The Theology of the Possible

After years of study, I feel that I am finally starting to get a hold of an idea that has eluded me.  I did a long paper in Seminary so that I could clearly understand eschatology.  Separately, I’ve been trying to understand how Charismatic preaching and Bible interpretation works.   This leads ultimately to an examination of our Charismatic practice to find the “way forward.”

There are a lot of groups offering us a false “way forward” in the church right now.  The whole “Emergent” movement is capturing a generation with pseudo-Christianity.  The seeker friendly church is watering down the Gospel.  The New Perpsective on Paul is deceiving the scholars.  The Charismatic church is rife with abuse of money and power, and chasing after signs.   Meanwhile our culture is going down so fast we can’t keep up.  It’s discouraging out there.  We need revival.

Now this is not a post about revival, but it is a post about having a theology that can undergird a revival.   This is the theology fo the possible.

First, our view of the end times.   I have come to the conclusoin that although almost no Charismatic/Pentecostals who embrace amillennialism as a system, we are in fact amillennial by  nature!  Just to review, in a nutshell, the postmillennial view looks for taking over of institutions.  The premillennial view looks for Christ to return and take over.  The amillennial view says that we are in a spiritual millennium now.   This is why some theologians prefer the term “present millennialism” or “inaugurated millennialism.”  The reason why we are present millennial in nature is because we fundamentally are a movement about believing that you can have “more of God” than you have.   We are a movement that says you can “be like Jesus.” You can actually do the things he did, think like he thought.  You can have a ministry like the apostles had.   This is a basic hermeneutic of bringing a spiritual reality from heaven into earth.    This is present millennialism.

However, Charismatic/Penteocstal groups have been everything but present millennial.  This is at least partly because the he Reformed/Calvinist guys who developed Amillennialism have a very boring conception of a spritual millennlum.  They would go bonkers if they heard we had adopted their view (and made it more optimistic), but the basic features of their system, how it reads the Bible, and where it puts events, is really the one that “fits” with Charismatic/ Pentecostalism.  It’s not just a “good option” for us.  It fits with our “more of God” view life.

You see, postmillennialism, which is popular in some Charismatic circles, like Bill Johnson or Bill Hamon, involves us ultimately “taking over.”  It’s definitely an attitude of the “possible” but it is not an attitude of the spiritually possible.  The more you get into taking over this world, the more you end up moving away from the Pentecostal/Charismatic idenity of having “more of God.”    Same thing with premillennialism.   When you get into this, you stop believe God about what you are and can become, and you start focusing on what is coming, and how you have a “last days” ministry.   Now that I see this, I would call John G. Lake a present millennialist.   His life passion was bringing the spiritual dominion of God into the Earth.   He rejected the premillennial dispensationalism that all of the Pentecostals of his day accepted, and although he had a “dominion” mindset, it was not about taking over governments.   His passion was the God kind of life.  That is my passion too.  And that is the same thing that George Warnock lays out in the Feast of Tabernacles.

Connect to this, The Latter Rain brought in a view of “Restored Truth” showing that the Church was moving progressively in a direction looking more like the early church.   The early rain had come, and now the “latter rain” is coming.   One step at a time, first Luther bringing back salvation by faith, then Wesley bringing back responsibility of man, then the Pentecostals bringing back the dynamic experience of the Holy Spirit, etc.   The church itself is on a trajectory of spiritual upward movement.   Each move of God takes us closer to be a glorious end time church.     This concept also fits with both the Charismatic worldview, and the present millennial system.

This leads to my third, related, observation.   The Charismatic hermeneutic is different from the traditional Reformed hermeneutic.  They believe all doctrine must originate from the Bible.  We believe that God is speaking now to highlight things in the Bible that we never corporately saw or practiced before.  Of course no one explicitly believes that, but in practice that is exactly what Charismatics believe.    For the Reformed people God “spoke.”  For us he “is speaking.”   It is a way of saying we believe in revelation.   We do not believe that prophets or a revival can create new doctrine, but because we believe God is restoring the church, we believe revival can reveal Biblical doctrine that has not been emphasized before — such as the 5 fold ministry.   It’s been there for 2 thousand years, but only since 1948 has anyone actually “tried” it.    That’s because we believe in the possible.  We believe that the church and the individual have the possibility to be more like God than they are and that is what God is taking us to, one step at a time.  Therefore when a “new revelation” is released, we instinctively receive it as part of taking us there.   This is actually not always good, but do you see how it ties together?   The “more of God” worldview means a present millennium, a view of the progressive restoration of the church,  and an openness to what God is saying “now” through the church.

This has been a missing piece — connecting our theory of what we are dong to what we are actually doing.   Normally we just dip into the evangelical bucket for “doctrine” add on a few Charismatic distinctives and keep doing our Charismatic thing.   It is inconsistent.   Part of what we’re missing is how you “validate” when God is bringing something forth, versus when it just sounds exciting, but isn’t a revelation.   Charismatics are very succeptible to hype.  If you hype it up, we might think the Spirit is moving.  And the Spirit moving is the hermeneutic of now.   If you are bringing more of God, you must be right, and you must have the doctrine we need.    No need to validate.   But if you wanted to validate, would you have the tools?  No.   That’s because evangelical hermeneutics do not provide the tools.   They just tell you how to be “safe” and avoid any possibility of error — which of course doesn’t work anyway.   But now things are changing.   Redemptive-Historical preaching and Biblical Theology are on the rise, and they are unlocking how the Bible itself works.  My theory is that this method of reading the Bible is more conducive to revelation.  It recognizes that how the Apostles themselves interpreted Scripture is how we should interpret it.  As Pentecostals, we go one step farther — they way they interpreted the OT, is the way we should interpret the NT and evaluate revelation.    Use of the apostolic method of hermeneutics is how we should validate what God is speaking to the church “now.”

For me this leads to a tight theology of the possible.   We are Arminian because we believe that the way things are is NOT the way things have to be.  We embrace a view of “Restored Truth” and are present millennial because we believe in greater possibilities for the church itself in history.    We use Apostolic Hermeneutics because we believe that we can do the same things that the apostles did,  including the way they interpreted the Bible, and even receiving revelation directly from God.   These are all deeply rooted in and connected by the single belief that we can and will have “more of God”!

The Feast of Tabernacles

I just finished reading The Feast of Tabernacles by George Warnock.  It is definitely one of the seminal books of the Charismatic movement, although very few contemporary Charismatics have heard of it.  Warnock was a key figure in the “Latter Rain” revival of 1948, and wrote the Tabernacles in 1951 in response to a prophecy.  He had this to say about the relationship between the Latter Rain and the Charismatic movement “It wasn’t long until the move of God began to infiltrate the large post-reformation churches, and some saw fit to give it a name that was more prestigious — The Charismatic Movement.”

FoT is contains an elaborate and fascinating set of typologies.  Perhaps because of this, and because of the climate during the 20^th century which was hostile to typology he includes a section in the book where he explains and defends its use.  It may be the only book I’ve ever read which actually explains in some part the theory of hermeneutics that underlies it.   I was interested in the book because something of the Latter Rain has always captured my interest, especially since it is talked about so glowingly by certain ones who were “there” and at the same time an almost forgotten movement because so many who were involved dissolved in the Charismatic movement or got into cults.  So that leaves me with a question – what was it that was good about the LR that we should keep, and what was bad that caused the problems?  So reading the FoT is part of going to back to the source.

The basic theory of the book is simple.  There are 3 biblical feasts:  Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles.   Passover and Pentecost are explicitly fulfilled in the New Testament which leaves an open question about the Feast of Tabernacles.  That fulfillment is coming at the end of age – now – through the people of God.   The first part of the book is spent laying the backdrop of the other two feasts and seems fairly straightforward.  It begins to get interesting as he moves deeper into the Tabernacles concept and seeks Biblical justification in a variety of places.

Warnock looks at the various celebrations of the Feast of Tabernacles in the Bible as each showing us something about a final eschatological Feast of Tabernacles in the Church: Solomon’s dedication of the Temple, Nehemiah, Jesus visit to the Feast

Criticisms

First, let me deal with places where I had issues or disagreed.  My main and most consistent of the book is the thinly veiled elitism it contains.  In several places the implication is made either directly or through typology that if you are not with “us,” you are against God.   This same kind of elitism continues today in some heirs of the Latter Rain.  This is where the Charismatic idea of responding to critics as “Pharisees” seems to stem from.  Let me say up front, that the most Pharisee-like experience I’ve ever had was in a Charismatic church.

In addition the idea of rallying around a doctrine is derided, while at the same time new doctrines are advanced.  I definitely see the point that during a special revival visitation of Christ, doctrine becomes less important as the true people of God are called out from every place and called together, yet during the rest of time doctrine is an important part of building together.

Warnock has an unusual idea of there being different groups within the church.  In other words descriptions like “Sons,” “The Bride,” which we take to be metaphors for the church, he sees as parts of the church.  Here again is a problem.  Although he does not develop the idea here, others did, and it led to serious elitism.  What if I’m a manifested son and you’re not?  What if I’m the bride and you’re not?

Hermeneutics

First, I strongly believe in Warnock’s basic theory of approaching Scripture. Sixty years later the scholarly community seems to be slowly moving to the place where Warnock already was by revelation.  The Hermeneutical principles he lays out are:

1. We should use the same principles of hermeneutics that the apostles did
2. Typology is valid and important in interpreting Scripture
3. All of the Bible is applicable to us. (He identifies the church as spiritual Israel)
4. The Old Testament is the pattern of the New.  (1 Cor 15:46)

I was thrilled when I first read this because it follows the exact line I’ve been exploring through other channels.  It was a strong confirmation that the journey I’ve been on for Spirit-filled hermeneutics was heading the right direction.

We see Warnock applying these hermeneutics throughout the book.  In the end of the book he looks at Moses and Elijah appearing on the mountain and Peter offering to construct “tents” (tabernacles) there as a sign of a “Moses-Elijah Company” on the Earth.

In addition to applying the Feasts typology to history (Passover=Reformation, Pentecost=Pentecostalism, Tabernacles=Return of Christ), he applies the history of Israel as a pattern for the history of the church.  We already went through the “Babylonian Captivity” of the Dark Ages (this is in agreement with Luther).  Protestantism itself was a kind of “Second Temple,” but just like the second temple, it ended in a system of religion not glory.  The idea is that now in the post-Chistendom era, we are in the same place Spiritually as when Christ came the first time and he is preparing the house for his return.  This pattern may be more of a stretch, but it is interesting.  He then spends a chapter examining the restoration of the temple by Zerubabbel, Nehemiah, comparing their task of restoration of the Temple to our task of restoring the church.  This works, but it doesn’t exactly match the historical recapitulation scheme he set up.

He uses numerous other types and symbols as well.  He shows the significance of the number 2.  He looks briefly at the concept of redigging of wells, which was such a big deal recently in the Charismatic movement.  He uses the story of Jonathan winning a victory but being punished for eating the honey as a typological story of being punished for tasting the fruit of the spiritual “promised land.”  He also interprets Jacob’s ladder.  Really it’s a gold mine of typological interpretations.  Some very strong, some not as strong, but really an example I’d like to examine in more detail as an application of “Apostolic hermeneutics” to now.

Eschatology

Different Charismatic groups have built different eschatologies, but they all differ from the traditional Pentecostal dispensationalism, and this is due directly to the influence of the Latter Rain.   Warnock sees the “hope of the church” not as the return of Christ to the saints, but as the Glory of Christ filling the “Temple” of the church in the same way it did in Solomon’s dedication ceremony.

He has a big vision for what is possible in God.  In fact, you could say that his vision was very similar to that of the original Pentecostals.  He talks about speaking in foreign tongues (xenolalia), being translated, and doing all kinds of exploits.  It was definitely a vision of “unlimited Christianity” and read  a lot like a David Hogan story. (p181)  I got a kick out of this line “They shall poison his food but it shall be like adding vitamins to his diet.”   The emphasis here though is on living the very same kind of life that Jesus did.  This is a part of the Spirit filled promise that we should never lay aside.  In some ways that was what the Feast of Tabernacles book was all about – a kind of trumpet call to the church saying that we are entering and end time phase of history where as Christ begins to tabernacle more with his church, we shall increasingly reflect the glory and power of Christ.  I believe both of those things.

Warnock sees overcomers as coming to a place where they speak “with such power and authority that the very nations themselves will have to bow in submission.”  This sounds postmillennial on the surface, but I actually see his ideas a more of a modified amillennialism, because they do not focus on cultural transformation, they focus on spiritual transformation and victory.  He acknowledges a Great Tribulation, but he sees these overcomers as having remarkable authority in the midst of it, including prayers that cut it short, and in general a ministry to those who are oppressed and persecuted during it.   The concept here is of a deep intimacy with God and protection during the judgment as Noah was protected in the Ark.  Our covenant must end in “glory and victory” because it is a ministry of life, where as the Mosiac covenant was a ministry of death. This is a pattern of “Spiritual Victory,” as opposed to postmillennial ideas of physical dominion, or premillennial ideas of awaiting the king, or evangelizing to save as many before he comes.

On the one hand, I want to dream big, on the other hand, it seems that if you get focused on being “powerful” you don’t be come powerful, you become arrogant.  I’m not sure how to resolve this at the level of personal spirituality yet.

Covenant Theology

After demolishing dispensationalism, I heard a great Bible teacher say that covenant theology was the answer to the problem.   This guy was such a great Bible teacher that I was intrigued.   I recently spent a good amount of time looking into Covenant theology and I have a few things to say about it.

First, covenant theology is NOT just a listing of the covenants in the Bible.  Covenant theology is a theory about a relationship of all of the covenants into a overarching structure of covenants.  Normally these three covenants are the covenant of redemption, covenant of works, and the covenant of grace.   The covenants in the Bible are categorized or placed into this overarching scheme.   Therefore, when we are talking about covenant theology what we are really talking about is a view of redemptive history.   The fact that there a series of covenants in the Bible, no one can dispute.   The issue is in what way do they relate to one another, to specific eras, and to the overall history of humanity?

Secondly, although this is considered a “classic” position, there is much disagreement and variety with the viewpoint.   If you start reading in the topic, you do not end up just reading one “definitive” statement and many sub-views, you end up reading about a series of thinkers, many of whom were not Puritans, but were Reformed thinkers on the Continent.   Modern renovators of covenant theology have even more disagreement among themselves.

The basically outline of Covenant theology is as follows:

1. The Covenant of Redemption.  This is an agreement within the trinity to save mankind.  This is invented to deal with Calvinist problem of “decrees.”
2. The Covenant of Works. This is when God gives man a covenant which he must obey in order to live.   Most covenant theologians only look at the relationship with Adam in the garden as being a Covenant of Works.  Some call it the “covenant of life” pointing out that eternal life, even in the Garden was not by works, it was simply there for the offering, and Adam blew it (J. Rodman Williams).   Others call it the “covenant of creation” (Michael Horton).
3. The Covenant of Grace. Since man failed in the covenant of works, God followed up with a series of grace-based covenants begininning with Noah, and ending with the New Covenant set up by Christ.

There is disagreement over what to do with the Sinai Covenant.   Herman Witsius, one of the classic Reformation covenant thinkers said it was a “mixed” covenant, because it had both elements of grace and of works.   Obviously then arguments could be made for it being a works or a grace based relationship.

The advantage of covenant theology as a view of redemptive history is that it promotes a sense of continuity between the testaments and therefore helps us understand and apply the Old Testament.  The disadvantage is the same — the tendency is so much in the direction of unity that Charles Hodge actually intimates that the Old Testament believers really did believe in Christ — even though He is not talked about in the OT, there are other things which the pharisees knew that aren’t in the OT, and therefore it must have just been commonly understood.  This is what I might call “radical continuity.”  This kind of “radical continuity” forms a rationale for theonomists and other classic Puritans who bring the Old Testament directly into the present.

For the past century dispensationalism has been the alternative to covenant theology.  It proposes a kind of “radical discontinuity.”  God deals with man in different eras.  This leads quickly to us looking at the Old Testament and saying”why read it, it was for another people at another time.”   Or if we do read it, we have to figure out how to read it by using statements like “well they were under law.”   This also fails.   What is needed is an approach which promotes integration between the Testaments without confusing them.

An interesting observation in this area is that the terms “Old Testament” and “New Testament” are misleading.  The word “testament” is a synonym for “covenant” but the Old Covenant spoken of by Paul was not that made with Adam, Noah, Abraham, or David.  It is specifically the covenant made with Moses.  Paul reaffirms the promises made to Abraham. The book of Genesis then is not really in the Old Testament    By the same token, Jesus performed his ministry under the Old Covenant, so the gospels are not really part of the New Testament.  Chew on that!

Covenant theology also makes an interesting reversal.   Instead of asking “Why the Gentiles” you end up asking “Why Israel”?  In other words, why interrupt the plan of redemption with 1500 years of law, symbols and types to lead to Christ?   Why not just send Christ to the world?  It’s a fascinating question which I cannot answer yet (I heard Wayne Grudem say on a tape that he couldn’t either so I’m not feeling too bad about it), but I think it’s a valid one.

My wife complains that the covenant theology system is to Aristotlean.  That is, it is too much of an imposition of a system on the text.   I see her point.  If they can’t figure out what the Sinai Covenant is — grace or works — that’s a pretty big piece of data to not be able to interpret.  And you can also see how Reformation salvation concerns are read into the scheme — Works vs. Grace.

Yet at the same time, the continuity promoted by the basic covenant approach has merit.  The “covenant of works” for example, I find a much better way of explaining the guilt of man than “Adam blew it for you.”   Instead, we can say that Adam was in a covenant, and he failed in that covenant, which is still in force down until now.   You cannot go back into the garden and re-make the choice, but Jesus did.  He took the penalty for Adam’s eating of the wrong tree, and became a “tree of life” that you can partake of.   Christianity is the second garden.

The point of covenant theology then stands.   How you relate the covenants to one another is the key to redemptive history.  Not relating them as in dispenationalism has been tried and found wanting.   The traditional scheme has insights but seems to also have issues too.  What is needed is an enhanced or modified version that addresses and explains the progressive nature of each of the covenants, this includes a satisfying explanation of “why Israel” and a basis for a healthy relationship between the old and the new .    The concept of works and grace I think is a valid one and part of the answer, but maybe not “the answer” itself.

The Canonical Exegesis Movement

The “Canonical Exegesis Movement” is not a term in use by anyone, but it is a description of something real that is going on in our time.   For most of the 20th century, dispensationalism reigned supreme among evangelicals.  This led to a lot of problems with our hermeneutics — because it was “hyper-literal” and because it wrote off the Old Testament as being “under Law” and therefore not applicable.    The more academic types mixed this with higher critical assumptions about the books of the Bible being independent units which had to be read atomistically.

By the early part of the century, most of the evangelical options for Seminary education had disappeared as the “modernists” or liberals took over the denominations.   This happened at almost the exact same time as the rise of dispensationalism.   It was like a double tidal wave erasing our heritage and leaving us with a shell of the remainder.    With time the fundamentalists and later the evangelicals regrouped and founded their own seminaries.   You can find the present list of evangelical seminaries here. You can see that there are now many of them an always new ones forming.   However, most of them are relatively young.   Not to overstate Westminster Theological Seminary may in some ways be the only direct connection we have with earlier heritage of Christian thought in our country going back to the Puritans.  It was founded by J. Gresham Machen in protest over over the liberal slide of Princeton, and in preserved for us a non-dispensational heritage. Perhaps this is why people associated with it and its daughter seminaries (WTS California, and Redeemer) are among the leaders in bringing back the “old ways”  Among these is the procedure of looking at the whole Bible for truth, including a careful use of images and types.

Two major shifts happened over in the liberal world which also signaled an open door for evangelicals to pursue this avenue — Robert Alter did literary analysis which obseleted some of the old JEPD theory stuff, and Brevard Childs of Yale changed the discussion about Biblical Theology among some liberals to be about what is actually in the Bible.   The generation of scholars just coming of age now are riding on these developments.   On their shelves however are the classic books by Geerhardus Vos (Biblical Theology), Patrick Fairbairn (Typology), and Meredith Kline (Kingdom Prologue) which do not look through the dispensational lens.

Suddenly we’re seeing a whole new set of things going on.  We have dictionaries such as the “New Dictionary of Biblical Theology” and the “Dictionary of Biblical Imagery” which are designed to look at themes as they develop in the Bible.   We also have a major series of theology books released by IVP on Biblical Theology topics.   There is also a major commentary now on the use of the old testament in the new, headed by perhaps the leading evangelical scholar in this area — Greg Beale.   Beale said it rightly that his recent move to Westminster was a kind of coming home theologically.   Westminster has never been a place just about “Calvinism” or I wouldn’t even pay attention to it.  It’s a place about continuing the tradition of Reformed thought in all areas.   Reformed Arminians like myself need to listen when these guys talk about stuff other than the TULIP.   After all Calvinists get to spend their lives thinking while we Arminians feel compelled to actually do something

The point however though is that a quiet revolution is taking place in Biblical Exegesis.  The dry commentaries we’ve all gotten used to are going to be on the out, and the deeper, richer, Matthew Henry type stuff is going to come back in.  It goes under different names “intertextuality,” “Canonical exegesis,” “Biblical Theology,”  “Imagery,” “Typology,” but really all of these things are related — they are looking at how the Bible interprets itself from front to back.

As Charismatics we can get a smile out of this since George Warnock layed it all out in his seminal work “Feast of Tabernacles” where he basically explained that we needed to follow the types, and connect the testaments, and do what the apostles did if we wanted to get the real meaning of the Bible out.   All of the Charismatic preaching and teaching goes back to this simple insight that others have then built on.   This was all taking place while the rest of the evangelical and pentecostal world was doing the dry dispensational thing.   No one has been able to articulate clearly the theory under which Charismatic practice rested, however.   You just kind of hear it, watch it, do it.   And some are more interesting than others.  A bunch of Reformed guys who don’t even believe in the Charismatic are about give us a basis for what we do.   By showing how the apostles exegeted the Old Testament text, they will show us how to exegete New Testament text and apply it to now.     For those of you who think this is an esoteric topic, it’s not.  The entirety of Church practice rests on how we read the Scriptures.   Reopening the Scriptures, except this time with significant academic firepower behind it is going to be an awesome thing.   When we start reading the Scriptures the right way, hold on to your hats.

Basic Dream Interpretation and Hermeneutics

For the past three nights, I’ve had dreams that I not only remembered, but were highly symbolic and seemed to have meaning.   In addition, when I awoke from the first dream I felt that I had had a God dream.  I told my wife and I began to give the intepretation.  It was strange because I rarely dream anymore and I have never interpreted a dream before.  But this seemed to just flow off of my tongue, and speak to our situation.

In fact, I believe this may have been triggered by a visit to a Bridge church and listening to a message online that they did on dream interpretation that night.   The Bridge was set up by John Paul Jackson, who is unquestionably the leading Christian dream interpreter today.  He has set up an entire school which centers around revelatory gifts, but what is really unique is the depth of insight into dream interpretation.   Now there are others who have dealt with Christian dream interpretation, but Jackson seems to have been called of the Lord in this hour to release revelation to the body of Christ on this subject.   I have never had the opportunity to take the classes (they are fairly expensive) but even the few tidbits I’ve gotten have made a lot of sense to me and piqued my interest for more.  Mark Virkler is another leading charismatic who has insight into dream interpretation, but I do not believe it is as extensive or deep, however from what I read on his website, I believe it would be largely complementary to Jackson’s material and perspective.

What really fascinates me about dreams is that underneath they deal with the issue of Biblical typology.  They are usually symbolic, encoded messages that must be decoded by use of several keys.   Rather than be something artificial like a dream dictionary these keys are deeply rooted in our understanding of Scripture.

During the past few years the Lord has brought me through a process of opening up the Scriptures without which dream interpretation would have been impossible.  This was because the fundamentalist/dispensationalist hermeneutics that I first came into the Kingdom with were so literal that they gave no importance to the inherent symbology of the Bible, and where they did, they used it very rigidly and usually in reference to the end of the world.  In addition, in Seminary, most of my classes were based on standard evangelical hermeneutics which give more importance to the immediate context, grammar, and background information surrounding a passage, while intentionally downplaying any symbolic aspects.

These left me quite dry and hungry for an alternative.  Fortunately, my two Old Testament classes started a paradigm shift for me as I was exposed to a “Biblical Theology” perspective of doing exegesis.   Biblical Theology looks at the Bible as a whole, and connects all of the dots together, using words, phrases, concepts and echos.  In poetry class, I was taught how what seems to be repetition is actually comparing and contrasting.    Moreover, I got in touch with famous Charismatic Bible interpreter Kevin Conner, and ordered his Bible Interpretation series from Australia.   He reinforced these same principles but with a Spirit filled gifting.

The result of all of this was that I began to recognize that there were Biblical symbols, and that they were not inflexible and monolithic, but that they were flexible — they are used in support of a general theme or themes but not always in exact correspondence.    It’s not that a certain color or animal has to me a very specific thing, but that it is used in a generally contiguous way.   In addition, many such symbols may have a reverse.   Take Blood.   Well Blood could deal with killing, but it could deal with sacrifice, and more specifically sacrifice which cleanses from sin.    That could be personal sacrifice,  God’s sacrifice.   It could be sacrifice in the context of covenant.   On the flip side, the Bible says “the life is in the blood” so blood may deal with life.   So the context in which you put the blood is important to what it signifies.   But notice that all of these meanings are tied around the same concept, even though life and death are clearly opposite.   In addition, see how the Biblical theme is itself based on the very nature of things.    God was not just the author of the Bible, He was (and is) the creator of the universe.   Biblical types then generally play off of the very nature of things.   So the first principle of dream interpretation is to be grounded in a Biblical view of the elements of the universe around us.

Not every dream however is replete with Biblical symbols.   My friend had a dream last night where he was on an aircraft carrier.  You can’t look that up in a dream dictionary.    What you can do, however, is use the principles of heremeneutics I learned in Old Testament to decode it.

1. First, ask what is this fundamentally?   Fundamentally it’s a boat.   What does a boat do?   It takes you places.   Vehicles often deal with ministries or companies — things that are taking you places in life.
2. Now what is it specifically?  He could have seen any boat, but he saw and aircraft carrier.  Why?  What makes this a special kind of boat.  Well it’s a vessel of war.  It’s the largest kind of boat.  It has thousands of people on it.   Any of one of these could be what is significant in the dream.
3. How do you know which is important?  One of the biggest mistakes in dealing with types is to try to make every aspect of something match something else.   You need to ask:  What did you see in the dream?  What was important about it in the dream?   What you saw is the reason for the usage of that image instead of another one.
4. Does it have any specific significance to you?   For example if you are in the Navy an aircraft carrier would signify something quite different than if you are not.

See?  It’s not spooky.  It is an application of the same principles I learned in OT class.   Now some elements of a dream could be quite difficult.   Why the Lord chooses to use such complex symbols to speak to us, we can only guess.   It can be both frustrating and fun, like any puzzle.   For example, in one of my dreams I was in a plane and we were trying to get to runway 50.  Well comparing and contrasting are not going to help figure out what 50 is.  Unless 50 has some personal significance, it’s good to look in the Scripture (or a Biblically based dictionary).   In this case, I was reminded that 50 was the year of Jubilee.   In my case this meaning fit perfectly with our situation.   This is an advantage if you are interpreting your own dreams or the dreams of a friend.    Like puzzle pieces, you can try out different possibilities until they fit.   Now, notice, I’m not saying you can just make anything fit.  If the year of Jubilee didn’t fit my real life I wouldn’t have tried to make it.  I would have just left it a mystery.

And that’s part of it too.  Dreams can be highly detailed, and some of the details may be hard to decode.   If you can get the main and the plain, you may just have to live with some unsolved mysteries.  However, I’ve found with each of my dreams that if I take it before the Lord, it begins to come clear.   He may remind me of what was important about the person in the dream, or he may show me something about image that I was missing.   For example, my grandmother was flying the plane.  Now, the obvious part of this was that my grandmother was not qualified to fly the plane.   But that still left the question of why my grandmother and not just a stranger who wasn’t qualified.   When I brought the image before the Lord, He reminded me of the feeling of family comfort I had with my grandmother in the plane.  And then I began to see that in the context of the dream my grandmother (who is very old and may not live a lot longer) represented time with my family that I might never get again.   When you put the right key into the lock, it turns the door.  It makes sense in the dream, and it makes sense in your life.

Another interesting aspect of dreams is determining when something is literal and when something is symbolic.   My wife has appeared in two of the dreams, and when she did, she did not represent “something I was married to.”  She was actually herself.    However, in the first dream, two of my children appeared, and I believe they represented two ministry associates, not themselves.   It’s easy to see why now that you cannot correctly interpret a dream without the Spirit of the Lord.

This leads to my final point about dreams.    When God sends you a dream, it’s because He loves you.   Reaching out to communicate with you is a significant act of love (the wives all said Amen).   Getting the correct interpretation has to be premised on this fact.   If you think you are being told the thing that you fear most then you probably had a dream from God that the enemy is trying to interpret for you.    Even if the dream has something cautionary in it, if it’s from God it’s there to help you, or help you help someone else.   I know that I have a way of turning a blessing into a warning.  Assume the best instead of the worst.   Jackson’s school of thinking even says that all three kinds of dreams — those from God, those from the devil (nightmares), and those from the flesh — can be used in a Godly way.   Those from the devil reveal a plan he has against you, those from the flesh reveal the true state of your heart.    Now that is redemptive.

Bible Translations.. Argh!

In the time of Martin Luther, the Bible could be found chained to the Pulpit inaccessible both because of it’s language and it’s location. It has been pointed out that this was also figuratively true– that the Church held sole control over the Scripture and its interpretation and it was Luther who unchained it. He translated it into the language of the people, and he also taught them to live by it and from it. This was a very dangerous thing as far as Satan was concerned. He has fought long and hard to keep the Bible out of the hands of the people. The story of the English Bible reads red in a trail of martyrs blood. The Chinese Communists tried to eradicate every single Bible in the country, only to find an unstoppable Chinese underground church. In America we completely take all of this for granted of course. Satan’s strategy has been to keep us from reading it, or if we must read it, to use a variety of methods to superimpose an external meaning upon it.

This strategy of keeping the Word of God out of the hands of the people I believe can be seen in the area of Bible translations too. For some reason large sections of the American church have clung to the King James Version. Now the only problem I have with the King James is that it is not in my language. Other than that, it’s a great Bible. Had I been born in 1600 or so, I think it would have been an ideal Bible to use.. This is more than an issue with “thee” and “thou”, it’s about fundamental changes in word meanings that we would have to “translate” into our language to get proper understanding. So I’ll skip the KJV– funny thing was that until about 30 years ago, it was almost the only conservative translation available.

Enter the NIV. The NIV was written at a 6th grade level and I believe orginally intended to be for that audience. Someone it went mainstream, and it went very mainstream. It became the nearly universal Bible among evangelicals and moderates. Over time, however, people began to become increasingly dissatisfied with the NIV for several reasons. First, evangelicals were not satisfied that the Bible was really close enough to the Greek. It left some room for the translators to interpret. A “thought for thought” or “dynamic equivalence” translation inherently has the translators making decisions about what a text means even when it may have been ambiguous in the original. Second, the NIV was “dumbed down” to a simple reading level, and folks like J.I. Packer felt that this was not appropriate for God’s Word. The more complicated language should be retained to be truly accurate. Thirdly, and probalby most importantly, Zondervan, who owns the NIV, was embracing egalitarianism in a big way by using gender “neutral” language, which of course is not really the way English is used.

The primary other option, if you wanted literal was the NASB. Now Charles Stanley used the NASB, and that guy can teach the Bible, so it definitely had its supporters. But the NASB was the opposite of user friendly. No paragraphs and English that read like Greek made it not a first choice for readers or memorizers. You always found yourself memorizing something unnatural in English vernacular. In 1995 they did an update and improved some of that, and then later they did a couple of Bibles with paragraphs, and that was helpful too, but it was a bit late to start.

So when the NIV went south, people started thinking, it’s time for a new translation. We want it to be NASB literal and reliable without the NASB problems. It needs to be memorizable and readable, not just good for study. Enter the ESV. An Evangelical “who’s who” came together and did a translation that was conservative in language, readable, and similar to the history of English Bible. This probably makes it the best Bible available today.

There are other options of course. The HCSB was created for similar reasons. This is probably the most readable of all of the fairly literal translations, but you will find some surprises– not the phrasings you are used to or grew up with… and what is with calling it the “Holman” anyway? Who want’s a Bible translation with some guy’s name on it?

The NKJV is also very literal… The late great Adrian Rogers was in on this one. Difference is that the NKJV uses the same manuscripts as the KJV instead of the ones used by all of the modern translations. Some people think these “majority text” readings are best, but most people who have looked into the matter find that the so called “critical text” is probably better. I like the NKJV though.. again too bad they don’t print it with paragraphs.

The other issue is that each translation has a different level of publisher support. The NIV has the Zondervan Juggernaut behind it. Every possible imaginable Bible or Bible product is available in the NIV. The HCSB has the backing of the Southern Baptist Convention and so it also has many options available. The other translations seem backwater by comparison. The ESV has very few formats, and slowly adds them each year as they have money. The NKJV and NASB seem to be managed by very conservative groups who do not really see the value in all of Bible options.

The ESV, NASB and HCSB are about the only Bibles I would use. The other ones are too loose or too liberal usually. If I want a commentary, I’ll buy one. I’d like God’s Words direct, especially since all of those people died for me to have it.

Thoughts on Charismatic Bible Interpretation

In the last post on this topic, I was touching on various approaches to the Bible. I’d like to hone in a bit more on the crux of what I’m grappling with. There exists today a tremendous gap between Charistmatics and Evangelicals in their approach to Scripture. So I’m a hard core Charismatic with an evangelical background at an evangelical seminary. No wonder I’m living in tension.

Why the tension? Well on the one hand the best of evangelical preaching and thought is very grounding. It’s straightforward. It’s wholesome. It’s clear. Take Charles Stanley. I think he may be the best of all evangelical Bible teachers. Here is a guy who opens up the Bible, and tells you the most straightforward facts it contains, and yet you remain glued to the TV. What is the deal? Part of the deal is certainly his view of Scripture. He teaches from the Bible. He assumes that the Bible must teach you. No points for complex or secondary interpretation. On the other hand, the best of Charismatic preaching is incredibly dynamic and interesting. The best of the Spirit filled guys can take was seems to be the most obscure Bible passage and bring it to life with a whole new shade of meaning you never saw. I’m always thinking “man I wish I could learn how those guys get that out of the Bible.” Can you have both?

Recently I’ve been thinking about the actual process of getting value from the Word. The problem with even the best of evangelical approaches is that they start and end with the rational mind. Intense memorization, incredible background study, etc. I’ve come to realize the fact that we are spiritual beings and that we must live out of The Spirit. The mind should definitely be engaged, but the Spirit should govern. Moving in the Spirit in one day, you can probably do more than a whole lifetime of the mind only. Take T.L Osborn. He was a missionary to India. No fruit. Came back, encountered William Branham began to move in faith and the supernatural, and for decades to come led massive crusades which healed untold numbers and changed countless lives. If the process of Bible interpretation begins and ends with the Spirit, then I think we’ll get real value. I rather have a prepared Spirit and an unprepared mind than a prepared mind and an unprepared Spirit. Of course, what you really want is both. When I preach my goal is to know all of my facts and points, but to be animated by God.

Here is the thing about Charismatic Bible Interpretation that I’m starting to realize though. We’ve come to the place where if it is new and exciting, or has a new angle we think it’s true. It’s a “revelation.” There is a spiritual atmosphere when people preach and deliver these revelations. It can be very captivating and life shaping, but it may not be 100% true. That’s the danger of a revelation isn’t it? Not so bad for an occasional message, but when an entire branch of the Church is built around it, it can get unbalanced. Instead of being really tied to the Bible and its plain meaning for truth, we are actually tied to these revelations which are preached. I think the Bible calls that “being tossed about by every wind of doctrine.”

The problem when you shut down revelatory preaching, however is not only that things can often get as dry as a stick, but that you’ve actually undermined the way that the New Testament itself was formed. Many of the OT quotations in the New would never be derived from a rational study of the OT text or by use of the so called grammatico-historical approach. They come by revelation to the apostolic authors. Now they do not undermine the text, but the average reader would not likely have gotten from point A to point B. I believe we ought to be in the same hermeneutical flow as the apostles were. More on that later.

Reading the Bible

Reading the Bible is not as simple as it sounds. I think the hardest thing is that we bring so much to it through our unknown pre-suppositions. Different parts of the Body of Christ use different hermeneutical systems. The way you read the Bible will underlie your entire Christian experience, also entire movements. Now that I’ve been under several systems, I’ve developed a real interest in starting from the best possible angle. Here are several approaches used today:

• Text and Background — This is my way of describing the approach commonly taught in the evangelical seminary. The emphasis here is placed on backgrounds to the text, the structure of the text, original language studies, etc.
• Inductive Bible Study — Inductive Bible Study places more emphasis on the reading the Bible in your vernacular language. Instead of spending lots of time in background study and original language, you spend lots of time in the Bible in your language. This method is more of a populist method, and is common among many evangelicals. Kay Arthur has written several good books on this. Although I’m just exploring it, I really like the premise.
• Imagery and Typology — This is not an approach all on it’s own, but it is sometimes a missing component from the other systems. Only recently are scholars starting to accept what has long been known by spiritual Bible readers– there are complex types and images which are important in truly applying the text. These should be studied as an enrichment.
• Prophetic Hermeneutics — The problem with standard Hermeneutics is that it leaves out the Spirit. The factual proof of this is that you cannot use seminary hermeneutics to explain the way that apostles quote the Old Testament in the New Testament. Charismatic/Pentecostal preaching uses what Mark Stibbe has called “This is That” hermeneutics. In this system, the context of the application draws meaning out of the text by the illumination of the Spirit that may not be visible from a “bottom up” rational investigation.

I’ve been trained in Seminary in the first method, and it has created a dissatisfaction It’s not practical enough, and drives you into knowledge, not into God or the Bible. I’ve been around a lot of people who use the second method, and I’ve sat under teachers who have used the last two methods, and I’d like to get more of that. I’ve been fishing up some books on the topic… more on that later.

Post-Reformation Hermeneutics

In the last post, I talked about various contributions made to Christian epistemology through Church History. Upon the core of post-Reformation Epistemology is hermeneutics. The seminal feature of the Reformation was its emphasis on the importance of Scripture for determining the truth, and therefore the great determinant factor in such a context is the method of obtaining truth from the Scripture-Hermeneutics.

What Luther initiated in his protracted struggle with the Catholic hierarchy was taken to its logical conclusion by John Calvin. Calvin is perhaps best remembered today for the so called doctrines of grace, or the five points of “Calvinism”, however his real contribution to Church history lies in his approach to Scripture. Luther had used Scripture to trim from the Catholic church that which was clearly unscriptural, and thereby created the Protestant “high church”, which retains many of the centuries old features of Catholicism by weight of tradition. Calvin, on the other hand, began to use Scripture as the exclusive source of truth. Scripture became a factual textbook from which one built the institutes of the Christian religion upwards. It was to be against Scripture which all things were measured. It is from this brand of Reformed thought that all later advances of the Church stem. It was uncompromising, but it also tended to be cold and rational.

Calvin’s system reached it’s zenith in the English Puritan movement. At the core of the Puritan revival movement were brilliant young Cambridge scholars who applied Calvin’s system to every sphere of life and eventually turned the world upside down. The power of their ideas and witness eventually dethroned the King of England, established America, and established a permanent beachhead for Reformation Christianity. It is upon the Puritans which all Anglo civilization rests, and it is the treasure house of their theology which has from time to time been raided as a compass in the darker straights of ensuing history.

From a hermeneutical perspective, very little changed until the middle of 19^th century when German higher criticism emerged. This system undermined the authority of Scripture and in so doing unhitched Germany from its Christian moorings, eventually leading to the moral bankruptcy which permitted the Holocaust. Germany’s pre-eminent position in Protestantism also provided a platform from which to infect the Anglo civilization. Although ultimately unsuccessful particularly in the United States, the cost paid by humanity for the embrace of these doctrines was immense.

In the United States an answer arose to Higher Criticism: Fundamentalism. Fundamentalism championed the literal meaning of Scripture thereby preserving the essential foundation of Protestantism. However, the fundamental system appeared to lose the deeper reading of the text which had been inherent to the Reformed perspective in favor a more literal, more individual, and more spiritual reading of the Scripture. D.L Moody was perhaps it’s founding father. Along with powerhouse thinker R.A. Torrey, he championed the idea that the Scripture was the “Word of God” and united this philosophy with dispensationalism. The weakness of this system was that its literalistic approach and exaltation of the text tended to put the Scripture “on” rather than “in”. The words themselves became very important while the principles slowly faded to the background. As the principles faded so did the emphasis on application and permeation of their truth into the rest of life. In many ways the evangelical movement fathered by Dr. Ockenga and Billy Graham starting in the 50’s moved away from the excesses of this movement while not essentially replacing the foundation.

The Pentecostal movement arose simultaneously as a branch on the same tree, and inherited many of the same emphases, but with the Spirit taking pre-eminence over the Scripture. This change was to lead to great confusion among Pentecostals throughout the 20^th century as “every wind of doctrine” blew threw the church. Fortunately, many of the winds were good, and contemporary to the rise of the New Evangelicalism, God planted the seeds for a more Spiritual understanding of Scripture through the Latter Rain movement, the seminal work being George Warnock’s Feast of Tabernacles. The typological or prophetic understanding of Scripture today traces largely back to this movement.

The Shepherding movement arose within the context of post-Latter Rain Pentecostal Christianity and had as a major thrust of its teaching the rebuilding of the architecture of Western Civilization, which they recognized as being essentially undermined by fragmented relationships. This understanding built the underpinning of a more principled approach to the Scripture and was carried to its logical conclusion by one of the leaders in the movement, Dennis Peacocke, who went on to become the leading Charismatic voice in Biblical Worldview. His approach to Scripture focused more on the principles which lay behind the text. Not only what does the text say, but what is assumed by the text, and what are the implications of the text when applied to a culture?

At the same time evangelicalism was experiencing a rebirth of Biblical Worldview through the enormously influential ministry of Francis Schaeffer. However, the weight of evangelical hermeneutics had unconsciously shifted to a blend of Higher Critical approach and Fundamentalist approaches to Scripture. While affirming the authority of the Word of God, grammar, background, and other extra-Biblical concerns gained greater and greater importance, making for a dry impractical reading of Scripture for which only the Scholar was qualified. This approach is common to nearly all of the Biblical resources popular today, and is very lean on personal application.

Most Christians are totally unconscious of their hermeneutical presuppositions, because they are so foundational to our understanding of reality. Understanding that such presuppositions exist, their implications, and the context in which they exist, bring us to the first step of choosing correct ones.