Think Theology

Thabiti Anyabwile has written a brief review of Iain Murray’s new book, Life of Arthur W Pink. I have not had the chance to read Murray’s biography of Pink, but I really appreciated what Anyabwile wrote. Arthur Pink was raised in a Christian home and later rejected the Christian faith to join the occult. Several years later He came to know Christ and joyfully received the gospel. Anyabwile encouragingly points out that Pink’s testimony is a great encouragement for parents who may have children that were raised in the church but are not serving God. In fact, he writes,

“I thought of this anecdote from Pink’s life because I know a lot of parents worry about the eternal prospects of adult children who appear spiritually dead.  Take heart: God the Holy Spirit may use a choice word spoken in passing to wrestle the wretch into an awakening that leads to everlasting life, fruitfulness and glory.  Pray and speak.  The Lord is at work.”

Like Anyabwile, Pink has been extremely influential in my life. His devotion to Christ and 20th century “puritism” have challenged me greatly. Now, his biography encourages me to encourage parents!

Justin Taylor has recently provided David Powlison’s answers to fifteen important questions related to Christian counseling. I’ve found them extremely helpful, wise, and biblically saturated. If you have an interest in providing Godly counsel and understanding the human heart, I’d encourage you to read through the following links. These questions are taken from Powlison’s essay “I Am Motivated When I Feel Desire” from Seeing With New Eyes: Counseling and the Human Condition Through the Lens of Scripture. The questions are links are as follows:

1. What’s Wrong with People?
2. Why Do People Do Specific Ungodly Things?
3. What’s Wrong with Wanting Good Things?
4. Why Do Our Desires Deceive Us?
5. Is “Lusts of the Flesh” Terminology Practical?
6. Does Each Person Have One “Root Sin”?
7. How Do I Know If a Desire Is Inordinate Rather than Natural?
8. Why Talk about the “Heart” When the Bible Says It’s Unknowable?
9. Doesn’t the Term “Lusts” Just Apply to Bodily Appetites?
10. Can Desires Be Habitual?
11. What’s the Relationship between Fear and Desire?
12. Do We Ever Have Conflicting Motives?
13. “Lusts” and Other Ways of Talking about Sin
14. Should We Just Confront People about Their Sinful Cravings?
15. Can You Change What You Want?

Each of these questions, and the answers provided, will help your understanding of the human heart and will, in turn, help you provide biblical wisdom for those in need of help!

Brian Croft provides excellent advice for parents who desire to pastor their children – How can I make sure I am individually shepherding my children? Those who know me will sense that my heart is very similar to Croft’s. In fact, he writes, “I fear many pastors are laboring hard to shepherd the church to the neglect of their family.” From my experience, I’d agree. There have been some very effective pastors in my life who have failed to shepherd their children. The generalizations about PK’s (Pastor’s Kid) is evidence enough! So let’s take Croft’s advice seriously. I’ve taken the liberty to provide the entirety of his suggestions, which are practical ways to pastor your children in accompaniment of regular family worship:

1)  Monday through Thursday each child gets a day and on his or her appointed day stays up 30 – 45 minutes later than their siblings to meet with me before bedtime.  I thought they would be excited about it for a few times, but then grow bored with it.  Not so.  Years later, they look forward to that time more than anything, which provides a natural accountability when you are tired from the day and are tempted to skip for that evening.

2)  We read the passage I am preaching for that week, discuss it a bit, then we read a chapter from a book they have chosen to read.  At the end, I take time to ask them how they are doing and how I can pray for them.  This is a great way to see how they are really doing and teach them what are good things to be praying for others.  Then, I pray for them and take them to bed.

3)  One of the greatest joys to my wife is her watching my effort with our children and lead our family in this way.  The last thing she feels is left out (just in case you were thinking that).  Our wives’ desire for us to make regular, deliberate, spiritually meaningful efforts to care for our children will mean more to her than I think we realize or understand.  I find this especially true for our wives who are stay at home moms who labor hard in this task of shepherding their little hearts all day with little break.

4)  My efforts with my children have put me in a position to challenge other men in my church to do something similar.  It has been amazing the way our fathers in our church have embraced this and the way it has empowered many of them to see they can spiritually lead their families with deliberate efforts.  Fellow pastors, the obvious needs to be acknowledged that you cannot challenge the men in your church to do anything you are not making a faithful effort at.  Regularly and individually shepherding your children’s hearts is certainly one of those efforts that we must model for the men in our local church.  Their failure to do it could be a reflection of your failure to model it.

Last night I taught on the subject of Creation for a class I’m teaching on Systematic Theology. I tried to responsibly introduce the students to the various theories regarding Creation, from the literal 24-hour day theory to the abandoned spontaneous generation theory. We discussed a bit about evolution and immediate and mediate creation and a few other significant topics.

I also revealed my cards a bit. I informed them that I currently hold to Genesis 1 describing literal 24-hour days, I also am finding myself more in line with the Literary Framework view, as I tend to see Genesis 1 as both “literal” and “literary.” I haven’t come down as a hardliner in those areas yet, but I’m enjoying my study.

That being said, I have an interesting book that I’ve been working through – Coming to Grips with Genesis. The book advocates young earth creationism and interacts with scholars and theologians from other perspectives. In it, on page 128, I find the following three principles of interest:

1. While all truth is God’s truth, not all truth is revealed truth and not all statements that claim to be truth are actually true
2. Revealed truth is certain, while non-revealed truth claims can often be wrong and are subjective to change. For example, the content of Genesis 1-2 is absolutely certain by virtue of it being divinely revealed truth, while scientific theories of origins are tentative at best.
3. Revealed truth should help to interpret non-revealed truth/knowledge. For example, the certain contents of Genesis 1-2 should be used to validate or invalidate the tentative scientific theories on origins.

What do you think of these three principles? Are they helpful or misleading? Do you agree that “scientific theories of origins are tentative at best”? Can such language be helpful for Christians are harmful for apologetic interaction? Or is it helpful for Christians and in discussions with non-believers? Does such guidelines cause an unnecessary divide between special revelation and general revelation or knowledge obtained by human learning? Or do we need to maintain that divide in order to keep our emphasis on the uniqueness and sufficiency of Scripture?

Paul gave the Corinthians an imperative when he wrote, “Let a person examine himself.” I continue to consider self-examination (see previous post, How am “I” doing). Karl Graustein, author of Growing Up Christian, provides helpful questions for young believers to consider, based upon 2 Cor. 13. He suggests we ask the following:

Do you pray? What do you pray about?
Do you read the Bible? Do you enjoy reading your Bible? Do you experience God teaching you when you read your Bible?
Do you worship God? Why do you worship?
Do you think about God? What aspects of God do you think about?
Do you confess your sin to God?

Your Motives
Why do you pray?
Why do you read your Bible?
Why do you go to church?
Why do you attend youth meetings?
What do you think about in times of corporate worship?
Why do you do good works?
Why do you acknowledge sin in your life?
Why do you obey your parents?

Your Relationships
Do you talk about God with your friends?
Do you tell non-Christians about your faith?
Do you have a good relationship with your parents?
Do you enjoy spending time with true Christians?
Do you desire to serve others?

I think these questions are excellent, and I’d encourage you to take a look at them and consider answering them! Perhaps God will use them to help you examine yourself and seek Him for help in making some changes!

Within the spectrum of Old Testament scholarship, the majority of non-evangelical scholars are advocates of the Documentary Hypothesis. This theory states that the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) was not written completely by Moses but by different post-Mosaic authors.  The theory suggests that these authors are determined by the usage of different Hebrew words within the specific books of the Pentateuch. The suggested authors are the Jehovist, the Elohist, the Priestly, and the Deuteronomist, which is why the Documentary Hypothesis is also refered to as the JEDP theory. Thus, the supposed authors are known as the Jehovist, the Elohist, the Priestly, and the Deuteronomist. Since Moses’ death is dated around 1451 B.C.,  it is important to mention that this view proposes that the last parts of the Pentateuch were completed in the 5th century B.C., meaning that the composition of the Torah took nearly 1,000 years! This theory, and I want to emphasize that this is a theory, is quite influential within Old Testament scholarship.

Perhaps the best response to this view has been proposed by Dr. Duane Garrett of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in his Rethinking Genesis. I find myself turning to this quite often when studying transmission theory and the study of Genesis (and the Pentateuch).
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“Our need for community is more and more obvious today. The breakdown of the traditional family and the desire to be part of something greater than ourselves are motivating many disciples to get reconnected. We’re remembering that God himself is the ultimate three-in-one community: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Many of us have been following the bonsai way by default simply by settling for community life that is small and shallow. But all over our culture, shallow pots are beginning to shatter against the Rock.” – Eric Sandras, Buck Naked Faith: A Brutally Honest Look at Stunted Christianity, p. 49.

Lexicons are a great tool for studying your bible. A lexicon provides insight on specific words such as the form and meaning of words (or phrases) and will often provide specific details regarding the relationship between other words. A lexicon will provide dictionary definitions for each word and will then relate each word to its New Testament usage. Lexicons are an incredible help when one is studying the Bible, specifically when doing so in regards to the original languages.

But lexicons can also cause a lot of bad theology if someone doesn’t know how to use them properly or if they are used in a way that bypasses their function.

Here’s why – words often have a wide range of meaning. For instance, the English word “sentence” can refer to a grammatical unit of words (e.g., “I used eight words to make up one sentence”) or it can also be used in regards to a judicial judgment (e.g., “The judged handed out a very lenient sentence on the defendant”) and it can be either a verb (e.g., “I sentence you to thirty years in prison”) or a noun (e.g., “Write me a sentence”). The same is true for other languages, and in our case, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.
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In The Hermeneutical Spiral, Grant Osborne writes of nine semantic fallacies. Semantics, determining specific word meanings, is a large part of exegesis, and for many, the process of doing basic bible study. We often hear of “word studies” that bring light upon passages of Scripture, and many bible students have provided the “background” information on a specific Hebrew or Greek word that is helpful in aiding others to understanding the text. The problem, however, is that some of these methods are actually unhelpful because they risk destroying the author’s intended meaning of the text! Yet there are still many helpful ways to include word studies in our comprehension of a specific passage of the Bible. Perhaps these guidelines will help you in your study of the text. Osborne presents the following nine fallacies:

1. The lexical fallacy
2. The root fallacy
3. Misuse of Etymology
4. Misuse of subsequent meaning
5. The one-meaning fallacy
6. Misuse of parallels
7. The disjunctive fallacy
8. The word fallacy
9. Ignoring the context

I’m going to briefly go through each of these nine fallacies and then provide both my thoughts and examples. What’s your favorite “word study” that has been influential in your life?

I’m preaching through the book of Haggai for the next four weeks. Today we started chapter 1 (audio here). We’re going to study each of the four prophetic messages that Haggai gave to Israel, but let’s talk background for a minute – the background for the book of Haggai, the tenth of the Minor Prophets. We’ll start in the sixth century BC. From 597BC until 538, all the Jewish people were captured by the Babylonians and taken from their homes. When the Babylonians came into the land of Israel, not only did they kill many Jewish people and take them as captives, they destroyed the most important and sacred place for the Jewish people – their temple!

It was approximately 70 years that the Jews were in Babylon (i.e., there were no Jews in Israel; Israel was not a sovereign nation). While in Babylon, the Jewish people were treated as slaves and quickly got sucked into worshiping Babylonian gods. It was a time of great distress and turmoil for God’s people. There was very little worship occurring for the one true living God – Yahweh, the creator of the universe. Only a handful of people remembered God.
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One of the students, a Creationist, says, “We didn’t like, evolve from anything. That doesn’t make any sense. I mean, how can, like, an African American person evolve from a white person. We’re different skin.”

And Christians wonder why Evolutionists find Creationism to be ridiculous. Hmm. Wow.

Check this out: Elena Kagan and Partial-Birth Abortion. Despite Kagan’s deception, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG)  “could identify no circumstances under which this procedure . . . would be the only option to save the life or preserve the health of the woman.” You have to read the the link to find more evidence. Hmmm. She is going to be on the Supreme Court?!?!

This fall I plan to begin teaching and preaching through the Gospel of John. I must confess that I’m really excited to get into the fourth gospel in our NT canon. I spent 2009 working through it during my devotionals and found my appreciation for John enriched beyond my wildest dreams. Actually, my love for Jesus was enriched by John’s Gospel. It’s a pretty fantastic book.

So I’ve been working on preparing the sections that I’ll preach on. I’m trying to avoid two things:

1. Dragging on and on and exhausting my listeners with every technical detail that can be found in John’s gospel. D.A. Carson refers to this as “so focusing on the tree, indeed on the third knot of the fourth branch from the bottom of the sixth tree from the left, that the entire forest remains unseen, except perhaps as a vague and ominous challenge” (pp.100-101).
2. Moving too quickly. There is no way that I could consciously do justice to John’s contribution to the Church by taking four weeks or even two months to cover it. There’s just simply too much there! But we live in a “happy mean” culture that likes things quickly and easily, so the temptation to satisfy the flesh is there.

By God’s grace we will avoid both of these errors. Here’s what I’ve got thus far. Your suggestions are welcome!

• John 1:1-18
• John 1:19-34
• John 1:35-51
• John 2:1-12
• John 2:13-22
• John 3:1-21
• John 3:22-36
• John 4:1-45 (not sure how we’re going to break this section up. one sermon? two sermons? three sermons?)
• John 4:46-54

The process has been interesting. You can’t always trust the chapter divisions or even the pericope divisions! I’m concerned about the majority of chapter 4 because the whole story is so dependent upon the context. I don’t really see how we can break it up without losing the thrust of the redemption narrative. But there’s a lot there too.

On a side note, we’re going to actually play the specific section that we’re teaching on from the Gospel of John DVD. I think this will prove helpful for the audience. The visuals will, in my opinion, be quite helpful.

The Apostle Peter advised his readers that, in expectation for the eschatological, they should have “lives of holiness and godliness” (2 Pet. 3:11). Throughout the Scriptures, believers are to be marked by holiness (cf. Lev. 19:2; 20:26; 22:32-34; 1 Thess. 4:3-7; 2 Cor. 7:1; Eph. 4:20-24; Heb. 12:10, 14). Regardless of what culture has deemed the standard of holiness, we are commanded time and time again, in the pages of Scripture, to flee from immorality and to pursue godliness. Society and modern church pragmatics won’t be able to overthrow this high calling. And if you think about it, this calling is both demanding and discouraging. Why? Allow me to explain.

First, I find the call to be holy extremely demanding for one reason – I’m a sinner. So it’s demanding to think that my sin is being called into account. And what’s more demanding is that my sinful nature actually wants to fulfill this demand on it’s own, apart from the Spirit. So I have to constantly fight against my flesh and my natural desire for a self-righteous fulfillment of this calling. Secondly, it’s discouraging to think that the goal is so far from being experienced! Just this morning I was reflecting upon my shortcomings sin. See, there it goes again. I’d rather call it “shortcomings” than “sin” because “shortcomings” sounds so much more politically correct! But no, my “struggles” are not anything short of sin. They are defiance to God and in need of atonement.
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“He who sincerely prefers God to all other things in his heart will do it in his practice. For when God and all other things come to stand in completion, that is the proper trial what a man chooses; and the manner of acting in such cases must certainly determine what the choice is in all free agents, or those who act on choice. Therefore there is no sign of sincerity so much insisted on in the Bible as this, that we deny ourselves, sell all, forsake the world, take up the cross, and follow Christ withersoever he goeth. Therefore, so run, not as uncertainly; so fight, not as those that beat the air; but keep under your bodies, and bring them into subjection. Act not as though you counted yourselves to have apprehended; but this one thing do, “forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark of the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13-14). “And besides this, giving diligence, add to your faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge; and to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; and to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity. For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 15, etc.).” – Jonathan Edwards, God the Best Portion of the Christian

Ask Doug: American Flag and the Pledge of Allegiance in Church? from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

Yesterday morning I shared a brief message on the first section of Psalm 103 (audio here). It was really just a short devotional, but I believe God really spoke to me through the Psalm. The text spoke to me probably because it was Father’s Day and because I was struggling with teaching on the subject I’d previously been preparing for. The short of it was that I was praying and felt led in a different direction. The long is that I had prepared another message and had enough time to really meditate on the psalm and sensed it would be more useful for building up the congregation.

But back to thinking about God the Father in this text. You see, David wrote, “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him” (v.13). I always find myself reflecting on God during Father’s Day, largely due to my appreciation for Jesus’ teaching on prayer (the “Lord’s” prayer) in that He encouraged His followers to call upon our heavenly Father, along with Ps. 68:5′s reminder that God is a Father to the fatherless. We can’t proclaim this enough: God is a Father to His children. And not just any father, He is the Father and a perfect Father at that!
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Luke G. provoked some good discussion this past week on facebook by bringing up the death penalty. Should Christians be in favor of it? Is it unbiblical to be against it? How do justice and mercy work out when it comes to how individuals and governments deal with serious crimes? This article by John Piper helped me to meditate on the topic with some Biblical examples in mind.

“Athanasius showed us that sometimes it is not right to compromise – when core theology is at stake. There are matters of ego and nonessentials on which it is proper and Christian for us to compromise. But when the heart of the gospel is at stake, it is time to be like Athanasius and refuse to bend, even when we are criticized for not being a “team player.”

At several key points in the long debate, Arians and semi-Arians (even some believers who were otherwise orthodox but confused) tried to get Athanasius and others to find middle ground between homoousios (Jesus is of the same nature and being as the Father) and homoiousios (Jesus is of a similar nature to the Father’s). More often they simply proposed the later, homoiousios, as a compromise between the two parties, Arians and orthodox. Athanasius consistently refused to consider compromise. He rightly insisted that to say Jesus was of a “similar” nature to the Father or anything shor tof the “same” nature as the Father was to fail to accept Jesus as fully God. And only if Jesus was and is fully God can we have assurance that we are saved. Any being other than God is incapable of saving us – which would mean that if Jesus was not fully God, we would still be in our sins and on the road to damnation.

This is how Athanasius saved the faith of the church. Without his flint-like determination, Christianity might have become a little, obscure sect of Greek philosophy, lost in the mists of time. Or we would still be worshiping Jesus among a variety of other minor gods, with the Father viewed as a distant, inaccessible deity.” – Gerald R. McDermott, The Great Theologians (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010), p. 45 (emphasis original).

Tim Chester provides some notes from a lecture that was given by Duncan Forbes (Part 1 and Part 2), who summarizes why we need to preach the sovereignty of God in deprived areas by stating that,

1. God is in charge

2. God is in control of both good and bad things

3. God has sovereignly arranged deprived neighbourhoods for our benefit

4. Nothing can stop God accomplishing his purpose

5. God is in control of our physical safety

6. God is in control of who gets saved

“The hermeneutical enterprise also has three levels… We begin with a third-person approach, asking “what it meant” (exegesis), then passing to a first-person approach, querying “what it means for me” (devotional), and finally taking a second-person approach, seeking “how to share with you what it means to me” (sermonic). When we try only one and ignore the others, we end up with a false message. Those who take only a third-person approach are seminary profs with their heads in the clouds, speaking to no one but their own kind. Those who take only a first-person approach are subjective and living in a monastery, with God’s Word relative only for themselves. Those who take only a second-person approach are also subjective but use the Bible as a club, always challenging everyone but themselves. We must study Scripture with all three in the order presented, always seeking the passage’s meaning then applying it first to ourselves and then sharing it with others.” – Grant Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral, p. 22

Do you follow Osborne’s point here? He breaks down the three steps in the overall profess of hermeneutics to be related to (1) what the historic author intended, (2) what it means for the student, and (3) how it applies for others. This is a good reminder.

I find myself reading a lot of technical commentaries and scholarly works that often fall into category #1. More often than not, this has a rich affect upon area #2 for me. But it is often difficult to move from #’s 1 and 2 towards #3. What often seems so important for me is difficult to communicate into the lives of others who are in different situations in life.

Yet Osborne is also helpful in what he writes just before this. He states that, “hermeneutics when utilized to interpret Scripture is a spiritual act, depending on the leading of the Holy Spirit… We must depend on God and not just on humanly derived hermeneutical principles when studying the Bible” (Ibid.).

Let’s summarize this process:

1. We study the ancient text rigorously while using outside resources to help us determine the author’s intent. What was that specific author intending to communicate to his readers? What insights can we grasp from the cultural practices of that author’s day? How would his readers understand certain words and idioms, etc.
2. Once we determine the original meaning of the text, how does it find application in my life. How should I respond to the message of the text? How does it challenge my thinking, feelings, and actions?
3. Why is this important for other believers that God has placed in my life? What illustrations can I use to emphasize the importance (consequences) of applying this to my life (or not). In other words, what’s the point and why should others care?
4. We need the Holy Spirit to be actively involved in every step of the process, or it is futile. Without the Spirit’s illumination, we are left empty and without an exegetical or expository “power” that enables us to both understand the text, apply the text, and proclaim the text.

I’m left sensing the need to meditate on this reality. How about you?

In Grudem’s Systematic Theology (pp. 572-4), he provides four areas that Jesus experienced pain in the crucifixion:

(1) Physical Pain and Death
(2) The Pain of Bearing Sin
(3) Abandonment
(4) Bearing the Wrath of God

Which of these four areas strikes you as more overwhelming to consider?

In the past five years I’ve had an opportunity to make a few observations about how Christian parents raise their children (toddlers to teenagers). These observations have been made within the context of a local congregation and as I’ve visited other congregations too. I’ve seen some parents make a huge deal about the necessity of having a youth program (based largely on how “bad” it is in the world). Surprisingly, these same people never seem to show up, nor do they have their teens attend! Some parents insist that teen gatherings need to be a lot about worship and encountering God, but the understanding is that this occurs by having really loud worship music that is rock based (or whatever other trendy style of music is currently popular). Other parents think children & youth ministry is all about games and fun. These parents tend to believe that a youth ministry is in competition with everything that the world has to offer (sex, drugs, rock & roll), so if the teens don’t have football and basketball and video games and food, they don’t need to attend. After all, teenagers are only motivated for fun (or so goes the thinking).

But I’m pretty sure these views fail to grasp some significant biblical principles. Chester and Timmis are helpful when the write,

“Take a group of hormonal teenagers, put them all together in one space, and then wind them up with energetic games. It is not very realistic to expect them then to listen to a Bible talk! It is easy to suppose that attractive activities are the key to successful youth work. It is easy to suppose that the corresponding measure of success is weekly attendance. But God does his work through his word. The key to successful youth work is the Bible. This is how God does his work in young people. And the measure of success is not attendance but gospel fruit in their lives.” – Total Church, p. 184

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“Although trying to cool their ardor for congregational tongues-speaking, Paul does not disparage the gift itself; rather, he seeks to put it in its rightful place. Positively, he says three things about speaking in tongues, which are best understood in light of the further discussion on prayer and praise in vv. 13-17: (1) Such a person is “speaking to God,” that is, he or she is communing with God by the Spirit. Although it is quite common in Pentecostal groups to refer to a “message in tongues,” there seems to be no evidence in Paul for such terminology. The tongues-speaker is not addressing fellow believers by God (cf. vv. 13-14, 28), meaning therefore that Paul understands the phenomenon basically to be prayer and praise.” – Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT), p. 656, emphasis mine.

This is a significant statement by one of the premier NT scholars in the world. Why? Because Fee is not only a considerable NT scholar but a Pentecostal as well! Fee is helpful here because many Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians tend to see tongues as either communication between God and man (when uninterpreted) or communication  between man and man (when interpreted).We are told by some Pentecostals that there are multiple functions to the gift of tongues: (1) tongues as the “sign” or “evidence” of the “Baptism of the Holy Spirit,” (2) one’s personal “prayer language” that can occur both privately and corporately, and (3) a “public” tongue, which is interpreted for the congregation and is seen as a “message” to the church.

However, as Fee notes, the concept of a “public” tongue that is interpreted and then called a “message in tongues” seems to completely ignore what Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians. I tend to believe that it most likely stems from a misunderstanding of texts such as Acts 2:11, as well as several verses in 1 Cor. 14. The interpretation of tongues was never horizontal in it’s function within the NT corpus, meaning that tongues is presented in the NT as communication by the Spirit between man and God, not man to man. It follows that the interpretation of a tongue would communicate the same. The concept of a “tongue message” seems to be a later invention. In the New Testament, messages communicated to man by the Spirit for man are referred to as prophecy!

There are several problems with this “message in tongues” concept. It would seem to me that many tongues often go uninterpreted due to the simple fact that what many people consider to be an interpretation is not! Furthermore, when the gifts of the Holy Spirit are mislabeled it is easy to see how they can quickly become misunderstood and worship practices can quickly become based more upon subjective experiences than what is clarified in the Scriptures. Both of these issues raise many other practical issues that can eventually become harmful to the church.

I plan to lay out a strong biblical and theological presentation of the gift of tongues and interpretation soon. Until then, I find Fee’s statement very compelling!