Michael S. Heiser's Blog, page 10

A Great Christmas Idea: “Come and See: An Immersive Audio Experience” of the Story of Jesus in the Gospels

I wanted to let you all know about this new product. The project is directed by a friend of mine, Boyd Barrett. Boyd is an experienced stage actor, and that experience shows in this production. You can follow this link to listen to a free audio sample. I did — and it’s pretty cool.

From the website, here’s a description of the project:

COME AND SEE is a three part audio project designed to transport listeners to the time of Jesus and allow them to feel like they are very much in the middle of each scene, witnessing the events firsthand. Every recorded saying and every recorded deed of Jesus in the four gospels are part of the story while creating an overarching narrative that provides the historical and cultural context.

Boyd is offering a special discount for Christmas:  a 25% CHRISTMAS DISCOUNT available by using the coupon code CHRISTMAS. Simply put the 3 volume project in your cart, go to checkout, and enter the applicable coupon code. So you can pre-order the entire project, which will have an estimated run time of 6 to 8 hours, for ONLY $15. This is a great deal!  Check it out!

The post A Great Christmas Idea: “Come and See: An Immersive Audio Experience” of the Story of Jesus in the Gospels appeared first on Dr. Michael Heiser.

Two Weeks Left to Register for MEMRA Module 1 Language Courses

Just a reminder!

Registration for the first 2019 module will remain open until December 31, 2018. After registration closes those who are registered will receive instructions by email for accessing the courses, which begin on January 7, 2019.

Courses offered will be:

Beginning Biblical Hebrew
Beginning Biblical Greek
Beginning Biblical Aramaic

MEMRA courses are delivered on video and are self-paced. There is no calendar. They are designed for 52 weeks, but students will not be locked out of the course after 52 weeks. They follow a grammar that must be purchased separately on Amazon (or some other site/place). Click on the registration link to register for the course and navigate the site for more information!

The post Two Weeks Left to Register for MEMRA Module 1 Language Courses appeared first on Dr. Michael Heiser.

What is the Bible’s Big Story? Part 9

This is Part 9 of a guest series by Dr. Ronn Johnson.

 

My last post concluded with the recommendation that the primary effect of Jesus’ death when viewed in priestly terms (that is, when we speak of Jesus dying as a sacrifice) found him making an already-righteous worshipper fit for entering sacred space. Most of my evangelical friends would find this purpose of Jesus’ sacrificial death to be too limiting, of course, though I think that their concern is due to a miscalculation of how important sacred space was in ancient Near Eastern religious culture. The dread associated with officially approaching a holy God (beyond the privilege of offering up a spontaneous prayer, for example) will play a major role in the Big Story of the Bible, whether in describing Israel’s worship system in the OT or in celebrating the “new and living way” to approach God in the NT. So we will certainly revisit the issue of sacred space as I get to the construction phase of my project. For now let’s look at the next brick in the evangelical wall:

The OT teaches a constant tension between God’s justice and God’s love

I quoted from Timothy Keller’s opening article in Zondervan’s NIV Study Bible in part two of this series when trying to explain the Sin Paid For model of the Bible’s story. Here is the quotation again, this time offered as an overview for the meaning of this brick:

“Through two-thirds of the Bible, the part we call the OT, an increasingly urgent, apparently unsolvable problem drives the narrative forward. God is a God of holiness and is therefore implacably opposed to evil, injustice, and wrong, and yet he is a God of infinite love. He enters into a relationship with a people who are fatally self-centered. Will he bring down the curse he says must fall on sin and cut off his people, or will he forgive and love his people regardless of their sin? If he does either one or the other, sin and evil win! It seems impossible to do both. The resolution to this problem is largely hidden from the reader through the OT, though Isaiah comes closest to unveiling it. The glorious King who brings God’s judgment in the first part of Isaiah is also the suffering servant who bears God’s judgment in the second part. It is Jesus. Victory is achieved through [Jesus’] infinite sacrifice on the cross, where God both punishes sin fully yet provides free salvation. Jesus stands as the ultimate protagonist, the hero of heroes. Therefore, because the Bible’s basic plotline is the tension between God’s justice and his grace and because it is all resolved in the person and work of Jesus Christ, Jesus could tell his followers after the resurrection that the OT is really all about him (Luke 24:27, 45). So everything in the Bible—all the themes and patterns, main images and major figures—points to Jesus” (The Story of the Bible: How the Good News about Jesus is Central [in the NIV Zondervan Study Bible, 2015]).

I appreciate Keller’s clarity in explaining his view. He is making several bold assertions along the way, however, with many of them open to immediate challenge by anyone who is simply reading through the Bible. I can think of seven such challenges: 1) if there is an “urgent, apparently unsolvable problem” driving the OT narrative forward, it is fair to ask where this problem is stated; 2) if there is a necessary curse of God which “must fall on sin and cut off his people” because they are “fatally self-centered,” it is again fair to ask where this idea is taught; 3) by using the provocative word regardless in the question “will [God] forgive and love his people regardless of their sin?” Keller implies that God’s forgiveness includes the idea of downplaying the seriousness of sin; 4) if “sin and evil win” when “God forgives and loves his people,” we are led to ask how or why this would be true; 5) if the “resolution of this problem [of sin vs. forgiveness] is largely hidden from the reader through the OT,” we are allowed to consider whether this problem ever existed at all; 6) if the “victory achieved through the cross” provides “free salvation,” it is fair to ask why salvation and righteousness were described as available before the cross; and 7) if the “Bible’s basic plotline is the tension between God’s justice and his grace,” we are owed an explanation as to why the OT regularly celebrates God’s justice and grace together.

It is this last point, of course, which concerns our brick. And this is no ordinary brick; Keller calls it the Bible’s basic plotline. Recall as well that Keller is not saying this in an essay tucked into the back of a library, but in the lead article of a major publisher’s best-selling evangelical study Bible. All this is to say that, in challenging this view, we are (in the opinion of many, but not all) stepping outside the boundaries of evangelicalism.

That being said, I think that a challenge to this brick can be surprisingly simple. Part of me wonders if I have missed something here, for when reading the Bible from left-to-right I find no tension between God’s justice/righteousness and his grace/mercy/love. These attributes often appear side-by-side when describing Yahweh, signaling that they are complementary ideas, even one leading to the other:

Psalm 36:5-6, 10: Your mercy, O LORD, is in the heavens, and your faithfulness reaches to the clouds. Your righteousness is like the great mountains; your judgments are a great deep; O LORD, you preserve man and beast. Oh, continue your lovingkindness to those who know you, and your righteousness to the upright in heart.

Psalm 85:10: Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

Psalm 89:14: Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne; mercy and truth go before your face.

Psalm 103:6-8, 17: The LORD executes righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed. He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the children of Israel. The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in mercy. The mercy of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children’s children.

Psalm 111:3-4: [The LORD’s] work is honorable and glorious, and his righteousness endures forever. He has made his wonderful works to be remembered; the LORD is gracious and full of compassion.

Psalm 116:5: Gracious is the LORD, and righteous; yes, our God is merciful.

Psalm 145:7-9, 17: They shall utter the memory of your great goodness, and shall sing of your righteousness. The LORD is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and great in mercy. The LORD is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works.

Jeremiah 10:24: O LORD, correct me, but with righteousness; not in your anger, lest you should bring me to nothing.

Daniel 9: 16, 18-19: O Lord, according to all your righteousness, I pray, let your anger and your fury be turned away from your city Jerusalem . . . . O my God, incline your ear and hear; open your eyes and see our desolations, and the city which is called by your name; for we do not present our supplications before you because of our righteous deeds, but because of your great mercies. O Lord, hear! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, listen and act! Do not delay for your own sake, my God, for your city and your people are called by your name.

Hosea 2:19: I will betroth [Israel] to me forever; yes, I will betroth you to me in righteousness and justice, in lovingkindness and mercy.

Romans 3:24: [We are] being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

Romans 5:17, 21: For if by one man’s offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the one, Jesus Christ. So that as sin reigned in death, even so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Titus 3:7: That having been justified by his grace we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

These verses seem to set a clear path for understanding Yahweh’s justice and love as working hand-in-hand, not in tension with each other. Because God had promised to love and care for his own, he was considered righteous or just (these are based on the same Hebrew word) in honoring this commitment. In this sense being righteous is a virtue available to anyone (e.g., Ps 112:4: “[The man who fears the LORD] is gracious, full of compassion, and righteous”; cp. Ps 37:21; Prov 21:21; Isa 57:1; Hos 10:12; Mic 6:8).

But this is where things can get confusing for the modern evangelical. Keller is apparently using “God’s righteousness” as a reference to a demand for moral justice as we would understand legal fairness. Used this way, I understand how he can see righteousness and grace as almost opposite ideas. And he may be right. The lexical meaning of tsaddiq in Hebrew, however, does not support his use of the term. The word’s basic meaning simply refers to being properly aligned, or to being found “in order” (Ludwig Koehler, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the OT), which means we must always start by considering what standard is in play before saying that God is aligned with that standard. In reviewing the above verses again, I believe it can be argued that the standard God is aligning to is the promise that he would bless the family of Abraham. Think again of the audience that originally heard these verses. So in saying “God is righteous,” the writer was saying that God would keep his side of the covenant. The original reader would have been shocked to hear this. The gods of the ancient Near East were notoriously bad at keeping their promises. If anything, they were the ones who played justice and love off one another, threatening either at any time. But because Yahweh was righteous, because he was a promise-keeping God, he would necessarily be merciful/gracious to those he loved. This is what made Yahweh so unique, so wonderful, so worthy of worship.

I therefore recommend tossing aside this brick. There is no tension between God’s justice and his love, and in fact the opposite is true. It is because God is righteous that we know he will be loving and gracious to his own. This teaching will become a foundational element in our Big Story of the Bible.

Loyalty to God (“faith”) is necessary for salvation

The evangelical tradition has strongly argued that individual faith is necessary for salvation. I believe we are right on target here, though some issues of definition may still come into play. My understanding of faith/belief starts with the Hebrew words for faith (ʾaman) and loyalty (ʾamuna), which are basically the same words with different endings. Faith and faithfulness thus become interchangeable ideas in the OT. In the NKJV, for example, ʾaman is translated as “believed” in Genesis 15:6, then as “faithful” in Numbers 12:7; ʾamuna is translated as “faithfulness” in Psalm 36:5, then as “faith” in Habakkuk 2:4. So one meaning bleeds into the other, much like stress and stressful and care and careful are built on the same words in English. When I was a pastor, I recall sometimes leading the bride and groom in reciting old marriage vow “To thee I betroth my faith” during a wedding. I sense it has only been recently that when someone says “faith” we don’t also presume they mean fidelity/faithfulness.

The same relationship between faith and faithfulness follows through into the NT, where the Greek pistis (“faith”) is basically the same word as pistos (“faithful”), just with a different ending (the –os ending on a Greek root often carries the meaning of –fulness or –ful). So pistis gets translated in the NKJV both as “faith” (Matthew 9:22) and “faithfulness” (Romans 3:3) and pistos gets translated as “believe” ( 1 Timothy 4:3, 9) and “believer” (2 Corinthians 6:15, 1 Timothy 4:12) and “faithful” (2 Timothy 2:2).

I would recommend Matthew Bates’ Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King[image error] (Baker Academic, 2017) for a book-length defense of this idea that biblical faith refers to loyalty. It is not until the sixteenth century that Protestant theologians made the meaning of faith to become something to be believed as opposed to something we do (showing allegiance is more than mental assent; it requires an act of the will). You may  have heard of this as the faith vs. works question, which really is the result of Luther’s and Calvin’s reaction to the medieval theology of their era.

(Just last week Susan and I went to a Presbyterian church while on vacation, and it struck me how confused Paul would have been by the sermon. The pastor was preaching from Galatians 2:16, and he said that the “works of the law” mentioned there were any of those things that people did to earn their salvation, and that Paul wanted people to believe in, or put their faith in, the finished work of Christ instead. So salvation is a belief issue as opposed to a doing issue, the pastor said, and he piled on verse after verse about the virtue of faith. I think Paul would have liked the sermon for its emphasis on faith, but he would have struggled with what the pastor meant by faith as an English word. Paul’s concern in Galatians was not Roman Catholic legalism, as Luther saw it, but the fate of God-fearing Gentiles who were being told that they needed to add specific rules of Judaism [like circumcision, Sabbath, kosher, and other “works of Torah”] to their loyalty to Jesus in order to become authentic members of Abraham’s family. No, Paul argued, all a person needed was loyalty to Jesus to become an inheritor of God’s OT covenant promises [Gal 3:26-29]. As for the sermon, I think Paul would have been concerned that the pastor gave his audience a passive description of faith—as though it was the opposite of active obedience—and that he did not describe faith in terms of becoming loyal to Jesus while turning from the worship of the gods of ancient Greece and Rome. This is how Paul’s Galatian audience would have understood it.)

This understanding of faith becomes important because it adjusts the story of the Bible back to the beginning. When Abraham is said to ʾaman (“believe”) Yahweh in Genesis 15:6, Yahweh in turn considered Abraham righteous (tsedaqah). This would have been an outrageous idea to the ancient world; could a human be considered “right” with a deity due to simple (inward) loyalty? Deities usually demanded all sorts of ritualistic rule-keeping and sacrificial hocus-pocus. Clearly what was at stake was Abraham’s allegiance, or his worship of one god over another (cp. Joshua 24:2). The ripple effects of this idea will be felt throughout the rest of Scripture whenever people wondered how Yahweh, the deity of Israel, was to be honored. This was new territory, for no other god had ever been approached just through inward loyalty.

If you are following my thinking this far, it should become apparent why ʾaman and pistis are never used in the partial sense in the Bible. When used in describing a person’s relationship to a deity, a person was either considered faithful or they were not. No one was considered kind of faithful to their god. For example, Paul used pistos in 1 Corinthians 6:15 to describe Christians: “What part has a pistos [faithful person] with an unbeliever?” So the opposite of being pistos was being a non-Christian. In the same way, Paul starts Ephesians with “To the saints who are in Ephesus and pistos [faithful people] in Christ Jesus” as though he is talking to a single group of Christian people (cp. Col. 1:2 as well).

One more benefit of this view of faith comes in noticing that the Bible says that we will all someday be judged by inward realities (John 7:24), by the secrets we carry (Rom 2:16), by all of our hidden thoughts (1 Cor 4:5), and even by what we do (1 Pet 4:7; Rom 2:11; James 2). This is exactly how loyalty works. Faithfulness (loyalty) is an inward disposition, especially (in the context of most biblical storylines) answering the question of which god a person worshipped. So when Paul told the Philippian jailor to “Believe [pisteo] in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31), notice what he was saying as well as what he was not saying: Paul was not telling the jailor to try to follow the moral imperatives of Jesus’s teaching (works), nor to merely believe (mental assent) in Jesus’ finished work on the cross, nor even to become faithful to Jesus in some kind of behavioral sense. Quite simply, Paul was telling the jailor to become loyal to Jesus and to stop worshipping any other deity.

So is loyalty to God (“faith”) necessary for salvation? Absolutely. I appreciate my evangelical heritage for getting this one right, provided we work through what faith means. So keep this brick, preparing to use it as a foundational element in the Big Story of the Bible.

If you would like to respond to this post, I welcome your emails to ronnjohnson7@gmail.com. I will certainly reply.

 

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Online Course Updates at Yesod Bible Center

I’ve blogged about Yesod Bible Center before. It was created by a friend, Dr. Igal German. Igal has informed me that he has revised and updates all his online courses that are slated to begin in January 2019. This is an excellent opportunity to study Scripture online. Yes, there are a good number of such things offered, but in this case, Igal has the credentials and experience to offer solid content. Check it out!

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Mike’s New Discipleship Book, What Does God Want?, Now Available in Paperback

Well, Amazon has solved the paperback problem! You can now order What Does God Want? in paperback.

I’ve been asked many times, “How do I teach your material in my church? How can someone who isn’t even ready for Supernatural get into this content? This book is the answer.

What Does God Want? is specifically designed for new believers, though if you read the reviews that are already there (for the Kindle version), you’ll see that even people who have been believers for some time appreciate the content.

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Books You Should Read in 2019

Okay, it seems everyone is posting their “Top 10 Books of 2018” list this week (I’ve seen a bunch on Twitter) so I’ll get into the act. I listen to audio books while driving around, which allows me to get through a lot of material. What follows is my recommendation list. Most academic books on biblical studies never make it to audio. Unseen Realm is an exception, so I included it.  Researching and writing it was life-changing for me so I think it will be for others.

In no particular order:

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage [image error]

Honestly, “incredible” doesn’t even begin to describe it

The Newton Papers: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton’s Manuscripts [image error]

There are reasons Newton’s papers are still not entirely published — his theological heterodoxy being one. Very interesting.

Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West [image error]

Just awesome. Every snowflake in contemporary America should be chained to a desk and forced to read it.

The Wright Brothers [image error]

They succeeded where Da Vinci failed. Simple trial-and-error method married to keen observation of birds and tenacious perseverance. An amazing story.

American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant [image error]

Didn’t know much about him. He’s now on my top-five list of great, honorable men I wish I had met.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains [image error]

Absolutely soul-crushing. A book for our times whether we can stomach it or not.

Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis [image error]

This book is now the place to start for a broad overview of government interest in these areas.

Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It [image error]

A life-changing book. Data-driven explanation as to why the medical and nutritional community gets this entirely wrong. The author cites study after study, clinical trial after clinical trial. Basically, the real answer was discovered and well known in the first half of the 20th century, and then ignored. Pretty stunning. (I’ve lived the solution. I used to be 60 lbs heavier. I used the right strategy without knowing what I was really doing).

Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day [image error]

Maybe someday I’ll be this ingenious. Probably not.

The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible [image error]

So far the best thing I’ve produced. If you want to understand Scripture and biblical theology better, it will help you. Writing it helped me.

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Review of Important New Scholarly Book on Matthew

The most recent issue of Themelios, the academic journal of the Gospel Coalition, contains a review of Matthew’s Theological Grammar: The Father and the Son. This is an important work that argues that “προσκυνέω [proskuneō] in Matthew means worship and its use “bind[s] together the identity of Father and Son” by taking up the verb “in ways that evoke Israel’s commitment to the one God while constantly and strategically applying it to Jesus” (p. 27; excerpt from the review). The book is highly recommend. It’s part of the WUNT series by Mohr-Siebeck, the German publisher I affectionately refer to as God’s gift to biblical theology.

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Dr. Mike Brown Tells People the Truth About the Hebrew Alphabet and Of Course Pays For It

Back in March I posted a link to the video below, which was created and posted by Dr. Michael Brown.

The video is about how Hebrew is not to be read / translated / interpreted according to the shapes of the original picture-script (“pictographic”) from which the Hebrew letters originated. Dr. Brown is correct. Trying to take the Hebrew words of the Hebrew Bible and retrovert them to their original pictographs and then “translate” them according to picture meanings is nonsense. Imagine teaching your kids to read the alphabetic English letters and then years later tell them they were never really reading, but have to convert words to strings of pictures to “really know” what the letters are saying! It’s akin to making a cake according to a recipe and then suddenly claiming that to really taste the cake you need to eat all the ingredients in their original form. Raw eggs, bottoms up! Now pass me that cup of sugar! Absurd … but yet common.

We know how Hebrew is read. The biblical text of the Hebrew Bible is perfectly readable. It has a grammar that is precisely coherent. It’s, well, a well-ordered written language (thank God).

But that isn’t enough to satisfy the occult impulse in many people. Dr. Brown asks here why the vitriol against his video spewed forth. There’s your answer — the hunger to believe that, when you go back to pictures, you’ve acquired hidden knowledge (the word “occult” means “hidden”). Now, I’m not using “occult impulse” as pointing to anything satanic. That would be equally absurd. Rather, I’m pointing out the impulse to want to know secret things, or know more than your neighbor about something they think they know. It’s an unconscious covetousness — “I’ve figured out something you haven’t” (trust me, you see it in academia a lot).

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The Perfect Christmas Gift for the Seeker and New Believer

I’m of course talking about my new “discipleship book” aimed at introducing (and clarifying) the meaning of the gospel and what believers are supposed to be doing to follow Jesus. It’s called (as the cover makes obvious), What Does God Want?

Why is this a good gift idea? Because people are often disposed to thinking about Jesus and having conversations about him at Christmas time. This book will absolutely help you have that important conversation with people you want to consider the gospel.

For the time being, the book is available only in KINDLE. For why, see below. Even if you don’t have a Kindle you can still read Kindle books via a Kindle app on a phone or an iPad. So don’t let the Kindle platform stop you from getting it. Kindle also means the book is very inexpensive ($2.99).

What’s the book about? Glad you asked! You can of course see the book’s Table of Contents at the link. The book presents the gospel as a supernatural story with God’s desire to have a human family at the center. Then it talks about what the gospel is and, just as importantly, what the gospel isn’t. The rest of the content overviews what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. The book includes a glossary for people completely new to the Bible, as well as a glossary of supernatural vocabulary. In addition to presenting the gospel with clarity, the book also aims to prepare new believers for my book Supernatural.

I decided to self-publish this book so as to maintain complete control over the content. Excerpts will be used on discipleship web pages that I can’t describe presently. I want the freedom to give away parts of the content down the road as a Miqlat ministry.

Why only Kindle? Well, that might change. It wasn’t the original plan. I had intended to have both Kindle and paperback available by Thanksgiving, but that didn’t happen. The reason is Amazon — to date they have been unable to fix errors in the printing of the files. Until they do, or until I have another solution, it’s Kindle only. I’ve gone back and forth with Amazon three times without resolution. The only other option is that I have it printed somewhere and let Amazon handle fulfillment. To do that, though, I have to pay for a print run, which would be several thousand dollars. I’m not able to do that at this point. So here we are. The Lord will work it out. I just wanted to give you all some opportunity to make this part of your Christmas shopping! I’m also planning on an audio version, so stay tuned for that, too!

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Review of Mike’s Angels Book by Gospel Coalition

Readers will likely find this review of my new book (Angels: What the Bible Really Says About God’s Heavenly Host) by Justin Dillehay of interest. I’m grateful that Justin took the time to review the book, and that the Gospel Coalition found it worth inclusion on their website.

There’s one paragraph of interest for this space. Justin writes:

My only gripe about the book is Heiser’s tendency to cast “Christian tradition” as the bogeyman, with ancient Near Eastern studies as the savior (xiii, xix, 42). Derek Rishmawy refers to this as Heiser’s “frustrating case of biblical studies prejudice.” Perhaps by “tradition” Heiser means the cheesy stuff he heard as a kid. But if he means Athanasius, Aquinas, and Luther, then, as Rishmawy points out, it’s hard to get more supernatural than these guys.

Agreed — all those important figures were more open to supernaturalism than many evangelicals today. But they also shut the door to a number of important things in the Bible in that regard — or, perhaps more charitably, were too quick to dismiss the views of contemporaries (e.g., Irenaeus, Tertullian) in certain respects, or were ignorant of the strength of other supernaturalist interpretations when comparative ancient material (deciphered long after the lifetimes of these figures) is brought to bear. (If anyone cares to test the waters here, try this article on for size:

Schultz, Donald Robert. “The Origin of Sin in Irenaeus and Jewish Pseudepi-Graphical Literature.” Vigiliae christianae(1978): 161-190.

Schultz’s journal article can be obtained here. Here’s a link to a post from this blog that contains a couple excerpted pages. You can also read the dissertation upon which the article is based.

Here’s the point: How many of our creeds teach depravity the way Irenaeus saw it? Irenaeus understood that Second Temple literature informed the New Testament writers. I’d love to be shown otherwise, but I doubt any of the creeds or the reformers had such a keen insight. That isn’t because they weren’t great minds. It’s about access to the primary sources. Many important figures in Christian history were simple cut off from such resources. We aren’t, and so we bear greater responsibility.

So, yes, I have a bone to pick with tradition, but that doesn’t mean its bad or unimportant. As those who have read my work and followed the Naked Bible Podcast know, my gripe with tradition isn’t that it exists (!); rather, it’s that too often tradition and “the whole counsel of God” are conflated. What I mean here is that the average person in the pew might be confounded at the thought that there are things in Scripture that one’s denominational or creedal documents don’t address or which would hard to align with those documents. The fault isn’t that of tradition; it’s that people aren’t taught very far beyond tradition. That leads to the conflation I mentioned before. Traditions and creeds are good (as I’ve said many times), but they aren’t the text of Scripture understood in light of the original worldview and literary contexts of the people God prompted to write Scripture. The latter trumps the former, and its time we made that clearer to people.

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