Missing The Prophetic Forest For The Trees

Discussions of prophecy fulfillment often get overly focused on a certain aspect of a passage to the neglect of others. A lot of attention will be given to how to render verse 16 in Psalm 22, but other parts of the psalm that are significant will be ignored. Or whether verse 6 in Isaiah 9 is identifying the figure in the passage as God will be debated while other parts of the passage that are important don't get discussed.

I've argued elsewhere for a traditional Christian understanding of Psalm 22:16 and Isaiah 9:6, like here and here. I'm not discouraging people from doing that. But more than that ought to be done.

For one thing, the other parts of the passages (in Psalm 22, Isaiah 9, and other prophetic texts) are significant in themselves. See my post on the other aspects of Psalm 22 here and my collection of posts on Isaiah 9 here, for instance.

And the other parts of the passages provide evidence for how the verses that get more attention should be rendered. For example, the more the remainder of Psalm 22 seems to be referring to crucifixion, the more likely a reading of verse 16 that's consistent with crucifixion makes sense. And I've argued (here) that the references to animals in the surrounding verses make a reference to lions in verse 16 unlikely (which is relevant to whether verse 16 should be read as "like lions [they maul] my hands and feet" or something similar). As my post just linked explains, even a translation of verse 16 that refers to lions or uses a term like "dug" rather than "pierced" doesn't change the fact that a crucifixion makes the most sense of the psalm as a whole. If the description of what's done to the hands and feet is more poetic, metaphorical, or unclear, that lessens the evidential force somewhat. A term like "pierced" is more favorable to a Christian understanding. But the other renderings are consistent with crucifixion and don't change the fact that a reference to Jesus' crucifixion best explains the psalm as a whole.

A potential objection to my main point in this post is that looking at prophetic passages as a whole is often unfavorable to Christianity. Where's the eternal kingdom of peace referred to in Isaiah 9, for example? Or has everything described in Micah 4-5 occurred already? Isn't that evidence against a Christian view of these passages?

The Christian argument is that enough has been fulfilled to give us evidence for Christianity, not that everything has been fulfilled. A down payment has some significance, even though it doesn't involve full payment. If somebody predicts what will happen to you on a particular day, including some events that shouldn't be predictable by normal means, it's not much of a response to object in the afternoon that although the predictions up to that point in time have been fulfilled, the predictions about the evening haven't occurred yet. The fulfillments that have already occurred need to be addressed.

I've occasionally commented over the years about the neglect of the argument from prophecy. I think one of the reasons it's been so neglected is that people get overly focused on particular details within the passages and ignore or underestimate other details. So, the overall evidential value of the argument gets underestimated.