Friday, February 01, 2013

Hindsight masquerading as foresight

Chafer DTS


I was taught by Reformed mentors in the faith to follow the literal grammatical historical method of interpretation of Scripture. I follow this through out the entire Bible or I try to. :) We cannot invent one line of interpretation for one part of Scripture to use and then change to a different one when it comes to the area of Bible prophecy. Otherwise the Bible can be turned to mean anything from a subjective standpoint. Those who deny Ezek 40 to 48 is a future temple with animal sacrifices basically violate the principle of the historical context of which that was written. People who first read this would have understood it as a future actual temple with animal sacrifices if we follow the historical context. If we followed your manner if it a person would never really know what Ezek 40 to 48 is teaching at all and left to the subjective perspective of the person rather than from an exegesis of it. When we formulate positions of passages it must be backed up by proper exposition or exegesis of Scripture otherwise we end up forcing ones own theological mode in to Scripture rather than drawing it from Scripture itself. That’s a real danger all too often found in cults like Jehovah Witnesses like what they do in their translation of John 1:1 as an example. We all should avoid falling in to one error such as the late Dr. George Ladd who claimed that Isa. 53 in it's historical context was NOT a prophecy of Jesus Christ and was made in to one by the New Testament as an example of one wants to claim the NT is the interpreter of the OT or supreme over it or even reinterprets the OT. Yet the OT and NT are equally Scripture and of equal authority one another.


You’re ironically unaware of how much you yourself are viewing Ezk 40-48 through the prism of the NT and your own position in church history. You know more than you’re supposed to know, if you’re hermeneutically consistent. Hindsight masquerading as foresight.

Try this thought-experiment. Put yourself in the situation of a Jewish exile in 6C BC Babylon. Imagine if you all you had to go by was Ezekiel, plus the OT canon up to that point. You didn’t have the NT. And you didn’t have any postexilic scriptures.

Based on that frame of reference, how would you conclude that this refers to a temple that won’t be built for at least 2500 years, during the church age, in-between the binding and loosing of Satan?

Feel free to show me how you derive that interpretation from the historical context, given the historical horizon of the original audience.

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