A New Ministry: SBTS in the Fall

In God’s great mercy I will be joining the faculty of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the fall. Here’s the story in the Towers Online.

Here’s what I said when I shared this news with our church family at Baptist Church of the Redeemer:

Psalm 139:16, “Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”

Psalm 139:16 tells us that every day of our lives is written in God’s book before they come to pass. God is sovereign over every day of our lives.

Acts 17:26, “And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place . . .”

Acts 17:26 is describing nations, and it states that God has determined how long a nation will exist and what its boundaries will be. I think the same is true of individuals: God has determined how long we will live on this earth and what the boundaries of our dwelling place will be.

Ephesians 2:10, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

Ephesians 2:10 tells us that God has prepared beforehand good works for us to do.

2 Timothy 2:4, “No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him.”

2 Timothy 2:4 tells us that Christian ministers are like soldiers. Soldiers receive orders, and they obey, seeking to please their superiors.

The circumstances of our lives have made clear that new orders have been given to me.

It has been a high privilege to serve Southwestern Seminary for the past 5 years. The students have been eager to learn, encouraging to me, and what a joy to see them enter the harvest! The administration has been generous to me, always showing a sincere pastoral love, and God blessed me with dear friends in my faculty colleagues.

It has also been an unexpected, unlooked for joy and privilege to serve at Baptist Church of the Redeemer for the last three years. I never intended to get swept up in a church plant, but God blessed us immensely through this group of families who wanted to plant a church. We are so grateful that we were drawn into this endeavor. We have never been happier at a church than we are at Redeemer. We have learned and continue to learn from our brothers and sisters, and I am spurred on by their godliness and devotion. What a privilege to serve such a people!

I would be a fool to choose to leave.

But it has not ultimately come down to my choice. Months of thinking over and praying through this possibility have made me certain that if The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary invited me to join the faculty, it would be the call of God to leave Houston and move to Louisville to labor in a different section of the Lord’s vineyard.

God has opened this door and has called us to this new ministry. We are sad to leave home, family in Texas, and most of all our church, but at the same time we are excited about what the Lord has for us.

Lord willing, I will take up the post of Associate Professor of Biblical Theology at Southern in the Fall of 2008. I am humbled and honored to have the opportunity to serve in this role. May the Lord prosper his Word!

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On a logistical note, if anyone is looking to buy a house in southwest Houston, let’s talk!

Let Athanasius Spur You to Study the Psalms

In his fascinating lecture on “Reading the Psalms Messianically,” Gordon Wenham recommends The Letter of St. Athanasius to Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms.

Having followed that recommendation, I am now passing it on, and I would also recommend having a listen (or multiple listens) to Wenham’s lecture. The most striking thing, for me, about Athanasius’s letter is his absolutely thorough knowledge of the Psalms! What a gift to be spurred on to a closer and more comprehensive knowledge of the Psalms!

Enjoy.

By the way, if you have the SVS Press edition of Athanasius’s On the Incarnation (the one with the brilliant introduction by C. S. Lewis), the letter to Marcellinus on the interpretation of the Psalms is included as an appendix.

1 & 2 Peter and Jude by David R. Helm

Great preaching is inspiring. When I hear or read great preaching, it makes me want to preach. I often benefit from listening to inspiring preaching in my car on the way to school to teach–listening to John Piper fires me up, reminds me of all that is at stake, points me to the greatness of God’s mercy in Christ, and stimulates my thinking. All of this makes me eager to serve God’s people with urgent love for them and the Lord Jesus by proclaiming the Bible to them and praying the Lord to send the Spirit to set it on fire.

As I’ve mentioned recently, if you’re preaching or teaching a particular book, it is a great help to have your thoughts stimulated by someone else’s efforts to preach that part of Scripture.

The latest installment of the Preaching the Word commentary series arrived on my doorstep last night, and when I read the first two or three sermons in this volume, they made me want to preach! Praise God for the help in good books! Anyone preaching, teaching, or studying 1 Peter, 2 Peter, or Jude should get their hands on this book to have the soil of the mind fertilized by the able proclamation modeled for us by David Helm.

You may know David Helm from his work on The Big Picture Story Bible–if you have kids and don’t have The Big Picture Story Bible, you need to buy it right now and enjoy it with your children. Helm is also the executive director of The Simeon Trust, which Kent Hughes described when Mark Dever interviewed him.

I would also request that those of you who are in the habit of asking the Lord to bless things would beseech him to help me as I work on the commentary on Revelation for this series. If you happen to hear me preach sometime in the next few years, chances are it will be on Revelation, and Lord willing those sermons will take their place among the other volumes in the Preaching the Word series.

“Narrow” on Wednesday Night in Beaumont

Lord willing, this Wednesday night - May 7, 2008 - I’ll be speaking at “Narrow,” which meets at Westgate Memorial Baptist Church in Beaumont, TX (6220 Westgate Dr, Beaumont, TX, 77706). The event is a weekly Bible Study aimed at college students, and it begins at 9pm. If you’re in the area, it would be great to see you there.

Review of Tsumura’s NICOT volume on 1 Samuel

David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007. 720pp. $50.00, Hardcover.

Japan Bible Seminary’s David Toshio Tsumura has given us a fine new commentary on 1 Samuel. He lucidly overviews the history of the modern discussion of the text of 1 Samuel, which, he notes is “allegedly ‘in extremely poor condition’” (3). Against the tendency to emend the Masoretic Text in light of the LXX and the other versions, Tsumura insists that “The primary task of exegetes of ancient texts . . . is to interpret data in its original context, not to alter the data so that they can explain it easily” (8). Tsumura suggests that some difficulties are due not to a corrupt text but to phonetic spellings, misunderstood Hebrew grammatical structures, or idiomatic expressions. He suggests that “A narrative like 1–2 Samuel could have been written, at least partly, as if it was heard or spoken,” thus “the majority of proposed emendations are needless” (10). How might scholars two thousand years from now, whose only recourse to English is what they find in surviving written texts, respond to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying? Would the dialects in Faulkner’s prose be corrected or emended if the English text were compared with the French translation (or even with an English dictionary!)?

Tsumura argues that the “final editing of 1–2 Samuel, with minor adjustments, was probably made no later than the late 10^th century b.c.” (11). The Philistines are identified as being from the “Sea Peoples, who migrated from the Aegean” (34). They were uncircumcised but neither unsophisticated nor uncultivated (37). Tsumura provides a fascinating discussion of the historical and religious background of 1–2 Samuel, and his discussion of Grammar and Syntax is informed by both modern linguistics and more traditional grammatical categories.

The traditional threefold division of 1 Samuel is broadly followed: Samuel (1–7), Saul (9–15), and David (16–31). Tsumura sees the purpose of 1 Samuel being to highlight the establishment of the monarchy and the preparation of David (73). He argues that the references to daughter/sons of Belial (e.g., 1:16; 2:12) should be rendered to reflect a person’s connection to the divine name Beliyaal rather than as a “worthless” man or woman (124). He does not explore what this might imply about the way that people in the OT are reckoned in terms of “corporate personality” as belonging either to the “seed of the woman” or to the “seed of the serpent.”

This commentary is very strong on matters textual, grammatical, and historical, and Tsumura allows the rest of the OT to inform his interpretation. But readers should be aware that the commentary gives almost no attention to canonical biblical theology—the flow of redemptive history, the typological patterns between, for instance, Joseph and David, or the ways this flow of redemptive historical patterns might influence and be fulfilled in the NT. For another commentary on 1–2 Samuel that reverses these emphases (little attention to text criticism, grammar, and history, while focusing on canonical biblical theology), see Peter Leithart’s A Son to Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel.

For the most part volumes in this series are very user friendly, but I have two complaints about them: First, it makes no sense to me why the series hides the bibliography between the Introduction and the Commentary. The bibliography would be so much easier to find if it were located in the same place as it may be found in most other volumes: at the back of the book. Second, these are long commentaries read mainly by people who at least know the Greek and Hebrew alphabets. Therefore, all transliteration of Greek and Hebrew in these volumes should be abandoned. Transliteration hinders those who know the languages, and it does not give understanding to those who don’t. While it may help those who have not studied Greek and Hebrew feel more comfortable, how many people know what sounds are signified by the superscripted e’s or the backwards apostrophe? And even if they can sound out the word, sort of, they still don’t know what it means. Down with transliteration!

We congratulate David Toshio Tsumura for this accomplishment. He has advanced the discussion of 1 Samuel, and his bold position on the text of 1–2 Samuel is a refreshing, if controversial, perspective on the reliability of the Masoretic Text. No researcher will be able to ignore this volume, and no preacher will want to be without it.

UPDATE: JT wrote to tell me that Tsumura wrote the study notes on 1-2 Samuel for the ESV Study Bible. One more reason to look forward to its appearance this fall!