Retread

Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

- Soren Kierkegaard

This is so true given the impact of Biblical Theology and the New Perspective on Paul. The goal is to detach oneself so clinically from the text so as not to read oneself into it. This is the New Perspective's critique of Luther. They believe he exegeted the Bible through his own existential guilt and suffering which is correct.

The problem with these new waves of scholarship is that they believe that they can dissect Scripture as clinically as a biologist dissects a frog. In the process, they attempt to stifle their own psychology and encourage pastors to do the same in their teaching and preaching. There is then no connection with humanity as it is and Christianity renders itself irrelevant.

1 Corinthians 15:9-10 For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God which is with me.

Are these people here to tell me that Paul was not writing from a standpoint of liberated guilt? He was hunting people down as persecuting them in a vicious way. Then, the Lord appeared to him and showed him that the ones he persecuted were in the right. Clinical Paul just laying out the fundamentals of the faith? I think not. If that is so, he was a sociopath.

When you read and study Scripture out of your need, pain, anger, and guilt, you are reading a book that has been addressed to you. It is a book for you, offering liberation on an eternally high scale. - DOB