Football and Interpreting Scripture

 

Imagine someone's exposure and understanding of American football being composed solely of watching highlight videos of just the kicker and punter.  There would be scenes of punting on fourth down, the kick-off, extra-point kicks, and field goals.  This would allow a person to understand some things about the game of football.  A person could understand how the ball moves (sometimes) and how points are scored (at least some of the time).  But this, of course, would not be a full understanding.  Such a de-contextualized "understanding" of football would miss many of the details and connections between actions in the full game of football.  Even the significance of the actions viewed in the highlight reel would not be weighted properly--being either over-valued or under-valued.  Such a limited understanding of football would miss the center and weightiest part of scoring in football, namely the touchdown.  It would all miss the central movement of the football, namely the movement of the ball by running and passing.

This is good analogy for how some people cherry-pick a few sayings or deeds from Jesus' life without placing them in the larger pattern of his thought and life.  This is to fundamentally misunderstand Jesus.  A "pick-and-choose" approach to Jesus will miss the center of his teaching and misunderstand the connections and significance of Jesus' teaching and actions.  

To focus on the love of Jesus or his concern for the poor to the exclusion of the larger contextual themes of the Kingdom of God and the person of Christ Jesus himself is to fundamentally misunderstand Jesus and his message.  D. A. Carson's words on "love" in the Scriptures are relevant here:

I do not think that what the Bible says about the love of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking if it is abstracted from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, or the personhood of God—to mention only a few nonnegotiable elements of basic Christianity. 

The result, of course, is that the love of God in our culture has been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable.  The love of God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all sentimentalized.[1] 

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[1] D. A. Carson The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Crossway, 2000), 11.

The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God

* A selection from D. A. Carson's wonderful little book The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God.

If people believe in God at all today, the overwhelming majority hold that this God—however he, she, or it may be understood—is a loving being. But that is what makes the task of the Christian witness so daunting. For this widely disseminated belief in the love of God is set with increasing frequency in some matrix other than biblical theology. The result is that when informed Christians talk about the love of God, they mean something very different from what is meant in the surrounding culture. Worse, neither side may perceive that that is the case. 

….

To put this another way, we live in a culture in which many other and complementary truths about God are widely disbelieved. I do not think that what the Bible says about the love of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking if it is abstracted from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, or the personhood of God—to mention only a few nonnegotiable elements of basic Christianity. 

The result, of course, is that the love of God in our culture has been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable. The love of God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all sentimentalized. This process has been going on for some time. My generation was taught to sing, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love,” in which we robustly instruct the Almighty that we do not need another mountain (we have enough of them), but we could do with some more love. The hubris is staggering. 

It has not always been so. In generations when almost every- one believed in the justice of God, people sometimes found it difficult to believe in the love of God. The preaching of the love of God came as wonderful good news. Nowadays if you tell people that God loves them, they are unlikely to be surprised. Of course God loves me; he’s like that, isn’t he? Besides, why shouldn’t he love me? I’m kind of cute, or at least as nice as the next person. I’m okay, you’re okay, and God loves you and me. (pp. 9-12)

D. A. Carson's book "The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God"

D. A. Carson's book The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Crossway, 2000) is small--about 75 pages of text--but very profound.  In this slim volume Carson has packed a great deal of content.  He touches upon lexical studies regarding the word "love" in the New Testament, the doctrine of impassibility, limited atonement, different aspects of the love of God, and the importance of seeing God's love in light of the fulness of all of his attributes.  Here a few comments I was again skimming today:

I do not think that what the Bible says about the love of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking if it is abstracted from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, or the personhood of God—to mention only a few nonnegotiable elements of basic Christianity.

The result, of course, is that the love of God in our culture has been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable.  The love of God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all sentimentalized. p 11

Carson also has a great discussion in which he recognizes five different aspects of God's love.  His five categories are:

a.     The peculiar love of the Father for the Son, and of the Son for the Father

b.     God’s providential love over all the he has made.

c.      God’s salvific stance toward his fallen world

d.     God’s particular, effective, selecting love toward his elect.

e.     God’s love is sometimes said to be directed toward his own people in a provisional or conditional way—conditioned, that is, on obedience. pp 16-21

The great news is that Carson's book is available for free online HERE.  Take up and read!