4 Biblical Theology and Hermeneutics Graeme Goldsworthy

Graeme Goldsworthy is a minister of the Anglican Church of Australia and has served in churches in Sydney and Brisbane. He lectured at Moore Theological College, Sydney, in Old Testament, Biblical Theology, and Hermeneutics. Now retired, he continues as a visiting lecturer at Moore College to teach a four th-year B.D. course in Evangelical Hermeneutics. He is the author of several books, including Preaching the Whole Bible As Christian Scripture: The Application of Biblical Theology to Expositor y Preaching (Eerdmans, 2000), According to Plan: The Unfolding Revelation of God in the Bible (InterVarsity, 2002), and Prayer And The Knowledge Of God: What The Whole Bible Teaches (InterVarsity, 2005). Introduction I have found that many Christians have as their fi rst or main question to put to any passage of the Bible, “What does it tell us about ourselves?” They might sometimes start with, “What does it tell us about God?” But that soon takes second place to the more self-indulgent questions. This may, of course, be generated by a commendable conviction that the Scriptures are practical, and by a desire to live lives that are pleasing to God. Or it may be a habit born from the correct perception that the Scriptures are indeed God’s way of teaching us about ourselves. But the perspective or main focus is back-to-front. Such an approach usually fails to ask exactly how it is that God uses Scripture to teach us about ourselves. Is it by law or by gospel? When Jesus referred to the Scriptures of the Old Testament he said of Moses, “he wrote about me.” He said of the Scriptures as a whole, “they testify of me.” His main concern was to show the disciples the things concerning himself (Luke 24:25-27, 44), so that his emphasis was that the Scriptures are fi rst and foremost about him. And this emphasis is linked with Jesus opening their minds to understand the Scriptures (v. 45). Why is our emphasis often so different? It needs to be said at the outset that the Bible does indeed tell us a lot about ourselves. In fact, it is the only reality check that is available to us in ultimate terms. The hermeneutic question for us all, however, is “how does it speak of us and how do we receive instruction for living from it?” When Paul wrote to Timothy saying, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profi table for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work,” (2 Tim 3:16-17) he pointed to the pastoral-doctrinal signifi cance of Scripture. But behind this statement is Paul’s whole understanding of the role of Jesus Christ as the mediator of salvation, a principle he expresses in 1 Tim 2:5, “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”2 Put simply, the issue is one of how we read Scripture as the means of knowing what is in life and how we should seek to live it. The hermeneutic problem lies in the gap between the modern Christian and the ancient text. This is especially obvious when we deal with Old Testament texts, but the New Testament also presents itself as a collection of ancient texts with a whole set of dynamics that are not part of our experience. In this article I want to explore some of the ways that the discipline of biblical theology can help us to cross the gap and to read any part of Scripture as God’s word to us.