Recovering the Unity of the Bible: One Continuous Story, Plan, and Purpose

Other Books by Walter C. Kaiser Jr.

An Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics:

The Search for Meaning (coauthor)

The Promise-Plan of God:

A Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments

The Messiah in the Old Testament

The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Revised Edition: Exodus

Proverbs: Wisdom for Everyday Life

Psalms: Heart to Heart with God

ZONDERVAN

Recovering the Unity of the Bible

Copyright © 2009 by Walter C. Kaiser Jr.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan.

ePub Edition September 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-32339-6

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Recovering the unity of the Bible : one continuous story, plan, and purpose /

Walter C. Kaiser, Jr.

       p.    cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

       ISBN  978-0-310-32024-1 (hardcover)

      1. Bible—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Bible—Theology.  I. Title.

BS511.3.K34 2009

220.1–dc22                                                                                                                   2009020884

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible. Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by the Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Interior design by Melissa Elenbaas

To Bill and Judy Pollard—

dear friends, mentors, and leaders

of the Wheaton College Board

Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Preface

1. The Unity of the Bible: Introduction

2. The Unity of the Bible: Diversity as an Accompanying Reality

3. The Harmonization of the Diversity

4. The Unity of the Hebrew Bible

5. The Unity of the New Testament

6. The Unity of the Bible in Its Messianic Promises

7. The Unity of the Bible between the Two Testaments:

The God of the Old Testament and the New

8. The Unity of the Bible: Two Testaments:

The Morally Offensive Character and Acts of Old Testament Men and Women

9. The Unity of the Bible and the People of God

10. The Unity of the Bible and Its Program: The Kingdom of God

11. The Unity of the Bible and the Promise-Plan of God

12. The Unity of the Bible and the Law of God

13. The Unity of the Bible and the Doctrine of Salvation in Both Testaments

14. The Unity of the Mission in the Old Testament

15. The Unity of the Bible and Hermeneutics

16. The Unity of the Bible and Expository Preaching and Teaching

Epilogue

Bibliography

About the Publisher

Share Your Thoughts

Preface

I never would have thought of tackling such an awesome topic as the unity of the Bible had it not been for an invitation that came from Ranald Macaulay, principal of Christian Heritage learning center in Cambridge, United Kingdom, several years ago. He invited me to deliver sixteen lectures at the Cambridge Summer School of Theology (UK), July 14 to 20, 2008. These lectures originally were to be held at the Round Church Vestry on Bridge Street in Cambridge, but were later moved down the street to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

As I began this research some two years or more before these lectures, I found that most scholars wanted to celebrate the diversity of the Scriptures, but few were willing to stretch their necks out to lay any claims for the Scripture’s coherency. The trail for unity by and large seemed to drop off just after the biblical theology movement crested in the 1950s and ’60s. Only in recent days has there been such activity matching what was carried out about a half century ago (see the bibliography for confirmation of this point). Yet, without this component in its treatment of the Scriptures, the work of biblical theology remains piecemeal, without a set direction or an ability to locate itself in the theological curricula.

Nevertheless, I have been convinced that despite the dropping of the search for any center for a biblical theology during these same years, or a search for its unity, there is a strong case to be made for just such a unity. I have been delighted over and over again in my study for these lectures to see how strong, yet neglected, that case for the Bible’s unity is. May you, too, the readers of these lectures, have the same joy I have had.

It only remains for me to thank so many who have had a hand in this project. First of all, my appreciation goes to Ranald Macaulay for his invitation to this lectureship. I am also grateful for the correspondence from Dominic Vincent and Martin Lown, student program facilitators at Christian Heritage.

Once again it was a privilege to work with Katya Covrett, Senior Acquisitions Editor of Zondervan. She has, as usual, been most helpful. My long relationship with Stan Gundry, Executive Vice President, Publishing and Editorial Operations, has continued to be a wonderful association and one of great encouragement to me. It has also been a pleasure to work with Jim Ruark, Senior Editor-at-Large, as well as with Jesse C. Hillman, Associate Marketing Director, Academic and Reference. Thanks to each one of you and to all others who had a part in making this project a tribute to the glory of our Lord.

chapter

1

The Unity of the Bible:

Introduction

The indestructible unity and coherence of the Scriptures…is the foundational biblical doctrine.

—H. Freiherr Campenhausen¹

In 1955 G. Ernest Wright of Harvard began his article on the unity of the Bible with this unusual assessment: "The question of the unity of the Bible’s message is one that will never be satisfactorily solved, though it is one which every generation of Christians must seek to solve. We are continually impelled to search for the answer because the unity of the Church’s message to the world is at stake."² That is hardly a cheerful note on which to begin this series of studies on the unity of the Bible, but at least we may be encouraged that G. Ernest Wright did acknowledge that it is important enough to the Christian church that we must still attempt to press on for the best statement of the Scripture’s unity possible in every generation. Wright, however, had been even more melancholic in an earlier article. He opined:

The problem of the unity of the Bible confronts us in all of our attempts to teach and preach biblical faith in a modern setting. No sooner do we present one selection of biblical passages or books than we may be confronted with other passages which seem to say the opposite. When we attempt to present in some systematic way the theology of the Bible, which should be the chief agent for the presentation of its unity, we are confronted with the seemingly insuperable obstacle that the Bible was never written with any attention whatever to systematic presentation of theological propositions. For that reason biblical scholars cannot make up their minds as to what biblical theology is or can be. Is it a history of biblical ideas? But how can one make a systematic presentation of ideas undergoing historical change and exhibiting considerable fluidity through a historical process? Is it a systematic cross-section of those ideas at some one period…? If so, how can one call it a biblical theology, when it is a theology of only one period?³

In recent memory, most of this latest concern for the unity of the Bible took place toward the middle of the twentieth century. However, now in the twenty-first century, the emphasis has once again fallen on the diversity of the Bible, for the concept of diversity has risen to its highest point as the words of Scripture were granulated into as small bits as possible, mainly, but not exclusively, under the writings of some forms of source, form, and historical literary criticism.

Theological leaders, mainly those in the school of neoorthodox interpretation, especially during the days of the biblical theology movement of the 1950s and 1960s, were eager to discover and to set forth afresh some sense of the unity of the Bible that superseded or matched any historical, sociological, or literary findings that were emanating from the schools of negative literary and historical critical studies of the Bible.

Nevertheless, it has been the custom in many circles of biblical scholarship in the last half century to revert to emphasizing once more the Bible’s diversity and discontinuity, rather than to seek for any possible strands of harmony and unity. In fact, one tends to be more readily accepted in scholarly circles if the focus of one’s research avoids the topic of unity in the Bible, or a search for a center or a Mitte (German for middle or center) that Scripture might possess. Presumably the fear is that if one gets started with the presupposition that the text might exhibit a harmony or unity, it is probably motivated by a prior commitment to a dogmatic or a systematic theology interest that understands the Bible in a more harmonistic way or one that has a single purposive mind behind it all.

Oliver M. T. O’Donovan correctly countered such a fear and blanket accusation by asserting: In fact, the search for diversity is as much the result of a prior methodological decision as is the search for harmony, and cannot be defended on purely empirical grounds. Empirical investigation reveals [both] points of diversity and points of harmony.⁴

To gain some insight and a possible vantage point from which to evaluate the emphases and tendencies of our own era, let us briefly look at what has happened in the history of the Christian church.

The Concept of the Unity of the Bible in Church History

In the first Christian century, Josephus (c. AD 37–38—c. 99) could claim in his Contra Apion (1.8) that the Jews have not an innumerable multitude of books among [them], disagreeing from and contradicting one another [as the Greeks have], but only twenty-two books [i.e., equal to our present thirty-nine Old Testament books], which contain the records of all the past times; which are justly believed to be divine; and of them five belong to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind till his death.⁵

Similarly Justin Martyr argued for the seamless unity and freedom from contradictions of the divinely inspired Holy Scriptures.⁶ In his Dialog with Trypho, Justin Martyr concluded, I am entirely convinced that no Scripture can contradict another,…[for] I would admit rather that I do not understand what it says [should a contradiction be presented].⁷ Likewise, Augustine’s De consensus euangelistarum, though a relatively neglected work, argued against the pagan critic Porphyry in book 1 and against the Manicheans in the remaining three books of his defense of the harmony of the four gospels. In his first book, using the Pauline analogy of the head and the body, Augustine worked to overcome the objections of the pagans by writing in this manner:

Whoever apprehends this correspondence of unity and this concordant service of the members, all in harmony in the discharge of diverse offices under the head, will receive the account which he gets in the gospel through the narratives constructed by the disciples, in the same kind of spirit in which he might look upon the actual hand of the Lord himself, which he bore in that body, which was made his own, were he to see it engaged in the act of writing.⁸

Many other similar citations could be gleaned from Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, and others.

Unfortunately, the terms unity of Scripture and unity of the Bible as such were not usually part of the vocabulary of the early church, the era that immediately followed these early church leaders, or even of the Reformers, so far as we can tell. There were, however, other terms that approximated the concept of the unity of the Bible during these time periods, such as regula fidei, analogia pisteos, analogia fidei, and kanon pisteos, but these were terms with related, albeit often different meanings (some pointing, for example, to texts such as 2 Tim. 1:13 or Rom. 12:7), where these terms probably were not consistently used for the concept of unity itself.⁹ Even though the actual meaning of all these phrases was not always clear and did not always point to a uniform concept, it can be shown fairly easily that the assumption in these early periods of church history was that an organic unity ran through the entirety of the Scriptures; otherwise, appeal to the wide selection of texts made little sense if the fathers expected to have a cohesive statement emerge from them. It was the interconnectedness of Scripture that brought the sixty-six books of the canon into a wholeness that put the reader or interpreter at ease, regardless of where he or she was in that extensive corpus.

But there is another way of evaluating this same type of evidence from these same sources. Some have thoughtfully observed that the reason there is a scarcity of evidence in the earlier periods for the unity of Scripture is because the church faced few challenges to its unity prior to the time of the Enlightenment. Only then did numerous alleged contradictions to Scripture begin to appear.

While Gnosticism had led the earlier attacks against any concept of wholeness in the biblical corpus in the second to third Christian centuries, these were as short lived as those made by Porphyry or the attacks of the Manicheans, which did not make an enduring offensive against the widely held consensus that there was some type of cohesiveness within the biblical text—simply because Scripture represented nothing less than the mind and purpose of God. Campenhausen declared, The indestructible unity and coherence of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments is the foundational biblical doctrine for Tertullian as for all the church fathers since Irenaeus in the battle against the Gnostics.¹⁰

Nowhere can the cohesive quality of the interconnectedness of Scripture be seen more dramatically and graphically than in its comparison with the sacred writings of other religions. James Orr, for example, made this famous contrast:

The Koran, for instance, is a miscellany of disjointed pieces, out of which it is impossible to extract any order, progress, or arrangement.

The 114 Suras or chapters of which it is composed are arranged chiefly according to their length—the longer in general preceding the shorter. It is not otherwise with Zoroastrian and Buddhist Scriptures. These are equally destitute of beginning, middle or end. They are, for the most part, collections of heterogeneous materials, loosely placed together. How different everyone must acknowledge it to be with the Bible! From Genesis to Revelation we feel that this book is in a real sense a unity. It is not a collection of fragments, but has, as we say, an organic character. It has one connected story to tell from beginning to end; we see something growing before our eyes: there is plan, purpose, progress; the end folds back on the beginning, and, when the whole is finished, we feel that here again, as in the primal creation, God has finished all his works, and behold, they are very good!¹¹

Nevertheless, despite these several lines of argumentation from the early church and history itself, still in our day the case for the diversity within the Scriptures continues to be so pervasive that many biblical scholars would judge that any other goal for a biblical theology than an acknowledgment of its diversity would be out of keeping with the current lines of thinking for this discipline, and it would therefore be unable to handle the wide spectrum of materials, genres, and topics in the Bible. Gerhard Maier was not convinced, for he noted that the general consensus in scholarship was against unity.

In modern times the notion is widely prevalent that biblical revelation exhibits no unity. Old and New Testament are said to be everything but unified;¹² indeed, they abound in contradictions.¹³ This leads, on the one hand, to the rejection of attempts at harmonization and to disparagement of the unfruitfulness of such attempts.¹⁴

Maier went on to decry the fact that this rejection of the Scripture’s unity has likewise made deep inroads into positive as well as biblicistic circles. He was alluding to the fact that even conservative scholars had generally given up on the search for any unifying factors and had concluded that diversity and discontinuity were the more scientific ways of approaching biblical studies.

In the twentieth century there was a tendency to pose the question as to whether there was a center or Mitte to Scripture, rather than whether Scripture had any kind of unity. Once again, it was Gerhard Maier who surveyed the scholarly landscape that was involved in this situation. He concluded: It is difficult to speak of a ‘center’ of Scripture today, because the rubric ‘center of Scripture’ is often separated from the ‘unity of Scripture.’ While the two were closely identified at the time of the Reformation, the Enlightenment disengaged them. Indeed, the ‘center of Scripture’ practically replaced the lost [subject of the] ‘unity of Scripture.’ ¹⁵

The concept of the center or Mitte,¹⁶ or a Mittelpunkt,¹⁷ or even a Zentralbegriff¹⁸ of the Bible, or of either testament, tended to replace any discussion of the unity of the Bible. However, Rudolf Smend surveyed approximately 150 years of Old Testament theology up to 1970, and he concluded that "the confidence with which one has postulated the existence of a center (Mitte) of the Old Testament, has steadily become less and less.¹⁹ Accordingly, what once was a reluctance to adopt or suggest a central concept, a focal point, or an underlying idea" that embraced the whole of biblical theology has almost become a total abandonment of this quest.

However, if this were to be the real state of affairs also for biblical theology, why call the discipline by a name that implies some unifying promise—that is, a biblical theology. Why not call our textbooks in this area biblical theologies of the Old or New Testament? But in that case, how can a discipline, which historically by name and definition searches for a pattern, plan, person, and meaning from the biblical record, settle for a purely descriptive classification of the facts and information from the texts? And if the categories are coming ab extra from philosophy, that is, from an imposed subject arrangement, or the topics are taken from the systematic theology outline or some other external pattern of organization, would this not be an alien imposition over the texts that almost presupposes certain conclusions before we start?

Gerhard Hasel joined in the chorus of denials for any kind of center in the biblical materials. He warned that the biblical theologian cannot and must not use a concept, fundamental idea, or formula as a principle for the systematic ordering and arranging of the OT kerygmatic message as a key that determines from the start how he will present the content of the OT testimony. Nevertheless, he surprisingly went on to advise that the final aim of OT theology is to demonstrate whether or not there is an inner unity that binds together the various theologies and longitudinal themes, concepts, and motifs.²⁰

Of course, such a center must come internally from the text itself and not be one imposed from the outside or determined in advance (as Hasel warned and as I of course agree). But, if so, is that center all that opaque? Were the writers oblivious and ignorant of any ongoing master plan in their participation in this divine revelation? One would think, from their claims, that they were aware of some type of continuity even if it were only in terms of the continuing narrative story of the Bible. Page H. Kelley came to the same conclusion as he affirmed that the search for a unifying theme should be regarded as a valid one, else the Old Testament would be reduced to a collection of unrelated literary fragments.²¹

We will leave for another time the discussion of how, in the 1970s, history became the chief medium of divine revelation in the Old Testament. Let it be said in the meantime, however, that a subjective and often fallible estimate of history, as offered in the literary historical-critical theories of the day, did little to describe the heart and object of Israel’s faith. As Roland de Vaux challenged, Either the interpretation of history offered in the Bible was true and originated from God or it was not worthy of Israel’s faith or ours.²²

Types of Unity in the Bible

W. Graham Scroggie observed, There are two kinds of unity: the one is that [used in the metaphor] of a building, which we call a mechanic [view]; the other [metaphor] is that of a body, or a plant, which, of course, is organic.²³ He asked which kind of unity characterized Scripture and proposed the test Margoliouth had suggested for the unity of the authorship of Isaiah, which could just as well serve as the proper test for the unity of the whole Bible. Margoliouth had said:

Aristotle tells us that a work of art should be so constructed that the removal of any part should cause the whole to fall to pieces. We can, therefore, easily tell whether such a work is a unity by seeing what will happen if we take any part away. If the experiment results in leaving two unities where we fancied there was one, there will have been no original unity of plan. But if the result of the experiment leads to endless dissection, then it will have been shown that the work was originally an organized whole.²⁴

The second metaphor for unity was the organic one. Scroggie suggested that the laws of organic unity, summarized by the comparative anatomist of old, no one less than Georges Cuvier, could be helpfully compared to the unity of the Scripture as well.²⁵ Just as there is an organic unity in the human body, so that if an eye, a limb, or even the smallest joint of a finger is lost, not only has its unity been violated, but the body is forever maimed. In like manner, if one book or part of a book of the Bible were lost, the truth of the Scripture would similarly be maimed.

Cuvier’s first law was: Each and every part is essential to the whole. When this law was applied to salvation, the various parts of the Bible yielded these types of patterns:

Genesis to Malachi: Salvation was promised and typified.

The Gospels: Salvation was provided in the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

Acts to Revelation: Salvation was proclaimed, applied, and consummated.

If any one part were removed from the canon—for example, the Gospels—the link between the promise and the provision would be broken. If the Old Testament were removed, the Gospels would announce fulfillments for which there were no predictions. And if Acts to Revelation were cut off from the Bible, the salvation promised and provided would be useless, for the question would be: to whom was it to be applied and for what was it to be used? All three main parts complement each other, and each is essential to the whole.

Cuvier’s second law was: Each part is related to, and corresponds with, all the other parts—that is, all the parts are necessary to complement each other. Scripture has a structure to it so that the combination of its parts yields a complete picture. Accordingly, Scroggie noted how the first and the last books of the Bible form a nice inclusion and a complete chiasm:

a First Heaven and Earth (Gen. 1)

b Husband and Wife (Gen. 2)

c Judgment Pronounced on Satan (Gen. 3)

c’ Judgment Executed on Satan (Rev. 20)

b’ Husband and Wife (Rev. 21)

a’ Last Heaven and Earth (Rev. 22)

Thus the opening and closing of history are part and parcel of each other.

In like manner the four gospels are important to each other and to the message of the whole Bible, for each presents Jesus from a different teaching point of view. Matthew is written for the Jews and presents Jesus as the King of the Jews. Mark is addressed to the Romans and presents Jesus as the powerful worker of miracles. Luke focuses in on the Greek mind and shows Jesus as the Great Teacher and the wisdom of God. John is a supplement to the other three Gospels and presents Jesus as the true Son of God. Instead of there being four gospels, their combined story results in one gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, with the first three stressing Jesus’ earthly side for the most part, while John emphasizes his inward and heavenly aspect.

No less do the Epistles complement each other. All five writers of these letters emphasize a parallel part of the same organically related truth. Paul’s great topic is faith and its relation to justification, sanctification, service, joy, and glorification. James, on the other hand, wants to make sure works are properly seen as the legitimate outcome of faith; thus he complements the apostle Paul. Peter is the apostle of hope who urges God’s people forward despite trials and temptations. John is the teacher of love and the relation love has to light and eternal life in Christ. Finally, Jude warns against apostasy, which can wreck faith, hope, and love toward God.

The principle of a designed structure can be seen everywhere in Scripture and is a marked indicator of the Bible’s organic nature.

Cuvier’s third and final law is: All the parts of organism are pervaded by one life principle. The biblical text claims for itself that the word of God is living and enduring and stands forever (Heb. 4:12; 1 Peter 1:23, 25). Just as a seed, or a living organism, has life and vitality, so the Scripture shares that same vitalizing force that comes from God. The fact that God’s Word is alive can be seen in the life it produces