The latest episode of Christ the Center is available.  The panel members give a brief introduction to the major issues and point listeners to a number of helpful publications on the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament.

In his unpublished Reformed Textual Criticism,¹ Moises Silva brings up an interesting point regarding the Van Tilian aversion to probabilistic methods and the discipline of textual criticism. One need not spend much time in order to uncover Van Til’s negativity toward probabilistic methods. He found no room for probability within the Christian epistemology. This leads the textual critic who has Van Tilian sympathies to question whether he needs to jettison one of his interests. The whole enterprise of textual criticism is based on mechanical methods designed to point out which textual variant is most likely original.

Silva assuages the apparent clash:

It would be misleading, I think, to suggest that Van Til disapproved of using the methods of probability in every respect. We may be quite sure that even he, upon hearing a weather forecast predicting a 90% probability of showers, would have canceled a Saturday picnic. […] What provoked Van Til, of course, was Bishop Butler’s transference of such day-by-day decisions to matters about which the Bible speaks unequivocally, including especially the existence of God (also such affirmations as the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the divine authority of the Scriptures). Many other things, however, do no belong in the same category. Even some matters having to do with our Christian life lack firm certainty.²

He then adds in a footnote:

Even more fundamentally, Van Til objected to the use of possibility and probability arguments when presenting the gospel to unbelievers, on account of conflicting epistemologies: “For the natural man the idea of possibility is on the one hand identical with chance and on the other hand with that which the natural man himself can rationalize. For him only that is practically possible which man can himself order by his logical faculties. But the word possibility means for the Christan that which may happen in accord with the plan of God” (The Defense of the Faith [3d ed.; Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1967] 144).³

Silva studied under Van Til in the late 1960s and to his knowledge, Van Til never brought up textual criticism “even during his most vigorous denunciations of ‘probabilistic apologetics.’”⁴

1. Silva, Moises. Reformed Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: Westminster Theological Seminary, 1990).↩
2. Ibid., 20.↩
3. Ibid.↩
4. Ibid., 19.↩

Watch two shewas fight it out.

If you are to tell what the Bible does say, you must be able to read the Bible for yourself. And you cannot read the Bible for yourself unless you know the languages in which it was written. We may sometimes be tempted to wish that the Holy Spirit had given us the Word of God in a language better suited to our particular race, in a language that we could easily understand; but in his mysterious wisdom he gave it to us in Hebrew and Greek. Hence, if we want to know the Scriptures, to the study of Greek and Hebrew we must go. I am not sure that it will be ill for our souls. It is poor consecration indeed that is discouraged by a little earnest work, and sad is it for the church if it has only ministers whose preparation for their special calling is of the customary superficial kind… If the students of our seminary can read the Bible not merely in translation, but as it was given by the Holy Spirit to the church, then they are prepared to deal intelligently with the question of what the Bible means.

The Reformed View

Reformed Theologians read redemptive history as composed structurally of two overarching covenants (the covenant of works and the covenant of grace). They view each explicit covenant made after the Fall to be a different administration of the same covenant of grace. As redemptive history progresses, God reveals more of His grand plan as if each successive covenant peeled a petal from the rose of redemption until the bud is fully revealed.

Rather than capriciously accept this Biblical structure, the Reformed theologian must have a firm grasp of the biblical case that underlies this position. In this post then, we intend to provide a synopsis and paraphrase of some of the arguments for the structural unity of the covenant of grace. The work of two articulate authorities on the subject (O. Palmer Robertson and Robert Reymond) will be used [liberally]. We will use Robertson’s basic outline found in The Christ of the Covenants ¹ for our examination.
(Continue Reading…)

1. O. Palmer Robertson, The Christ of the Covenants (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1980), 27-52.↩

I’m currently occupied with a weekend seminar on ethics, so I’m taking a brief break from the James/Paul series.

On another front, I have been translating various portions of the K^etuvim recently (sections from both the T^ehillim [4th book] and Ruth), which is admittedly a dangerous endeavor for a NT specialist.

Nevertheless, there is a curious construction found at the end of Ruth 2:7 that has proven particularly nettlesome to me from a translation perspective.

Here’s the text in question (transliterated from BHS, 4^thedition):

Zeh shivtah habayith m^e‘aţ

If you dislike transliteration as much as I do, here’s a pointed Hebrew text of Ruth Chapter 2 (from the Aleppo Codex).

These are the presently unresolved questions I have with regard to this text:
(Continue Reading…)