Chrestomathy

Like a Mighty Flood

Not a little confusion exists today over the work of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament dispensation, contrasted with the New.  Below is B. B. Warfield’s excellent summary of the matter:

The old dispensation was a preparatory one and must be strictly conceived as such.  what spiritual blessings came to it were by was of prelibation.  They were many and various.  The Spirited worked in providence no less universally then than now.  He abode in the Church not less really then than now.  He wrought in the hearts of God’s people not less prevalently than now.

All the good that was in the world was then as now due to him.  All the hope of God’s Church then as now depended on him.  Every grace of the godly life then as now was a fruit of his working.  But the object of the whole dispensation was only to prepare for the outpouring of the Spirit upon all flesh.  He kept the remnant safe and pure, but it was in order that the seed might be preserved. This was the end of his activity then.

The dispensation of the Spirit, properly so called, did not dawn, however, until the period of preparation was over and the day of outpouring had come.
  The mustard seed had been preserved through all the ages only by the Spirit’s brooding care.  Now it is planted, and it is by his operation that it is growing up into a great tree which shades the whole earth, and to the branches of which all the fowls of heaven come for shelter.

It is not that the work is more real in the new dispensation than in the old.  It is not merely that it is more universal.  It is that it is directed to a different end–that it is no longer for the mere preserving of the seed unto the day of planting, but for the perfecting of the fruitage and the gathering of the harvest.

The Church, to use a figure of Isaiah’s, was then like a pent-in stream; it is now like that pent-in stream with barriers broken down and the Spirit of the Lord driving it.  It was he who preserved it in being when it was pent-in.  It is he who is now driving on its gathered floods till it shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.  In one word, that was a day in which the Spirit restrained his power.  Not the great day of the Spirit has come.  

B. B. Warfield, “The Spirit of God in the Old Testament,”  Selected Shorter Writings, edited by John E Meeter (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1973) 2: 716f.

Book of the Month

Book of the Month/October 2012 

Engaging the Culture – Book Review
Written by Douglas Wilson
Sunday, 30 September 2012

This is a superb little book, one that addresses a screaming need with clarity, while at the same time avoiding a simplistic 1,2,3 triteness.

The theme of the book, as the title suggests, is that provocative little phrase from the Westminister Confession which says this:

“The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture” (WCF 1.6).

The subject can get complicated, so let’s begin in the shallow end.
We can assert, for example, that God created the yellowhammer, even though the Bible never mentions the yellowhammer by name. God made all things (John 1:3), and this includes, by good and necessary consequence, all yellowhammers. God made all birds (Gen. 1:26), and this includes the yellowhammers also. By good and necessary consequence.

This is a simple example, and it is a simple point. But one of the reasons we must hang on to this simple point is that the serpent is more subtle than all the beasts of the metafields of discourse. Pomo relativism (and all its leprous spin-offs) hates the idea of this kind of certainty — a certainty that McGraw points out, quoting Letham, necessitates systematic theology (p. 33). It is de rigeur of late to disparage systematic theology, opposing it (somehow?) to biblical theology. But without systematic theology, there is no biblical theology, and if we have biblical theology — and good and necessary consequence — we will have good and godly systematics.

So good and necessary consequence can be mishandled and abused. Sure. Name a good thing in this fallen world that can’t be. Refusing to follow the arguments that proceed from scriptural premises has bad consequences also. Going right could have bad consequences, but so could going left, and so could standing right where you are.

McGraw sees and understands that this doctrine is necessary if we are to have any hope at all of finding “a key to understanding New Testament uses of the Old Testament” (p. xiii). Doctrines such as the doctrine of the Trinity cannot be found in any one passage of Scripture. In order to defend that doctrine, we have to go through all Scripture and assemble an argument (p. 1). He shows how Jesus assumes this principle in His handling of the text in His dispute with the Sadducees about the resurrection, and how He assumes that those He is speaking to needed to submit to that principle as well (pp. 11-12).

So for those who want to stick with a strict biblicism, the bad news is that a tight handling of the Scripture requires us to accept good and necessary consequence as a biblical way of proceeding. It is like those who reject human teachers because “all they need is the Bible.” But the Bible gives them human teachers. They don’t want just the Bible; they just want to disobey the Bible.

At the same time, McGraw does a great job in avoiding the idea that scriptural arguments are assembled, clunkity clunkity, out of two by fours. He is clear about his positions (which I share) but he doesn’t write as a hack partisan at all. For example, he acknowledges that the medievals who used the quadriga were at least making an attempt to tie the Old and New Testaments together. “In part, the quadriga represented an attempt to harmonize such difficulties” (p. 22). Some have taken the phrase “good and necessary consequence” as somehow requiring us to treat the Bible as a logic textbook written by a committee of engineers. No, but the fact that it is literature does not alter any of these principles.

McGraw’s tip of the hat to Fairbairn’s Typology of Scripture as a sober and judicious treatment shows that he is not interested in a good and necessary consequence that results in a tidy chain of orthodox Ps and doctrinaire Qs. Good and necessary consequence thrives in literature and poetry and history. It is necessary in those genres. It is good and necessary in those genres.

At the same time, McGraw’s approach is rigorous and tough-minded. “The rejection of good and necessary consequence has not been a hallmark of orthodoxy, but rather a hallmark of heresy” (p. 60). This book is just . . . balanced.

His treatment of the Westminster Assembly leans on Letham’s wonderful treatment of the subject, and that is another good sign. This small book is the work of a well-educated and theologically-informed grown-up, and is a book that I believe that many pastors will find very helpful. I really enjoyed it — and ordered myself a couple of very fine other books right out of his footnotes. That’s another mark of a good book.

Muddy Waters

Are Theologians Necessary

Canadianchristianity Magazine interviewed J I Packer–and asked him, amongst other things, whether theologians are necessary to the Church.

Distinguished theologian J.I. Packer is the author of more than 40 books — including Knowing God, which has sold nearly two million copies and has been translated into 25 languages. He is the Board of Governors Professor of Theology at Regent College.
 
Meg Johnstone: You’ve been quoted as saying: “In all my teaching and writing, I am trying to show that theology is extremely practical.” So, are theologians really necessary?

J.I. Packer: (chuckling) I think the answer is yes, but you have to define what a theologian is. His business is to make sure that the church has what I will call a pure water system — thinking of the word of God as the water of life. You could describe him, therefore, as a kind of ecclesiastical plumber, or sewage engineer. In the church, there’s always going to be muddy water, there’s always going to be mistaken ideas going around; theologians are the people whose business is to keep the flow clear and pure. In order to do that, they have to understand the faith as a whole, and that usually means that they have to do something like specialist work in the exposition of Bible truth — because the people who are stirring up the mud are also doing specialist work. . . . Any section of the church which doesn’t have theologians — as point people and whistle blowers and plumbers and water engineers — is, sooner or later, going to be bogged down in muddy water.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

>Public Declarations

>Christ Coming into His Kingdom

Biblical Theology, Prophecy

As regards the Second Coming of Christ, it will scarcely be questioned that it was somehow connected with statements, which we now see to have primarily referred to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple.  Equally there can be no doubt, that the men of Christ’s time expected His Advent, and also that every age since has done the same; and, indeed, was intended to do so. . . . 

And the destruction of Jerusalem and of the Temple was not only a symbol, but in an initial sense the very coming of Christ into His Kingdom.That coming of Christ into His Kingdom, which had been denied in explicit words, and negatived by public deed, when by wicked hands they slew Him, was vindicated, and, so to speak, publicly enacted when the Roman solider threw the torch into the Temple, and when afterwards Jerusalem was laid level with the dust.  As regards the men of that land and generation, it was the public proclamation, the evidence, that Christ Whom they had rejected had come into His Kingdom.  By the lurid light of those flames no other words could be read than those on the Cross: “This is the King of the Jews”.  I say, then, the burning of Jerusalem was to that generation–and whatever kindred events successively came within the focus of the telescopic vision of following generations, were to them, the fulfilment of that prophecy, of which the final completion will be the personal reappearance of Christ at the end of the Aeon.

Alfred Edersheim, Prophecy and History in Relation to the Messiah (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1980), p. 132f.  http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=1440090947&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

>A Saved World

>For God So Loved The World . . .

You must not fancy, then, that God sits helplessly by while the world, which He has created for Himself, hurtles hopelessly to destruction, and He is able only to snatch with difficulty here and there a brand from the universal burning.  The world does not govern Him in a single one of its acts: He governs it and leads it steadily onward to the end which, from the beginning, or ever a beam of it had been laid, He had determined for it. . . . Through all the years one increasing purpose runs, one increasing purpose: the kingdoms of the earth become every more and more the Kingdom of our God and His Christ.  The process may be slow; the progress may appear to our impatient eyes to lag.  But it is God who is building: and under His hands the structure rises as steadily as it does slowly, and in due time the capstone will be set into its place, and to our astonished eyes shall be revealed nothing less than a saved world.  

B. B. Warfield, from a sermon on John 3:16 entitled “God’s Immeasurable Love,” in Biblical and Theological Studies (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1968), pp.518f. Cited in David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Fort Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1987), p. 215.  http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0930462092&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr