has a certain nature is not possible without a symbol. In order to be capable of revealing this transcendent reality, the symbol must itself be capable of displaying a transcendent phenomenon. Christ fulfills this symbol, but when he is absent his symbol of the worlds of the prophets fulfill it.
Like God, prophecy is outside of a human agency, but prophecy is not God. It is an informational representation of that transcendent Personal reality. This symbol or mediator, therefore, must be both miraculous phenomenon and the primary informational fount of its Author to cover the two main attributes of any object in existence and nature, this one being that of transcendent existence and nature. If this were not so then the only means of man in obtaining information about God would be entirely through insular idle speculation and feeling. But any evidential revelation of the object, in order to accurately reveal that object when it is absent to view, must be something of the nature of the object itself as an ontological entity. If its a thing like a Black Hole in the physical universe, its evidence requires no more than it exists in a measurable form and behavior as a cosmological body. If its a person, its the same, with the exception that he is evinced as shown alive and capable of thought and reason and if this person has a moral component, empathy for others, the testimony of his responsibility for what that person does, faithfulness to his word, and many others. If it is a transcendent person, it includes all the foregoing, and also that its evidence is expected to demonstrate this person has knowledge and abilities outside that of humans.
Only upon imaginary objects or phenomenon, those which are the products of the mind alone, are the demands of evidence required to come also from no more than philosophical demonstration and entirely rational arguments, since those are also entirely out of the minds own resources. Objects which are from no more than a purely conceptual origin await outside confirmation but, if they never receive it, nothing is lost but a concept, not the power of the conceptual realm. Physical evidence may be gathered and demonstrate the existence of the imaginary object, but the object itself did not demand such an outcome for conceptual objects to be real and vital products of the mind. The average object which is a product of the mind is also not evidence for it being only a product of the mind, but it seeks a connection with reality for it to be more than that kind of product alone. Objects also seek conceptualization, but their existence as an object is not threatened because they are not conceptualized. But since God is expected to be an objective reality, and the subjective reality of man is a creation of this God, the failure to demonstrate God by evidence which is outside of the idea itself and its subjective place of entertainment is also a threat to the entire legitimacy of reason, thought and the potentiality of “truth.” This is our place now in history. However, the issue is not properly to be called failure or lack of the evidence for God which leads to this breakdown, but that the evidence for God is conceived as primarily that in natural revelation, logic and the doctrines of the faith taught as mere statements of belief.
This also represents two worlds at odds. Ideas seek objectification and objects seek conceptualization. The basis of human actualization, if I may use that post-modern term, is the reconciliation between the natural insularity of the abstract world of mind, its inability to fulfill or reflect it as a reflection of its highest aspirations, and the lack of meaning for the outside world to find a place accurately within the mind. But the Christian revelation represents this reconciliation in the experience of man. In terms of object and meaning we speak of it this way in its most basic form:
1. God (transcendent meaning) seeks representation to man (objective reality)
2. Christ is a transcendent objective symbol (object), representative of God in the physical universe, the fulfiller of God’s (meaning) mind, his will.
3. Man believes Christ (trans. symbol, object), appropriates God’s trans. meaning
4. Man’s insularity of mind and objective world is reconciled by the revelation of Christ and God.
This is accurate, but how? Theology is habitual in stating good reasons to believe a certain proposition but which never need to have a particular kind of revelation outside itself upon which to substantiate it. It remains only a logical formula, as stated, without a logical ground outside of itself, which ground could only be not simply the necessity of revelation between trans. meaning and tans. symbol, but by the means of a certain kind of trans. information, which applies both to the meaning (God) and object (Christ). This information would not be not only syllogisms. It would show itself as having originated both outside the human mind and his world and being comprehensible and accessible to the human world. It represents the potential satisfaction of the world to God by being a kind of informational entity which is a true hybrid and will serve as a door, of sorts, through which man and God would connect.
Information is both meaning and object and contains both meaning and objects. An object is not necessarily conceptualized and concepts and not necessarily objectified. Miraculous information, which is expected of God, is the same, only of a miraculous kind, not one of the mere concepts, sensibility, logical axioms and philosophical principles, doctrinal statements, persons, places and things which are not. This is why the “revelation” of which we speak of God in Christ can speak only of a Devine information which demonstrates the miraculous and Devine ordination of the two to change his world.
Messianic prophecy is an idea and its a proof of the idea. Messianic prophecy is this informational entity of Christ.
Self-sufficiency
The self-sufficiency of prophecy as a type of revelation, as a means providing not only a demonstration of God’s existence but covering the nature of God, is in providing all doctrine, philosophy, theology, and the limits and type of faith and practice that is crucial.
To the viewer, God and his attestation are taken as one and the same, entities in different forms: one opaque and distinct, and one objective and clear. We like to say that God and his attesting method are different so as to make the statement that a “God sense” is king, and rules over facts. God uses prophecy. However, we are talking about faith and its view, not using God’s perspective to simply determine what is God and what is but an instrumentality of him.
God and God’s facts are taken as personal and informational equivalents to faith, to the apprehension of the Devine. Prophecy is an attempt by God to give man something with which the entirely selfish pretensions of reason and faith, and their conclusions, are replaced with a thing incapable of carnal guile. This is replaced by a kind of reconciliation by God of the extremes of human frailty and arrogance as much as is man’s outer/inner worlds are to be reconciled, made possible only by handling this informational object that is essentially the reason, the mind, of Another, which did not come from here. It’s not like the faith of “doctrine,” concept, tradition or, with atheists, gratuitous iconoclasm and bad childhood or church experiences. Doctrine/feeling and faith are two separate things. You can say you have faith in the doctrine or passionately argue from “common sense,” but these are not faith objects. They are that which faith argues from because faith in its natural state is stronger and more real than what will become its attestations. Doctrine, like “God is sovereign” or “there is not God,” are concepts, claims, things that require authentication, and do not authenticate. It is not self-proving. It has to borrow resources to support itself.
Atheism is the same, but even weaker, in that its authentication comes not from any positive argument, but only from the failure of the best argument. Prophecy, however, is both the doctrine and the faith, the claim and the demonstration, the premise and the conclusion of the religion, and the informational, revelational, biblical equivalent of Jesus himself.
“Jesus rose from the dead,” “God is sovereign,” “Jesus is the Son of God,” are concepts. They must be argued to. When these are modified by the prophetic, we realize that it is a prophecy that gives life to all doctrine, without which there would be none: “Jesus rose from the dead, as predicted in Psalms 22 and Isiah 53.” God is sovereign, as foretold in Psalms 2, Isa 61.” “Jesus is the Son of God, predicted in Psalms 2.” These statements are the claim and the proof for the claim and are corrections, but even these have limitations. Scriptural prophecy and its recorded fulfillment in Christ in a single unit itself contain the claim; the claim does not necessarily contain the prophecy, but can, and does, have a life of its own without it. Furthermore, the faith that these are true is expressed in the prophecy. This does not only mean that in Psalms 2, the prophetic faith, that of another day as foretold by God, of David and Isaiah is expressed. It is. But firstly that the Christian faith is on and in the prophecies as much as that Person of Prophecy, without which there would be no justification for faith.
Prophesying, Preaching, and the Prophetic: A Prophetic Think Tank
Prophetic Theory, part I: Subject and Object: A Prophetic Think Tank
Prophetic Theory part II: Logos Theology
John Ankerberg, John Weldon, and Dillon Burrough’s. The Facts on the Bible. Harvest House Publishers, Inc., 2009. ↩
Payne, J. Barton. Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecy. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1973. ↩
Virkler, Henry A. Hermeneutics: Principles and Processes of Biblical Interpretation. Baker Academic, 2007. ↩
Payne, p.6 ↩
from the root νοεω, “to exercise the mind (observe), i.e. (figuratively) to comprehend, heed:—consider, perceive, think, understand.” There is no inference to physical action in the word except through a theological calculus ↩
