Bible, Theology & Philosophy

Read Part 1.

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Have you ever wanted to learn Greek? A good number of Bible students and faithful church attenders have given a yes to this question. But these same people are often perplexed as to how they can actually learn Greek, Some may find themselves overwhelmed in a intorductory Greek class and conclude that it will have to always be “just Greek to me.”

The deluge had passed, and the ark had been parked. It was now time for Noah and his family to enter into the postdiluvian “brave new world” that awaited them. Noah’s first act after debarkation was to build an altar and offer sacrifices to the Lord. This act elicited God’s promise that He would not smite every living thing again as He had done (Gen. 8:20-22).

The Lord then established a “covenant” with Noah and his descendants (9:9). Since we all are his descendants, the regulations of this covenant apply to all of mankind. The Jewish tradition states that the Noahic Covenant illustrates what God expects of all people, not just the Jews. The provisions of the Noahic Covenant regarding the spread of life, the source of life and the sanctity of life are given in Genesis 9:1-7. God pledged His faithfulness to these promises by the token of a “bow in the cloud” (Gen. 9:12-17). As a warrior or hunter hangs up his bow after using it, the LORD placed His bow in the sky after He shot it at the earth with the flood. By this sign, He promised that He would not perform that same act again!

Noah’s three sons—Shem, Ham and Japheth—became the progenitors of new life on an earth that had been wrecked by the flood but also purified from its ungodly inhabitants (Gen. 6:7). As the sons are mentioned in the text, Genesis 9:18 records a tiny piece of information that is important in understanding the rest of the account: “Ham was the father of Canaan.”

The following verses (9:20-27) record a sad event in the life of Noah, the man of whom it had been said, “Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God” (Gen 6:9). These verses describe the fall of a good man. “Noah began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent” (Gen. 9:20-21). Scripture records both the victories and the defeats of God’s people. That fact is an often overlooked evidence of the Bible’s truthfulness, since authors tend to play down the faults of their “heroes.”

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Timothy Keller wades into the depths of the human experience with Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. It’s a book that “take[s] life seriously … [and] want[s] to help readers live life well and even joyfully against the background of these terrible realities [of pain and suffering]” (p. 3). He does this by pointing out that Jesus Himself experienced suffering and pain. He shows how other worldviews attempt to address the concepts of pain and suffering but are bankrupt.

Read the series so far.

In this last post in the series I intend to do three things. First, I will be drawing the conclusion that there are two very different ideas, and hence definitions, of “progressive revelation” (PR), and both operative words (“progressive” and “revelation”) mean something very different both separately and together, depending on who is using them. Thus, there is no really agreed upon definition of this term within Evangelicalism (or, indeed, biblical studies generally). Second, I want to quickly address the straw man issue (I’ll call it Objection 2). This is in case someone says that I have misrepresented the position of covenant theologians. I have not, and I shall furnish a couple more examples to prove it. Finally, in line with my call for plain speech and good communication, I want to close by asking which position on progressive revelation really is what one would be led to think it is.

Two conflicting ideas, and the importance of recognizing fuzzy definitions

The definition of progressive revelation which I have been commending in this article is as follows.

Progressive Revelation is the view that supplemental disclosures about a particular subject are built upon and traceable back to an original grounding revelation. The combined witness to the subject must evidence enough commonality so as to present a comprehensible picture of the subject which can be cross-checked and verified against every instance of the progression.