UNDERSTANDING THE TIMES
New Testament studies in the 21st century
Edited by Andreas J. Kostenberger & Robert W. Yarborough. Apollos. 400 pages. £19.99
ISBN 978 1 844 745 401
This volume is a festschrift for D.A. Carson, the distinguished and prolific New Testament scholar, whose work has made a major impact over the last 30 years, not only in biblical studies but also in apologetics.
It consists of a series of essays by a galaxy of New Testament scholars: Stanley E. Porter, Grant Osborne, Douglas J. Moo, Peter T. O’Brien, Eckhard J. Schnabel, Craig L. Blomberg, David W. Pao, besides the editors. While it will be of particular interest to other New Testament scholars and those similarly inclined, there are also chapters of a more strictly theological nature — on biblical inerrancy by John D. Woodbridge and another on the church by Mark Dever. It is a worthy tribute.
Stimulating
There is much that readers will find stimulating. Peter O’Brien’s chapter on Hebrews should not be missed. Mark Dever’s contribution on the church is interesting and brings a view from the shop floor, with its discussion of church discipline and the marks of the church.
Wisely following the four attributes of the church expounded in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed (‘one, holy, catholic, apostolic’), he warns against the present fad for contextualisation making a church more ‘of our century or our country than we are a Christian church’.
This is a welcome comment from a senior minister of a large and flourishing congregation. Dever allows for differences over baptism practice, but congregational church government is presented as if it were the biblically mandated practice.
On a cautionary note, New Testament scholars tend to focus on select texts, books and authors, sometimes in isolation from the whole teaching of Scripture and from the history of the Christian church. Western academia has a bias towards the new.
The rule of faith
As the Fathers tested their exegesis against ‘the rule of faith’, it is incumbent on us to measure the exegetical proposals of individual scholars against the accumulated exegesis of the whole church through the centuries, expressed in its creeds and confessions. New ideas may be good but they had better be tested, for God gave the Bible not to the university but to the church. I am confident the contributors to this book would agree.
Robert Letham,
a minister of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church in England and Wales, who lectures at WEST
