My confident hope is that I will in no way be ashamed but that with complete boldness, even now as always, Christ will be exalted in my body, whether I live or die. For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain. Now if I am to go on living in the body, this will mean productive work for me, yet I don’t know which I prefer: I feel torn between the two, because I have a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far, but it is more vital for your sake that I remain in the body. And since I am sure of this, I know that I will remain and continue with all of you for the sake of your progress and joy in the faith, so that what you can be proud of may increase because of me in Christ Jesus, when I come back to you.

What struck me as we were working through this passage is what Paul ultimately desires as the outcome of his situation is not based upon what is best for him; instead it is based upon what is best for those believers whom he serves, who constitute the body of Christ. This goes entirely against the grain of our natural human selfishness, to be sure, but it also goes against the grain of much of the self-actualization and self-help ethos of contemporary Christianity. Paul’s choice and desire in this instance are not driven by what he prefers or what will work best for him personally. Instead they are driven by what helps the body of Christ and thus ultimately magnifies Christ. Certainly what benefits the body will also benefit the self, so often the two paths don’t diverge that much. But when they do, Paul helps us see what is the more important standard for choosing. Let us always remember that we serve the body of Christ, not the other way around.

In tandem with the exhibition will be a lecture series. Every Tuesday night at 8 pm a prominent DSS scholar will speak. The list include Peter Flint, Emmanuel Tov, Martin Abegg, and many others. These are world-class scholars who have worked directly with the Scrolls for many years. The lectures begin on July 10 and run through December 4. There is a charge for admission, but with this line up the price is worth it.

This is a great opportunity for those in the DFW metroplex area to get some direct exposure to scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Highly recommended for all Bible college and seminary students in the area. For more info go to SeeTheScrolls.com.

I will be the first to admit that the biblical text has no record of Jesus teaching on homosexuality. But does that mean he didn’t have an opinion on the matter? Of course not. We can look at what he did teach, and come to the certain conclusion that he would not have approved of homosexual behavior. Take, for example, Matthew 19:3-6:

Then some Pharisees came to him in order to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful to divorce a wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and will be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

In this passage the Pharisees, who themselves debated this question quite often, sought to trap Jesus by pinning him down on acceptable grounds for divorce. In his response Jesus focused not on the negative, that is, on when a couple could divorce, but on the positive, that is, on what God’s desire was from the beginning. He emphasized the way God made humankind, as male and female, and how husband and wife were meant to be joined together in an intimate, permanent union. In other words, from Jesus’ teaching we can make a good argument that he saw the marriage relationship as being a permanent, loving union between a man and woman. Anything else falls short of God’s plan and design and is contrary to his will.

Practically this means that in the realm of sexual activity and human relationships, anything outside of marriage between a man and woman is not God’s plan and therefore is sinful. Divorce is a terrible fracture of God’s design and always stems from sin. Adultery certainly isn’t God’s best; we should roundly condemn adulterous behavior and relationships as sinful. And by the standard of what Jesus taught here, the only reasonable conclusion about homosexual behavior is that it is also sinful before God. It is not what God designed from the beginning, therefore it cannot be regarded as anything but sin.

Long and short, Jesus never did say anything about homosexuality. But he did teach on how God designed man and woman to relate in marriage. Anything else is not God’s plan, and Jesus would never have argued that it was.

It is with considerable mixed emotions that I (gladly) introduce this commentary to the reading public. On the one hand, this work represents a signal end of an era for this commentary series, since it is both replacing a commentary by the second general editor (F. F. Bruce) and is the final editorial task of the third general editor, whose onsetting bout with Alzheimer’s disease has necessitated his relinquishing this task, even though a few additional replacement volumes are still in the mill as it were.

Obviously Fee’s comment about Alzheimer’s caught me off guard. I had not heard anything publicly before about this, so perhaps this is his way of notifying the NT scholarly community of what he is facing. Let us pray for this great scholar and dedicated believer. May the Lord to be gracious to him by granting him strength and grace in the battle ahead.

It’s now summertime at DTS, so my schedule has opened up a bit. One goal for my summer is to work through several books I’ve gotten over the last year. Today is the first of several offerings, mini-reviews perhaps, on books that have landed on my desk and deserve some attention.

Exegesis is the warp and woof of biblical studies, especially on the graduate level. Here at DTS all Th.M. students have to take a number of courses on exegesis of the Greek and Hebrew texts, and we offer many electives on exegesis in particular genres and books. So I am always interested in new texts that discuss exegetical method. N. Clayton Croy, associate professor of New Testament at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, has produced a new text on exegesis entitled Prima Scriptura: An Introduction to New Testament Interpretation. The title is a play on the Reformation mantra sola scriptura. In essence Croy argues for an exegetical method in which Scripture holds primary authority but other authorities are allowed to have their say in an appropriate way. Practically Croy handles this matter very well, helping the reader to recognize from the outset that we are not purely objective interpreters. Instead we have presuppositions and biases and contexts which often drive our understanding of the text. Managing those with proper emphasis upon the centrality of Scripture is the goal of his exegetical method.

Croy’s exegetical method, and thus his text, is organized into four main sections: (1) analyzing and preparing the interpreter, (2) analyzing the text, (3) evaluating and contemporizing the text, and (4) appropriating the text and transforming the community. In the first section Croy takes a serious look at what it means to be a non-objective interpreter. He suggest some conscious self-evaluation to create awareness of biases and presuppositions which impact the interpretive process. The second section is the exegetical process proper, what most people will readily recognize as the nuts and bolts of exegesis. The benefit of this section largely lies in its breadth. Croy covers the gamut of issues which need to be examined when studying the text, and he offers helpful examples and bibliography along the way. The third section deals with hermeneutics proper and wrestles with the proper role tradition and reason can have in the exegetical process. The last section deals with what is traditionally called application, although Croy expands beyond that idea to aid the reader in genuine transformation. The book closes with several useful appendices.

The most helpful aspect of Croy’s text is his ability to keep one eye on exegesis and another on hermeneutics. The mechanics of the exegetical process are discussed ably, but all along the way Croy helpfully reminds the reader that there is a lot more going on in the interpretation of a text than grammar, syntax, genre, and so on. The reader must always be willing to wrestle with how they themselves impact the exegetical process for good or for ill, and Croy has given the exegete some very helpful advice on that matter. I would highly recommend the introduction to the work alone for its handling of those thorny hermeneutical issues.

There are a few places in the text where Croy and I would disagree. For example, he and I would not see eye to eye on the importance of the doctrine of inerrancy; I affirm that doctrine, while Croy prefers to speak instead in more modest terms of Scripture’s authority. See the introduction for his take on this issue and some very good argumentation in support of his view. There are certain aspects of the exegetical method which could have been discussed more fully. For example, I teach a more involved method for lexical and grammatical study, but these skills would certainly be in place already for most of Croy’s readers, and his text aims to present the method as a whole, not all the particulars of each part of it.

All in all Croy has written a very useful text on exegesis without ignoring larger hermeneutical questions. I would recommend it to those who need a refresher on exegetical method and those who are ready to wrestle with larger hermeneutical issues, such as the nature of meaning and the bias of the interpreter, while exegeting the text.

This discussion is not ours alone, but is one in which all of higher education is starting to participate. As a seminary we do have important theological considerations which secular institutions don’t have, but all institutions of higher learning who wrestle with this question are concerned about the implications and outcomes of moving towards a very online-prominent education model. A recent New York Times op-ed piece by David Brooks addressed the place of online education in institutions of higher learning. I find that his central point is one which I am starting to share: Online education enables greater efficiency in disseminating and absorbing information. This efficiency then enables institutions to focus much more centrally on the higher-level processes which make learning successful.

Here’s a quote from the article which makes this clear. After delineating four processes of learning (absorbing information, reflecting upon it, scrambling it into new contexts, then synthesis), Brooks states the following:

Online education mostly helps students with Step 1. As Richard A. DeMillo of Georgia Tech has argued, it turns transmitting knowledge into a commodity that is cheap and globally available. But it also compels colleges to focus on the rest of the learning process, which is where the real value lies. In an online world, colleges have to think hard about how they are going to take communication, which comes over the Web, and turn it into learning, which is a complex social and emotional process. . . . Online education could potentially push colleges up the value chain — away from information transmission and up to higher things.

We all want to develop students in the best way possible. I hope that DTS can leverage our online offerings to make the best students possible in fulfillment of our mission, to the glory of God.

It almost goes without saying that Isaiah 53 is an exceedingly important Bible passage. It has great import for biblical theology, historical Jesus studies, evangelism, Messianic Judaism, and a host of other topics. Two of my colleagues, Darrell Bock and Bob Chisholm, have contributed to a new book focused upon this text that offers tremendous help to those wrestling with this passage.

In this book of essays, titled The Gospel According to Isaiah 53: Encountering the Suffering Servant in Jewish and Christian Theology, several different scholars contribute to the question of the meaning of Isaiah 53 in Christian and Jewish interpretation, the meaning and use of this text from the perspective of biblical theology, and then its practical use in Christian worship and Jewish evangelism. There is a tremendous amount of detail in each of the chapters, with lots of references for further investigation. For readers who are beginning their study of this passage, perhaps one of the most helpful chapters is the conclusion by Dr. Bock, where he summarizes each chapter and ties together the themes of the book. For those who are further along, the book is organized well and each chapter appropriately named, so it is easy to find material with a narrower focus.

The central conviction of the book is that Isaiah 53 does indeed point to Jesus as the Suffering Servant, the Messiah who would atone for the sins of Israel and in fact those of the entire world. Each chapter makes an important contribution to that argument, and the book does an admirable job of explaining exegesis and theology without losing sight of practical matters. I recommend it highly to those who are studying this passage, and also to those who are involved in the work of Jewish evangelism.

You only preach or teach about 20% of what you discover in your study and exegesis. However, the quality of the 20% you use is directly related and supported by the 80% you leave behind.

The practical application for exegetes is that you cannot study just to teach that 20% because in reality you’ll then misunderstand it. Communication of biblical truth is always a small subset of everything that  goes into understanding a passage. The 80% that doesn’t see the light of day has to be there in order for the 20% which does to be properly understood.

To this I like to add what I have termed the Underwear Corollary. This is not original with me. In my circles a form of this is attributed to Dr. Haddon Robinson, who said something to this effect: “When you preach, Greek and Hebrew should be like your underwear: always there, but never shown publicly.” For the purposes of understanding exegetical method, I’d like to rephrase and repurpose this into the Underwear Corollary:

Certain parts of the exegetical method are like your underwear: You’ve got to put them on first in order to be well-dressed, but they aren’t what you show when you teach Scripture publicly.

The point is largely the same: The exegetical method is designed to give breadth to our understanding of Scripture. If we short cut the process, we ultimately cut short our communication of its truth.