“Collected Writings on Scripture” by D.A. Carson

D.A. Carson is one of my favorite authors and speakers, so if this book review sound a bit biased it’s probably because it is.  Crossway isn’t paying me money to give a good book review, I’m just reviewing as I read.  I’m also going to say that D.A. Carson is one of the most brilliant theologians of our day and age and this book shows it. 

This book is a collection of essays and book reviews Carson has written during his career.  The book begins with essays on the Bible and answering the questions “What is the Bible?” and “How do we interpret it?”  It then moves to “Recent Developments in the Doctrines of Scripture” The next essay is “Unity and Diversity in the New Testament.”  This essay was one of my favorites because Carson really shows his love for the diverse church.  He shows there are some fundamental portions on the doctrine of scripture that all Christians need to affirm, but that we need not say one person is not a brother solely because they don’t agree with us completely. 

The fourth essay is “Redaction Criticism”: On the Legitimacy and Illegitimacy of a Literary Tool”  in which Carson critiques some of the more modern tools of interpreting scripture.  The final essay answers the questions whether or not the “Doctrine of Claritas Scripturae is still relevant today.”  In summary, the doctrine of Claritas Scripturae answers the question whether or not scripture is clear and understandable. 

The second section are book reviews that Carson has done throughout the years.  I would love to say more, but I have said too much already.  This book was challenging for me, but also freeing considering how much of the doctrine of scripture is being questioned.  This is a must read for any theologian studying the doctrine of the Bible.

A Literal Book?

I was sitting in the language lab here at school, waiting to tutor someone, when a friend of mine walked in.  Her class was using the resources here in the language lab to do research on a project.  She and I talked a little bit, but she had to get work done, so she started on it.  Another guy from her class walked in and sat next to her.  He was working on his stuff then out of the blue goes on a tangent on how he doesn’t believe Christians know what they are talking about when it comes to their religion and the history of it.

While normally I would have stepped in immediately and shot down his answer and told him what for my friend told him that she agreed that “Christians”, for the most part, practice christianity on the weekends and that they don’t know the history of their religion.  He thanked her for the clarification and said what he meant about the history, but he said that a lot of Christians literally take stories that were meant as parables.

He said that the Old Testament stories shouldn’t be taken as literal and that it was easier for him to take some stories in the New Testament as real, but the Old Testament definitely shouldn’t be taken as literal.  he said that the stories he was talking about were the stories of “Jonah and the Big Fish” and “Noah and the Ark.”  He said that those stories, because they came out of an oral culture, were more of exaggerated stories if they were real.  This brings me to the question I will be hopefully answering, Is the Bible a Literal Book?  Can we read the Bible, especially the Old Testament, and know that what we’re are reading actually happened and it’s not a made up story?

To begin with while the culture was an oral culture when Moses penned the Pentateuch, Moses wrote those books as divine inspiration or direct dictation from God.  So to question the authority of those first five books would be to question God’s exact words.  Another point is that 2 Timothy 3:16 says “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”  What was Paul talking about here?  Before you answer you have to remember that the New Testament was being written as Paul wrote, so what was Paul talking about?  He was talking about the Old Testament because that is all they had at the time as “Scripture.” 

Am I saying that the New Testament isn’t inspired?  Absolutely not, it is just as inspired as the Old Testament.  I am merely clarifying what Paul would have been talking about.  So if Paul said that the Old Testament was inspired we must unanimously agree with him in saying all of the stories and geneologies in the Old Testament were inspired by God.  If we say one part of the Old Testament is a fairy tale we can discredit the entire Old Testament.  If we do not believe one part of the Bible how can we agree on the Bible as a whole.  Yes, there are parts that we will disagree on, but to say that the Old Testament is “Just stories” and “Shouldn’t be taken literally” goes to show that Christians aren’t the only ones that need to work on their history and theology.