Crossway just released a superb book on preaching in honor of Kent Hughes:
Leland Ryken and Todd A. Wilson, eds. Preach the Word: Essays on Expository Preaching: In Honor of R. Kent Hughes. Wheaton: Crossway, 2007.
[I prepared the following book review for D. A. Carson‘s Ph.D. seminar “The Old Testament in the New” in fall 2006 at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I chose to review this book last year partially because its author, Barnabas Lindars, was Carson’s “doctoral father” or mentor for his Ph.D. at Cambridge University. Willem VanGemeren, the director of the Ph.D. program for theological studies at TEDS, had encouraged Ph.D. students to get to know the professor whom they would like to be their mentor for the Ph.D. program. One important way to do that, he suggested, is to read and become very familiar with that professor’s works as well as the works of that professor’s mentor.]
Lindars, Barnabas. New Testament Apologetic: The Doctrinal Significance of the Old Testament Quotations. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961. 303 pp. Out of print.
New Testament Apologetic (henceforth NTA) was the first major published work by Barnabas Lindars (1923–91). It was the published version of his B.D. thesis submitted to Cambridge University, where he would later serve as an assistant lecturer (1961–66). (F. F. Bruce adds that Lindars’s B.D. “is not as other B.D.s are; at Cambridge it takes precedence over Ph.D.!” [Review of Barnabas Lindars, New Testament Apologetic, Modern Churchman, n.s., 5 (1962): 170.])
[Read more…] about Review of Barnabas Lindars’s “New Testament Apologetic”
D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament (2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), pp. 721–22 (bold emphasis added):
If, as we have argued, Revelation focuses on the end of history, then it is in the area of eschatology that it makes its most important contribution. Nowhere are we given a more detailed description of the events of the end; and while many interpreters have been guilty of finding far more specifics in John’s visions than his symbolism allows and of unwisely insisting that only their own circumstances fit those specifics, we should not go to the other extreme and ignore those details that John does make relatively clear.
But it is shortsighted to think of eschatology simply in the sense of what will happen in the end times. For the End, in biblical thought, shapes and informs the past and the present. Knowing how history ends helps us understand how we are to fit into it now. Particularly is this so because the New Testament makes it clear that even now we are in “the last days.” Thus, Revelation reminds us of the reality and severity of evil, and of the demonic forces that are active in history. . . . At the same time, the degree to which Revelation exhorts believers should not be neglected. . . .
John’s visions also place in clear relief the reality of God’s judgment. A day will come when his wrath will be poured out, when sins will have to be accounted for, when the fate of every individual will depend on whether or not his or her name is “written in the Lamb’s book of life.” Equally clear, of course, is the reward that God has in store for those who “keep the word of endurance” and resolutely stand against the devil and his earthly minions, even at the cost of life itself. John’s visions are a source of comfort for suffering and persecuted believers in all ages.
This new article is available as a PDF:
D. A. Carson, “Excerpts From A Sermon: The Call of the Prophet in Declining Time: Ezekiel 1–3,” The Spurgeon Fellowship Journal (Fall 2007).
Highlights:
“Now what is vital for us, in the opening chapters, is the nature of God’s call on Ezekiel’s life. For God does not call all prophets in exactly the same way.”
I just stumbled across a convicting quotation by Dr. Carson that I wrote down during one of his class lectures last March:
“Most people go through life concerned that others will think too little of them. Paul was concerned that others would think too much of him.“
He made this comment while exegeting verse 6 in 2 Cor 12:1–10:
This is a humbling reminder:
[I]t was his [i.e, Paul’s] conversion on the Damascus road that enabled him to see many things in a new perspective. . . . Even though he knows full well that he came to his Christian understanding via the Damascus road experience, and not in classes on exegesis, he also argues that what he, as a Christian and an apostle, finds in the Scriptures is actually there, and the reason unconverted Jews do not see it is because “to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it take [sic] away. Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts” (2 Cor 3:14–15). In other words, as far as Paul is concerned, conversion to Christ removes the veil to enable the reader to see what is actually there. Judging by his passionate handling of Scripture in Galatians, and in his slightly less passionate but scarcely less intense handling of Scripture in Romans, Paul is concerned to show that the gospel he preaches has in fact actually been announced by what we now refer to as the Old Testament: the δικαιοσύνη [i.e., righteousness] he announces is that “to which the Law and the Prophets testify” (Rom 3:21).
–D. A. Carson, “Mystery and Fulfillment: Toward a More Comprehensive Paradigm of Paul’s Understanding of the Old and New,” in The Paradoxes of Paul. Vol. 2 of Justification and Variegated Nomism (ed. D. A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid; Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 181; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), pp. 410–11.
The September/October 2007 9Marks eJournal includes D. A. Carson‘s “Five Steps for Racial Reconciliation on Sunday at 11 a.m.,” which is excerpted from chapter 4 of Love in Hard Places.
In 2000, Tony Payne, publishing director for Matthias Media, interviewed D. A. Carson on worship. Follow-up email correspondence occurs at the end.
Update: Graeme Goldsworthy, in his Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics: Foundations and Principles of Evangelical Biblical Interpretation (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2006), appears to agree with Tony Payne (contra D. A. Carson) when he asserts, “In modern evangelicalism we could mention current usage of the words that are quite far removed from their main function in the New Testament. One classic example is the use of the word ‘worship’ to refer either to what we do in church, or to that part of the weekly congregational meeting given over to the singing, often repetitiously, of popular ‘spiritual’ choruses and songs. [fn. 20: “David Peterson, Engaging with God (Leicester: Apollos, 1992), shows how far the popular use of the term has strayed from its biblical sense.”] The problem is that lazy exegesis and unreflective usage end up by obscuring the gospel-based significance of worship. Other problems arise when a hermeneutical approach exalts doctrinal categories by muting the dynamics of biblical theology” (p. 180).
