Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Food for Thought: Douglass Green, Christotelic Aproach and NT use of OT

Earlier this month Westminster theological seminary released Douglass Green an OT professor who had served there for 22 years previously because of his "christotelic" approach of reading the OT, specifically exemplified in this paper that interprets Ps 23. as a messianic psalm (but not as you might normally imagine messianic). 

I like that Westminster admits this is not a heretical view but graciously says it is one that will just not fit within their boundaries, I also like that they put up Green's hermeneutical views as well as other staff's who contrast/challenge his. I do not like that they chose to dismiss an employee after 22 years for this.

Read through Green's paper on ps.23 (link above)....would you ask someone to leave your school, pastoral staff or institution after writing that??


Here is a good explanation of "christotelic interpretation" and why some react to the extreme usage of christotelic interpreting of the OT written by William B. Evans a former classmate of Douglass Green at WTS
What are the characteristics of christotelic interpretation?

First, there is a rejection of grammatical-historical interpretation as the only legitimate hermeneutical approach to Scripture. Yes, they say, it is important to understand the biblical text in its original linguistic and historical context, but we can’t stop there. Grammatical-historical interpretation is a creature of modernity, and earlier Christian interpreters were not tied to it—the NT writers sometimes interpret OT texts in ways that likely would not have occurred to Isaiah or Hosea. Also, grammatical-historical interpretation asks what the text would have meant to the original human author, but the Bible is also divinely inspired and our interpretation must take this divine origin and perspective into account as well.

Monday, June 23, 2014

History of Interpreting the Bible

While I was in Bangladesh for the past two weeks I watched this video by Walt Russell from Biola University on the "the history of interpretation". It is a good basic run through of the history of hermeneutics and how it affects us as readers of the Bible today.


You can go the youtube page for the teaching and find the whole course that it is a part of on there as well.