The Road to Emmaus (Week 2)

This week in my Sunday School class we continued our introduction to biblical theology and interpreting the Old Testament. After the holidays, we'll kick into full gear looking at case studies.

Biblical theology asks the question: "By what process has God revealed himself to mankind?" and results in the relating of the whole Bible to our Christian life now. Some of the strengths of biblical theology as a discipline is an increased ability to deal with problem passages in light of the whole of scripture; the ability to relate an individual story to the whole Bible and therefore ourselves; the displaying of the relationship between all parts of the OT to Christ; and the ability to map out the unity of the Bible by looking at whole message.

The Bible like all narrative has a plot flow. A basic narrative plot flow follows the following course: Introduction (Setting); Rising Action (Conflict Introduced); Climax (Conflict Resolved); Falling Action; Denoument (Conclusion). A basic narrative plot flow of the Bible could look like the following: Creation; Fall; Redemption in Process (rest of OT); Redemption Accomplished (Christ); Redemption Consummated (Glory). Vaughn Roberts has another great outline in his book "God's Big Picture."

If we are to understand any part of the narrative, we must wrestle with the issues context and application. In other words, how do we interpret an Old Testament text in light of our cultural, historical and theological distance from the original context? One method of thinking about this is to divide the main idea of a passage into three categories.

The first is called the Author's Big Idea (or ABI as it will be referred to from here on out). The ABI is concerned with the author's original intent to the original audience. It seeks to distill the main point of the passage in its original cultural, historical and theological context. For example, an ABI for Romans 3:21-26 might be: "Paul writes to the church in Rome about the appearance of the righteousness in God in the person of Christ for the sake of their justification and God's justice for those who believe."

The second is called the Theological Big Idea (TBI). It is concerned primarily with the transcendent theological principles that can be derived from the passage that would be true in any cultural or historical context. In the TBI we generally see statements about who God is and how he acts toward his people. In Romans 3 the TBI might be: "The righteousness of God has appeared in the person of Christ for the sake of the justification of sinners and the display of God's justice for those who believe." See, that statement is true no matter the cultural context because it is a statement primarily about God.

The third category is called the Message Big Idea (MBI), which might be better titled Application Big Idea if not for the fact that the acronym ABI is already in use. The MBI is concerned with taking that transcendent theological principle we derived from the text (the TBI) and reinserting it into our own cultural, historical and theological context. It asks questions like, how does this truth about God apply to me in my present reality? In Romans 3 the MBI might be: "Because the righteousness of God has appeared in the person of Christ for the sake of my justification and the display of his justice, I can have forgiveness of sin through faith in him."

Every (good) pastor goes through the process of developing an ABI, TBI and MBI for a given passage they are preaching (even if they don't use those categories or that terminology), even if they spend most of the time in the pulpit dealing with only one of them. Preaching, by its very nature, out to include all three to some extent. It is a message from a story (ABI) about God (TBI) for our edification (MBI).

At this point I'll take a break before posting again about the different ways one might interpret a given OT text in relation to Christ.

On the Road to Emmaus

Today I began a Sunday School series at my church titled "The Road to Emmaus: Seeing Jesus in the Old Testament". It is the first time I've taught adults that are substantially older and wiser than myself, and I entered into it with a bit of insecurity. It ended up being incredibly enjoyable and I'm looking forward to how the rest of the series will go.

The reason I post this is to advance some thoughts laid out by Dave several weeks ago regarding biblical theology. I am going to post short thoughts on each Sunday's lesson so that you can follow along if you are interested.

This week we looked at a few introductory concepts that inform the how and why of studying the Old Testament. Biblical theology is a distinct area of theology from the more popular systematic theology as well as historical or pastoral theology. Systematic theology is concerned with seeing what the whole Bible says about a particular concept or topic. Historical theology is concerned with the development of theology over time in history. Pastoral theology is concerned with how we ought to live our lives and operate as a church as dictated by scripture. Biblical theology is concerned with the overall story or meta-narrative of Scripture. It asks questions like, "what unifies the Bible?"

So why study the Old Testament? Well if the Bible is all one story, that means that the OT is over half of the story, at least in quantitative terms. This also means that the OT informs the remainder of the story that we find in the New Testament. We see the NT quoting the OT on almost every page. Additionally, we see the OT always pointing us forward to Christ. The same God, the three-in-one, is the God of the OT and the NT. Despite the protests of some who would declare the God of the OT a God of wrath and the God of the NT a God of love, both testaments portray the same God--a God of both justice and mercy.

Finally, we see the NT speaking of the both the significance of the OT scriptures for NT believers. In 2 Timothy 2:15-17, Paul tells Timothy that the OT scriptures are "profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work." Additionally, we get the most important statement about about the OT scriptures from Jesus himself when, after his resurrection, he confronts two of the disciples about their failure to understand the OT. He says "'O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?' And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:25-27).

Thus, the class is aptly titled "The Road to Emmaus." My hope is that in the coming weeks we will continue to see the way in which the OT is telling the same story as the rest of the Bible: the story of God's rescue mission through his son Jesus.