In a guest editorial, Pastor Erwin Lutzer offers two words to encourage followers of Jesus to look to our heavenly Father for hope. 2020 was a tumultuous year but what assurances do we have that 2021 will be a better year? 

Welcome to 2021! So many people say I am so glad to say goodbye to 2020 with a pandemic. But I do need to ask you very candidly, do we have any assurance that 2021 is going to be better? We don’t know that; do we? Frankly, we have no idea what’s going to happen. We could face brand-new troubles, personally and nationally, that none of us are able to predict. How will we cope?

I’m going to introduce you to two words. You don’t even have to write them down, though you can if you wish. And I want those words to guide you as we think about the unknown future. The first word comes to us from Joshua 3 (verses 3-4). Here’s what happens. God is saying to the nation of Israel, “now you have not traveled this way before.” How do you face that unknown future and in the very next verse, God says, “I want you to consecrate yourselves.” What does it mean to “consecrate” yourself? It means to set yourself apart for God. As a matter of fact, Jesus even did this when He said, “I sanctify myself.” In other words, He was affirming the fact that He was set apart for God and for God’s purposes. Just the other day I was reading in my devotions from the twelfth chapter of Hebrews, where the Bible says, “Lay aside every weight and the sin which easily entangles us.” And God really spoke to me about some weights in my own life, even things that may not be sinful, but they are hindrances. They stand in the way of my worship and my fellowship with God. Ask yourself that question. What does it mean for us to get rid of sin—to consecrate ourselves to God? That’s what the Lord told Joshua that the people should do because they were traveling a way they had never been before.

But there’s a second related word that I want to introduce you to. At least the word sounds the same, and that is to “concentrate”—to concentrate means to focus. Now, in that passage of Scripture, God says the Ark is going to go ahead of you 2,000 cubits—a cubit is more than a foot. That means 3000 feet, which is a half mile—just a bit more than a half mile. Why? Because God says. “As you go across the path that you’ve never gone before, I want you to look at the presence of God that the ark represents.” And that’s what you and I have to do. We need to look beyond the present to the future and there’s no passage of Scripture that helps us do that more than the sixth chapter of the book of Hebrews and I was going to read the passage, but I’m going to invite you to read it on your own. As you get to the end of the passage, it says this: “we have fled for refuge and we have a hope that is sure and steadfast that goes behind the veil where Jesus is as our fore-runner.” That’s a summary of what he says.

Stanley Hauerwas, Working with Words: On Learning to Speak Christian (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2011), 322 pages, ISBN 9781608999682.

I recommend this book to all Christians, and especially to those in pastoral and the theological vocations. Like his other publications, the Duke Divinity School professor of ethics and theology asks poignant hermeneutical and theological questions pertaining to Christian discipleship and witness. In Working With Words, Hauerwas shares his vision, approach, and experience as a pastor-theologian writing for the Christian public. His goal is to paint a vision of God with discipleship and witness in mind. And because he addresses life’s puzzling complexities honestly, this volume will be a good companion to his Hannah’s Child, a memoir of his theological autobiography.

The book has three parts, and Hauerwas writes seven essays for each section. Most of the essays are either public lectures or church sermons that he had shared in recent years. A few other essays fill the gaps for this compilation. Part 1 addresses disciplines for those learning to speak about God. These disciplines include reading, hearing, seeing and naming God amidst evil. Part 2 explains the Christian language of love for a) dealing with greed, b) discerning the Christian body, c) engaging the reality of “finite care[s] in a world of infinite need” (154) and d) explaining what it means for the church to be on a mission. In Part 3, Hauerwas co-writes (with a few theologians) on the lessons he had learned from some of his teachers. These teachers are political philosopher Charles Taylor, political activist-theologian Richard Niebuhr, and philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. He also include a chapter examining the friendship between political pastor-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Eberhard Bethge, and a few chapters explaining some of the virtues that underwrites medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas’s writing of Summa Theologicae, contemporary Catholic Social Teaching, and contemporary Methodist theological ethics.

David G. Firth and Jamie A. Grant, eds., Words and the Word: Explorations in Biblical Interpretation and Literary Theory (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2008), 317 pages, ISBN 9780830828982.

Prior to the post-modern period, many of the critical methodologies used in biblical studies such as redaction criticism, form criticism and source criticism were used in biblical interpretation in order to aid the critic in the interpretation of a text’s pre-history. In contrast, literary theory focuses on the final form of the text. The editors of this collection seek to expose the reader to many of the multiple methods of literary theory as they relate to biblical interpretation.

Eight essays are included in Words and the Word and they fall into two parts: First, two general articles. Grant Osborne lays out the components of narrative theory, focusing specifically on how this can be used with the Gospels. Fanie Snyman provides a “responsible” and “non-technical” approach to exegesis of Old Testament narrative (61). Both Synman’s and Osborne’s discussions are clear and comprehensive.

Part two of the book is comprised of six essays, which discuss specific literary approaches to interpretation. First, Richard Briggs offers one of the most helpful explanations on speech-act theory I have encountered, including well-defined key terminology that is necessary for comprehending this concept. Speech-act theory understands that language has the ability to govern significant aspects of human life. Briggs claims the biblical writers were very cognizant of the profound power of words (85).

Jeannine Brown’s chapter on genre criticism is characteristic of all the essays in this collection—the methodologies all aim at discovering authorial intention. Brown reminds us that even genres were tools that biblical authors employed to communicate a specific message (143).

Many literary scholars assert that at certain times in their writing authors of the Bible intentionally employed ambiguity and willfully invited “readers to enjoy and play with the text” (183). David Firth argues for this practice as his contribution to the collection of articles. In an interesting piece, Firth attempts to show how William Empson’s taxonomy of ambiguity is a useful tool in which to explore biblical narrative. While Firth’s explanation and presentation is thorough and includes plenty of examples, I remain unconvinced (but open) that any ambiguity in the text is anything but unintentional.

Jamie Grant contributes an essay on poetics. The bulk of the essay deals with the significance of editorial shaping within anthologies like Proverbs and the book of Psalms. Grant demonstrates the importance of discerning a passages’ theme based on its placement by the editor within a particular thematic section of the book. Plenty of examples help to clarify this form of analysis. His chapter also includes a section on poetic parallelism and an even smaller discussion about New Testament poetry.

Peter Phillips explores the philosophical development of rhetoric, the art of persuasion. Although his essay contains some biblical examples to demonstrate his approach, this chapter and the next are two of the more theory-laden of the collection.

The final piece on discourse analysis, written by Terrance Wardlaw, might be one of the least known of the literary approaches discussed in the book. Wardlaw’s definition of discourse analysis is “the analysis of language and its use beyond the sentence. Moreover, one may describe ‘discourse’ as a unit of speech (either oral or written) treated by interlocutors as a complete utterance” (268). Wardlaw applies his analysis to both an Old and New Testament passage in order to help illuminate this theory.

Timothy Ward, Words of Life: Scripture As the Living and Active Word of God (IVP Academic, Downers Grove, 2009), 184 pages, ISBN 9781433501302.

This book is full of contemporary appreciation of the dynamic power of Scripture and invites a reappraisal by the reader of what we really think about the Bible. There are sections that will evoke a loud ‘amen’ from among Pentecostals and Charismatics, as when Ward insists that God always does what God’s Word says (p 26ff.). There are also warnings, though, as when Ward identifies a tendency among some Charismatics to place the Scriptures in an apparently less valued place than ecstatic and spontaneous eruptions of revelation, such as in worship services. He also bewails the reduction of well researched and applied expository preaching and the increase of anecdotal surmise and impressions. He insists that we need to avoid the ‘refusal by some to link God’s ongoing dynamic action through the Spirit directly with the speech acts communicated by the words of Scripture’ (p 158).

Timothy Ward, a Church of England vicar and an unashamed Calvinist, has produced this book on the back of his earlier thesis publication, where he examined an understanding God’s Word as His ‘speech act’. He successfully unwraps the implications of a properly Reformed doctrine of Scripture in the contemporary church. The result is excellent and most helpful to all who instinctively hold the Scripture in the highest regard yet sense, albeit unwittingly, the contemporary pull away from a high doctrine of Scripture in differing parts of the church today.

Ward’s dealing with how the doctrine of sola Scriptura should be applied in the church in a manner faithful to the Magisterial Reformers is especially helpful and illumining. Ward emphasises that the Bible is not a talisman, and needs to be read in order to hear the Word of God released towards us today. We need to have a higher appreciation of it as the very words of God released to us. He points out that a doctrine of sola Scriptura properly roots the understanding of the Bible and the exercise of its authority within the Christian community, and contrasts this with a more individualistic use of the Scriptures, without reference to the Christian community’s authority, as ‘solo’ Scriptura (p 154).

This is a serious and well researched piece of writing, written at the pastoral and applied level. Any preacher, who has been disturbed by the challenges of ‘post-modernity’ and ‘post-foundationalism’ and wonders what they are really meant to be doing with the Bible, would benefit from reading it.

Reviewed by Jim Purves

Preview this book: books.google.com/books?id=cmcvFiOBpncC