Deep Exegesis - The Mystery Of Reading Scripture Order Printed Copy

Author: Peter J. Leithart
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About the Book

"Deep Exegesis - The Mystery Of Reading Scripture" by Peter J. Leithart explores the complexities of biblical interpretation and challenges readers to engage in a more profound and nuanced reading of scripture. Leithart emphasizes the importance of understanding the historical and cultural context of the text, as well as the spiritual and theological significance. Through a detailed examination of key passages, Leithart demonstrates how deep exegesis can lead to a deeper appreciation and understanding of the Bible.

Billy Graham

Billy Graham (born November 7, 1918, Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S.—died February 21, 2018, Montreat, North Carolina), American evangelist whose large-scale preaching missions, known as crusades, and friendship with numerous U.S. presidents brought him to international prominence. Conversion and early career The son of a prosperous dairy farmer, Billy Graham grew up in rural North Carolina. In 1934, while attending a revival meeting led by the evangelist Mordecai Ham, he underwent a religious experience and professed his “decision for Christ.” In 1936 he left his father’s dairy farm to attend Bob Jones College (now Bob Jones University), then located in Cleveland, Tennessee, but stayed for only a semester because of the extreme fundamentalism of the institution. He transferred to Florida Bible Institute (now Trinity College), near Tampa, graduated in 1940, and was ordained a minister by the Southern Baptist Convention. Convinced that his education was deficient, however, Graham enrolled at Wheaton College in Illinois. While at Wheaton, he met and married (1943) Ruth Bell, daughter of L. Nelson Bell, a missionary to China. By the time Graham graduated from Wheaton in 1943, he had developed the preaching style for which he would become famous—a simple, direct message of sin and salvation that he delivered energetically and without condescension. “Sincerity,” he observed many years later, “is the biggest part of selling anything, including the Christian plan of salvation.” After a brief and undistinguished stint as pastor of Western Springs Baptist Church in the western suburbs of Chicago, Graham decided to become an itinerant evangelist. He joined the staff of a new organization called Youth for Christ in 1945 and in 1947 served as president of Northwestern Bible College in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Evangelism Graham’s emergence as an evangelist came at a propitious moment for 20th-century Protestants. Protestantism in the United States was deeply divided as a result of controversies in the 1920s between fundamentalism and modernism (a movement that applied scholarly methods of textual and historical criticism to the study of the Bible). The public image of fundamentalists was damaged by the Scopes Trial of 1925, which concerned the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools in Tennessee; in his writings about the trial, the journalist and social critic H.L. Mencken successfully portrayed all fundamentalists as uneducated country bumpkins. In response to these controversies, most fundamentalists withdrew from the established Protestant denominations, which they regarded as hopelessly liberal, and retreated from the larger society, which they viewed as both corrupt and corrupting. Although Graham remained theologically conservative, he refused to be sectarian like other fundamentalists. Seeking to dissociate himself from the image of the stodgy fundamentalist preacher, he seized on the opportunity presented by new media technologies, especially radio and television, to spread the message of the gospel. In the late 1940s Graham’s fellow evangelist in Youth for Christ, Charles Templeton, challenged Graham to attend seminary with him so that both preachers could shore up their theological knowledge. Graham considered the possibility at length, but in 1949, while on a spiritual retreat in the San Bernardino Mountains of southern California, he decided to set aside his intellectual doubts about Christianity and simply “preach the gospel.” After his retreat, Graham began preaching in Los Angeles, where his crusade brought him national attention. He acquired this new fame in no small measure because newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, impressed with the young evangelist’s preaching and anticommunist rhetoric, instructed his papers to “puff Graham.” The huge circus tent in which Graham preached, as well as his own self-promotion, lured thousands of curious visitors—including Hollywood movie stars and gangsters—to what the press dubbed the “canvas cathedral” at the corner of Washington and Hill streets. From Los Angeles, Graham undertook evangelistic crusades around the country and the world, eventually earning international renown. Despite his successes, Graham faced criticism from both liberals and conservatives. In New York City in 1954 he was received warmly by students at Union Theological Seminary, a bastion of liberal Protestantism; nevertheless, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a professor at Union and one of the leading Protestant thinkers of the 20th century, had little patience for Graham’s simplistic preaching. On the other end of the theological spectrum, fundamentalists such as Bob Jones, Jr., Carl McIntire, and Jack Wyrtzen never forgave Graham for cooperating with the Ministerial Alliance, which included mainline Protestant clergy, in the planning and execution of Graham’s storied 16-week crusade at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1957. Such cooperation, however, was part of Graham’s deliberate strategy to distance himself from the starchy conservatism and separatism of American fundamentalists. His entire career, in fact, was marked by an irenic spirit. Graham, by his own account, enjoyed close relationships with several American presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush. (Although Graham met with Harry Truman in the Oval Office, the president was not impressed with him.) Despite claiming to be apolitical, Graham became politically close to Richard Nixon, whom he had befriended when Nixon was Eisenhower’s vice president. During the 1960 presidential campaign, in which Nixon was the Republican nominee, Graham met in Montreaux, Switzerland, with Norman Vincent Peale and other Protestant leaders to devise a strategy to derail the campaign of John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee, in order to secure Nixon’s election and prevent a Roman Catholic from becoming president. Although Graham later mended relations with Kennedy, Nixon remained his favourite politician; indeed, Graham all but endorsed Nixon’s reelection effort in 1972 against George McGovern. As Nixon’s presidency unraveled amid charges of criminal misconduct in the Watergate scandal, Graham reviewed transcripts of Oval Office tape recordings subpoenaed by Watergate investigators and professed to be physically sickened by his friend’s use of foul language. Legacy of Billy Graham Graham’s popular appeal was the result of his extraordinary charisma, his forceful preaching, and his simple, homespun message: anyone who repents of sins and accepts Jesus Christ will be saved. Behind that message, however, stood a sophisticated organization, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, incorporated in 1950, which performed extensive advance work in the form of favourable media coverage, cooperation with political leaders, and coordination with local churches and provided a follow-up program for new converts. The organization also distributed a radio program, Hour of Decision, a syndicated newspaper column, “My Answer,” and a magazine, Decision. Although Graham pioneered the use of television for religious purposes, he always shied away from the label “televangelist.” During the 1980s, when other television preachers were embroiled in sensational scandals, Graham remained above the fray, and throughout a career that spanned more than half a century few people questioned his integrity. In 1996 Graham and his wife received the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the highest civilian award bestowed by the United States, and in 2001 he was made an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE). Graham concluded his public career with a crusade in Queens, New York, in June 2005. Graham claimed to have preached in person to more people than anyone else in history, an assertion that few would challenge. His evangelical crusades around the world, his television appearances and radio broadcasts, his friendships with presidents, and his unofficial role as spokesman for America’s evangelicals made him one of the most recognized religious figures of the 20th century.

What Is Life’s Ultimate Good

Dear Dan, I agree; any view that has God as the foundation of morality — like the Christian view I described in my last letter — will have further, serious issues to address. In fact, your two objections get at the most central ones. Let me respond to both. What Makes God’s Laws Good? Your first objection has a great pedigree and can be traced all the way back to Plato. Namely, what makes God’s moral laws — his moral values — good? Does he like these laws because they are good? Or are they good because he likes them? Either way seems to spell trouble for Christianity. Take the first option. Are God’s laws good because they meet some separate standard of good, one “outside” of God? If so, God has to defer to — is beholden to — some higher authority. And that’s impossible, according to Christianity. But the alternative seems just as bad. If God’s laws are good because he likes them, it makes morality seem arbitrary, dependent merely on his personal tastes or whims. After all, what if he had preferred things like murder, rape, and torture? Would these therefore be good? Do we really want to define “good” as “what God likes,” similar to the way “coolness” is just whatever the cool kids like? Wouldn’t this rob statements like “God is good” of all significance, reducing them to saying merely that “God is the way he is”? Again, neither choice looks very promising. So, which horn of the dilemma should the Christian choose? Goodness Is Godness I think the second option is the right one: God’s laws are good because he likes them. That is, anything that God likes or values is good by definition. Goodness just is Godness. So then, is the phrase “God is good” nothing but an empty tautology, saying no more than “God is God”? “Anything that God likes or values is good by definition. Goodness just is Godness.” Well, no. In this specific context, where we’re defining “good,” “God is good” tells us something informative — namely, that God’s values are what make things morally good. But in most other contexts, when we say, “God is good” we can generally take for granted which properties or characteristics go on the “good” list. In these ordinary cases, “God is good” expresses something different — for example, “Here’s what God is like: he hates lying, murder, stealing — things we all agree are bad.” But then, if goodness is defined as whatever God likes, doesn’t my view mean that murder and rape would have been good if God had liked them? In a sense, perhaps; at least their advocacy would have been included in his moral laws. But remember that we’re currently defining “good,” and I think some of the rhetorical force of the wouldn’t-rape-therefore-be-good objection comes from ignoring this context. After all, it seems that regardless of what we say ultimately “makes” something good, if that “good-maker” were different, good would be different. And in any case, the traditional Christian view of God holds that he couldn’t have liked these things, that it’s logically impossible for God to be different than he is, just as a square couldn’t fail to have four equal sides. It turns out, therefore, that things aren’t as nearly as bad as the objection initially implied. Why Follow God’s Moral Law? Then there’s your second objection: why should we follow God’s laws? Is it because, if we don’t, he’ll submit us to everlasting punishment? Should we follow God’s laws simply to avoid pain? Does it turn out, after all, that morality is merely a matter of might makes right? Well, I think Christians should acknowledge that avoiding pain and suffering is a good reason to follow God’s moral laws. Moreover, I concede that this would be a genuine problem — if this were the only reason for obeying God. And as I said, even this reason isn’t without its virtues. After all, if we think of God as a parent — which the Bible encourages us to do — it’s a perfectly good reason, morally as well as rationally. As children we often obeyed our parents, in part, to avoid discipline. In fact, this was the reason for discipline in the first place — to help motivate us to obey. But of course, our obedience wasn’t merely motivated by a fear of discipline. We also obeyed our parents because we loved and trusted them. We knew that their requirements were an integral part of their deep love and affection for us, that they gave us these rules to benefit us. Their laws were evidence of our parents’ love. This interweaving of love and law, this close relation between our love for our parents, their love for us, and their moral values (that is, their moral loves) usually resulted in us adopting their morals; their values naturally became our values. We liked these values. And it didn’t stop with moral values; we sometimes adopted our parents’ values about sports teams, movies, and music — again, sometimes simply because we loved them. So, according to my view, we ought to follow God’s laws because, ultimately, we want to — and the main reason we want to is that we love him. In this way, morality is ultimately personal and grounded in what we love. Meaning of Life The personal aspect of value isn’t limited to moral value; it’s a component of all value, including life’s ultimate value. What we might call life’s ultimate meaning or purpose is perhaps the most important topic of all. So, what is our ultimate value, meaning, purpose, or goal in life? Well, suppose you’re right that there’s no God. The meaning of life, then, would be like all value in a godless cosmos: subjective and relative. And because each person has his own values, there would be as many meanings of life as there are persons. In such a world, there would be no objective meaning that life has. But according to Christianity, humans have been made for something, for a purpose. Moreover, this purpose does not depend on us, and so, in this sense, it’s objective, human-independent. And because we were designed for a specific purpose, humans will only truly flourish and thrive by fulfilling this purpose. Fulfilling God’s purpose for us is life’s ultimate meaning. That doesn’t mean that, in a world without God, humans could not find some measure of meaning or value in things like family, work, art, gardening, or whatever. But unless these individual goods are put into the context of the much larger, overall purpose, they will never be as meaningful (to us) as they could be. Only by fulfilling this ultimate purpose is our meaning of life maximized. What Are Humans For? What is this larger context or purpose? What were we made for? We find a hint by noticing that, for many of us, relationships and community are what we most value, where we find our greatest fulfillment. We flourish best in community with people we love. And this fact is entirely in line with the Christian view that our ultimate purpose is to know and love the ultimate Person, God himself. Christianity is of one voice on this. As one famous confession says, our ultimate purpose “is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Indeed, God is a loving relationship, as odd as that sounds. The mysterious doctrine of the Trinity says that the Godhead is an intimate community of three (divine) persons. That’s what he is. (This is one reason why monistic religions can’t truly make sense of the view that God is love: Who was God loving before he created persons other than himself? Such a being couldn’t essentially be love; at best, he would need creatures in order to love.) “Our ultimate purpose is to know and love the ultimate Person, God himself.” Notice that the centrality of relationships is also evident when Jesus sums up all of God’s laws in just two: love God and love your neighbor. The moral law — and, not coincidentally, life’s ultimate meaning — is about relationships, both human and divine. God, then, created humans for his own purpose. Our purpose — the meaning of life — is also importantly objective, just as morality is: it is human-independent. Yet it’s obvious that we can and do reject God’s purpose for us. In fact, the gospel message — and the entire Bible — is predicated on such rejection. But God has given us another chance to truly flourish, to find ultimate meaning through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He has made this possible at an immense cost to himself. Dan, I get why you would reject Christianity, viewing it as you do from the outside. I hope you’ll continue to consider all this and at least begin to sense that genuine atheism might be a lot different from your current “kinder, gentler” version. I also hope that in the process you’ll reconsider Christianity’s claims — in particular, Jesus’s offering of himself and the relationship you were made for. Article by Mitch Stokes