Lecture series on the Psalter

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnNXzYjQerJjLNpD_rBJhJTLqTl1QNzoI

Blessed or happy in Psalm 1

Bruce Waltke on translating the first word of Psalm 1 as "happy" or "blessed":

So the word "blessed" - what does that mean? Many moderns translate it "happy". I think that's inadequate. I don't think we have a word for it.

But I point out in Hebrew that there are two different words for "bless"...So you have barak which means "to bless", and then you have this word ashrei.

The word barak means "to be filled with the potency for life". It's the ability to reproduce. So that when God blessed the creation, it was to be fruitful and multiply. Now when you carry that over to the NT, Jesus blessed the disciples. He himself never married. He's not saying to them be fruitful and multiply physically, but be fruitful and multiply spiritually. It's a different form of the kingdom. So that's the word "to bless", barak.

Now the other "to bless" is ashrei. The word used here [in Psalm 1:1]. And that word ashrei means that you have a blessed destiny. It usually refers to the future. And that future, that blessed future, is based upon your present relationship with God. The blessed person when you use ashrei may be in deep trouble at the time...This is a quote from Eliphaz in the book of Job. This would be the Greek equivalent of ashrei - makarios. He says "Blessed is the one whom God corrects". We don't think a person who is being disciplined is particularly blessed, but that's a blessed person. "Blessed is the one whom God corrects, so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty, for he wounds, but he also binds up; he injures, but his hands also heal" [Job 5:17-18]. You have a blessed future. So be thankful that you're a blessed person because God is disciplining you to give you the celestial city. You see how that's different from the word "fill you with potency with life and victory"? It's a different word.

Or another illustration is from the Greek of the Beatitudes of Jesus. Who are the blessed? It's not the way we normally think of it. "Blessed - makarioi, plural - are those who mourn, for they will be comforted...Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you...Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven..." (Mt 5:4, 10-12). So the blessed person is a person who has this great reward in the future. That is not translated by "happy". It's totally inadequate for that. I agree the average person doesn't understand it always, but I think it carries more than just being happy.

One God or many gods?

Some liberal scholars think the OT contains residual traces of polytheism. Divergent theologies which the editors and redactors failed to expunge. For instance:  

One God or Many Gods? 

Several key passages in the Old Testament speak of Yahweh alone as God [Isa 44:6-20...Jer 10:1-16]...But...the Old Testament paints a more varied portrait of God..."Among the gods there is none like you, O Lord..." (Ps. 86:8)...[In] Joshua 24:2,1-15 Joshua is exhorting Israel to serve Yahweh alone. To serve him alone means not to serve other gods...The first commandment says not "There are no other gods" but "you shall have no other gods"... The way [that the second commandment] is phrased seems to imply that idols can be real rivals of Yahweh The Israelites of the exodus were... taking their first baby steps toward a knowledge of God... .At this point in the progress of redemption,... the gods of the surrounding nations are treated as real. Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 97-102.

Some Mormon apologists deploy similar arguments. Responding to Enns, Bruce Waltke said:

A more tenable explanation, I suggest, is that the first two commandments, which tacitly assume the existence of other gods, belong to the genre of religious commandments, whereas Moses' statement in Deut 4:39 ("there are no other gods")—not cited by Enns—and the monotheistic prophetic statements that he does cite, pertain to the genre of theological statements. The statements about other gods in the Psalms and inJosh 24, as well as in the first two commandments, pertain—so it seems to me—to the epistemological reality that people fabricate non-existent gods and fatuously worship them (cf. 1 Cor 8:4-6); the theological statements pertain to the ontological reality that other gods do not exist. In other words, the statements about other gods tacitly assume human depravity, not henotheism (i.e., the worship of only one God, while assuming the existence of others).

Moreover, Enns's interpretation opens the door both to a liberal definition of progressive revelation and to open theism. According to the liberal definition, "progressive revelation" refers to an evolutionary development of religion wherein earlier revelation is primitive and rudimentary and its teachings about divine reality and morals must be assessed and corrected by later revelation. Schleiermacher (1768-1834), an extreme example, places the OT on the same level as heathenism (Greek and Roman thought): "The Old Testament Scriptures do not . . . share the normative dignity or the inspiration of the New" (Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith [ET of 2d rev. ed. of 1830; ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928], section 132). The notion of progressive revelation, when defined in this way, is inconsistent with the doctrine that all Scripture is inspired of God. WTJ 71 (2009): 88-89.

Bruce Waltke on prayer and providence

Easter week, 1928, my dad, a roofer, fell five stories and was not expected to come out of his coma. Mother, however, believed God would spare him, as he had Daniel's three friends in the blazing furnace. God "remembered" her, as he had Hannah, and a year later I was conceived. 

One night, as a four-year-old lying in my crib, I saw an angel looking down on me–on the headboard, then suddenly on the footboard and, just a suddenly back again on the headboard, without flying. It was as real to me as the moon shining through my bedroom window, though I knew it was not physical property.

In college I majored in history and minored in Greek and philosophy. Confronted with the rationalists the likes of Voltaire and of Rousseau, I had to choose between revelation and reason as my chief source and test of knowing what was good (i.e. an enhanced life) or bad (i.e. diminished life). I resolved my epistemological crisis both by my heart and my mind.

After having been tried for three centuries, the Enlightenment in social and moral skills proved to be a colossal failure. The Enlightenment moved Western civilization from Greek virtues to Nietzsche's will for power. In its wake came Nazi genocide and ethnic cleansing. Geneticists, social scientists, and medical practitioners sometimes play God and kill unwanted human beings. Today no human life can be assured it is precious or safe. 

Let me begin my walk with God at seminary by sharing an amazing answer to prayer. Going to a non-denominational seminary is a risk. Unlike a denominational seminary, where the graduate is fitted like a cog into an ecclesiastical machine, a graduate of a non-denominational seminary has no job security. I saw Dallas graduates flounder like a fish out of water, never finding satisfying employment. So for the sake of financial security, I took my destiny into my own hands: I applied and was accepted to be inducted into the US army chaplaincy. I persuaded myself of the truth that being a chaplain was a noble calling. But I fear I was bastardizing that noble call, for I was entering to serve myself, not soldiers. On the Wednesday before I was to be sworn in, I received a letter from the army instructing me that I would be sworn in at Hensley field, an airbase nearby to Dallas, and to expect a telegram on Friday morning specifying the time. Thursday night cold sweat trickled down my spine, a sure sign of a bad conscience. I prayed earnestly that God would get me out of my conflicted mess. Friday morning I received a letter from the army: "all your papers are lost: start over again." I did not obey.

I was troubled by the Bible's inconsistencies. In second year Hebrew I encountered the first discrepancy that shook me. The apostle Peter argues from Ps 16:10 that David predicted the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth when he said: "You will not abandon me to the realm of the dead, nor will you let your faithful one see decay [Hebrew sahat]" (cf. Acts 2:29-31). Peter reasoned David cannot be speaking [of] himself but must be speaking of Messiah because David, not Jesus, saw decay. But the authoritative lexicographers, Brown, Driver, and Brigs, later confirmed in the authoritative lexicon, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, give as the only meaning of sahat "pit." In that case David does not speak of Messiah's resurrection but of his own momentary triumph over death. So I faced the dilemma of trusting Peter or the human authorities. I chose to trust Peter on account of both my epistemology that true revelation trumps human reason and my Spirit-given conviction that the apostles speak the truth. Years later, as a mature scholar in Hebrew, I cross-examined the lexical authorities and found them wanting. I demonstrated that sahat is a homonym that means either "pit" or "decay." With verbs of motion such as "descent" it means "pit"; with verbs of sense such as "see" it means "decay." [B. Waltke & J. Houston, The Psalms as Christian Worship: Hearing the Voices of the Psalmist and of the Church in Response (Eerdmans, 2010), 323-24n76.]

According to one of my garrulous Harvard professors, the department of Ancient Near Eastern Literatures and Languages Program debated my application for three hours; I was their first evangelical applicant. 

At Harvard I often found myself in courses having to learn from the unknown to the unknown. This was acutely so in Comparative Semitic Grammar, a course taught every three years. Consequently the third-year men had already studied most of the Semitic languages, but the ten men of my first-year class were only beginning to learn some of them. Nevertheless, the professor assumed we all knew all the languages. I took notes furiously, hoping later to make sense of them. The ten of us were all in the same boat: our notes made no sense. We decided to meet three times before the examination, hoping that our collective knowledge and insight would be better than one's own to make sense of them. The first two meetings were fruitless. The exam was on a Monday morning, and we agreed to meet for the third and last time on the preceding Saturday morning. As I pored over my notes that Friday night beforehand, I could not make sense of them. I prayed, arguing with God that he should not have brought me this far to wash me out. God in his grace heard my plea, and gave me insight into the unknown, which I gladly shared the next morning with my peers.

When I went through the Ishtar Gate at Babylon and saw the image of Marduk, the patron deity of Babylon, with his dragon-like head, lion-like torso covered with fish scales and his serpentine tail, I thought to myself: "No wonder Daniel had visions of incredible animals." Probably Moses, who had the finest education of his day, was familiar with other law codes of his world, including the Code of Hammurabi, and God used his education in formulating the law. 

Another problem I confronted during my universities days was the discrepancy between Exod 6:3: "the Lord did not make himself known to Abraham," and Gen 12:8: "Abraham called upon the name of the Lord." How could Abraham call on a name that had not been made known to him? At the time I did not have a resolution to the discrepancy, but my high view of Scripture does not depend upon my resolving all apparent discrepancies. Over thirty years later I resolved the discrepancy; I concurred with Eslinger that the Lord's statement in Exodus 6:3 meant he had not yet demonstrated that he was truly God by miraculous interventions, such as his awful plagues on Egypt that enabled the Exodus. [B. Walkte, An Old Testament Theology (Zondervan, 2007), 368.] B. Waltke, "Why I have Kept the Faith," I (Still) Believe: Leading Bible Scholars Share Their Stories of Faith and Scholarship (Zondervan 2015), chap. 18.

No honor among thieves

Critics of Westminster have made a big deal about how the board/administration (allegedly) mistreated Christ Fantuzzo and Doug Green. They insist that this isn't just an issue of hermeneutics, but ethics. How we treat people we disagree with. People come first. They accuse WTS of engaging in "political machinations" and the like. 

That's the rhetoric. In that regard, it's been revealing to see how the critics treat Bruce Waltke. Now, in general, you might think they'd view hin as a sympathetic figure. A fellow victim of the Reformed purges. He was pushed out of WTS, then pushed out of RTS, by the same faction that went after Enns, Green, and Fantuzzo. 

But it turns out that the critics have other priorities, and when crunch time comes, people are not the priority after all. It boils down to power politics.

You see, WTS is hosting a retirement party for Waltke. When the critics saw that, they saw an opening. They could accuse WTS of hypocrisy. Longman even has a full-blown conspiracy theory. He assures us that the retirement party is a decoy to throw people off the scent. 

However, for the critics to exploit this opportunity, they had to sacrifice Waltke. After all, since the party is in his honor, they can't attack the party without implicating Waltke. So Longman has indicated that Waltke is complicit in the diversionary tactic. He's an enabler of the wicked WTS regime.

The retirement party was just too tempting an opportunity for the critics to resist. So they treat Waltke like a pawn on their chessboard. To win, you must sometime sacrifice one of your own pieces to secure a positional or tactical advantage. And as the critics have now revealed, it's all about winning. Winning at any cost. 

To take advantage of this opening, they must do their best to discredit Waltke. It's striking to see how ruthless they are in pursuing their aims:

• 
  
  Pete Enns I hesitate to comment here, but for the record, BKW strongly and enthusiastically endorsed and backed I&I publicly and TO THE ADMINISTRATION when the book was released (6/05). He also spoke at my inauguration as full professor the following spring (3/06) and cited the book in his comments, and even at one point gently chiding WTS for not "taking the incarnation seriously enough" (i.e.,applying it to a doctrine of Scripture as I do in I&I). 
• By June of that year he had made a 180 degree about face without offering an explanation to me, only calling me to insist his name be removed from all endorsements at Baker and counseling me to "recant" or he would take proper steps with the administration (I refused, obviously). To this day I can only speculate why he made this sudden change--though I understand the dynamic perfectly. The reason he has given me and others since has never succeeded in laying to rest my profound disappointment.
  Yesterday at 9:07am · Edited · 1
• 
  Tremper Longman Yes, Pete I have never understood it either though I have tried to get an explanation from him. It was a dramatic and unexplained shift.
  Yesterday at 11:05am
• 
  DebeDave Harris But maybe you could comment briefly on this, Dr. Enns?
• "A theory that entails notions that holy Scripture contains flat out contradictions, ludicrous harmonization, earlier revelations that are misleading and/or less than truthful, and doctrines that are represented as based on historical fact, but in fact are based on fabricated history, in my judgment, is inconsistent with the doctrine that God inspired every word of holy Scripture."
• -- B. Waltke
• I'm not sure what you are alluding to when you say he called for you to "recant," but maybe you could hazard a guess? From my limited experience with Dr. Waltke, I gather he takes time to make up his mind about some things, but when he does, he is very firm.
  Yesterday at 11:07am
• 
  Tremper Longman I would say this that the point is that Bruce had made up his mind when he endorsed the book. I am assuming he did not do it mindlessly or without reading it or coming to a thoughtful conclusion. That is not Bruce's style. If that quote represents his mature reading of I and I he has unfortunately misunderstood it. He certainly misrepresents it.
  Yesterday at 11:13am · 1
• 
  Pete Enns I also responded in writing to Bruce's later views of the book.
  Yesterday at 11:56am
• 
  John Davis I would rather believe in Bruce Waltke's integrity that perhaps his initial public comments were based on a casual reading and confidence in a friend and colleague, whereas a careful reading led to his written comments.
  Yesterday at 12:10pm
• 
  Pete Enns I would have rather believed that, too.
  Yesterday at 12:35pm

https://www.facebook.com/tremper.longman?fref=ts

Waltke v. Enns

Since the present keruffle over Green and Fantuzzo has spilled over to Waltke and Enns, now is a good time to revisit Waltke's response to Enns. Waltke is a far superior scholar, who takes the time to exegete Enns's prooftexts in a way that Enns himself fails to do. And Waltke clearly has a higher view of Scripture. Keep in mind, too, that this exchange too place at a time when Enns was still feigning faith in the inerrancy of Scripture–a pose he quickly dropped after his departure from Westminster: 

http://peterennsonline.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/71.1.Waltke.Revisiting%20Inspiration%20and%20Incarnation.pdf

http://peterennsonline.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/71.1.Waltke.Response%20by%20Bruce%20Waltke.pdf

Tremper Longman's soap opera

A third part of this public relations campaign is the “retirement party” being giving by the seminary for Bruce Waltke who only taught at Westminster for five years and left in 1990 and, ironically, at least he told me at the time, at least in part because the conservative constituency was constantly harassing him for being too “liberal.” After all, Bruce does affirm evolution, has no problems with multiple Isaiahs, and doesn't think that Moses wrote every word of the Pentateuch. 

Anticipated future Posts:
A Retirement Party for Bruce Waltke, Really? I love Bruce, but this is pure political theatre and Bruce knows it… 

https://www.facebook.com/tremper.longman/posts/827196623966300?fref=nf

Several issues:

i) How does Longman know the retirement party from Waltke is part of a PR campaign?

ii) He accuses Waltke of colluding in the PR campaign. 

iii) He misrepresents Waltke's position, which is more qualified:

In my book An Old Testament Theology [hereafter AOTT] I resolve the tensions between biblical cosmology and science partly by the theory of theistic evolution; I remain open to multiple authors of Isaiah; I accept an exilic date for the final edition of Deuteronomy; and other matters.  WTJ 71 (2009), 116.

iv) Who schedules events like this at WTS? The board? The office of the president? Of is it lower down the pecking order?

v) It's deeply misleading to say he only taught there for 5 years. To my knowledge, he's been a visiting prof. at WTS for many years. 

vi) Given that there are some traces of liberalism in Waltke's theology, it may be inconsistent for WTS to host a retirement party for him on the heels of dismissing Enns, Green, and Fantuzzo. Suppose that's the case. What then? It's better to be inconsistently right than consistently wrong. The important issue is not the retirement party, which is ephemeral, but what prospective ministers of the gospel will be taught in the class room.

vii) I agree that there are some significant weaknesses in Waltke's theology. At the same time, Waltke has compensatory virtues that Enns, Green, and Fantuzzo do not. Waltke has produced a tremendous body of scholarship over the years, most of which is very useful to the church. The same cannot be said for the other three. Most of what Enns has published is destructive to the Christian faith. Green and Fantuzzo haven't made anything like the contributions to evangelical scholarship that Waltke has. In fairness, Fantuzzo's a young scholar. But that's why there's very little basis on which to compare Waltke with Green or Fantuzzo. 

Does Green publish so little because he has nothing original to contribute, or because he has something to hide? It's a bit suspicious. 

viii) Keep in mind that Waltke is clearly to the right of Enns. He's a sharp critic of Enns:

Moreover, Enns’s interpretation opens the door both to a liberal definition of progressive revelation and to open theism. According to the liberal definition, ‘‘progressive revelation’’ refers to an evolutionary development of religion wherein earlier revelation is primitive and rudimentary and its teachings about divine reality and morals must be assessed and corrected by later revelation. 

Enns earlier informs his readers that authors in Second Temple literature anchored their interpretations in what they knew to be right. This involved manipulating the text to suit their purposes. He suggests this is the interpretative method used in Matt 2:15. But I find that that interpretation depreciates a high regard for Scripture’s inspiration. 

Enns believes his theory of incarnation is consistent with Warfield’s concursive theory of inspiration. I do not. A theory that entails notions that holy Scripture contains flat out contradictions, ludicrous harmonization, earlier revelations that are misleading and/or less than truthful, and doctrines that are represented as based on historical fact, but in fact are based on fabricated history, in my judgment, is inconsistent with the doctrine that God inspired every word of holy Scripture. To be sure, the Scripture is fully human, but it is just as fully the Word of God, with whom there is no shadow of turning and who will not lie to or mislead his elect. WTJ 71 (2009): 89n7, 90, 94.

Apparently I put more weight on logic than does Enns. True, it remains an a priori of mine that doctrine is based on the conviction that God does not contradict himself; speak nonsense; represent as ostensive fact on the plot level (i.e., the human author’s representation of the event) what in fact is fiction on the story (i.e., ‘‘the event’’) level; and other human ‘‘mistakes.’’ Admittedly, I am not a professional systematic theologian nor a scholar of the Westminster Standards in particular, but if the Westminster divines thought that Scripture contains what is commonly understood as human error, why would they and how could they have defined God with respect to his revelation in Holy Scripture as ‘‘truth itself ’’ (WCF 1.4)? 

‘‘Tensions,’’ the balancing of opposing truths that prompt one to extend understanding to embrace both, do not trouble me. Paradoxes mirror the messiness of life and are the grist for profitable theological reflection. The Semites have a saying, with which I tend to agree: ‘‘You do not have truth until you have paradox.’’ Like most people, I seek to resolve tensions with the same unflinching honesty as Enns, while admitting that the finite mind can never come to infinite truth. But Enns’s approach generates tensions between the inspiration of the Bible by an inerrant Source and human foibles such as contradictions, mistaken teachings, semantic impertinence, and doctrines based on Qumran pesher and on sharp but inappropriate and unaccredited exegesis that is called pilpul in Talmudic hermeneutics. In Enns’s response he does not correct my statements that his book implies these foibles. 

Likewise, I do not accept Enn’s resolution of the tension by conceding the necessity of accepting what most regard as human error. When I encounter contradiction in a good writer, not just in the Bible, I retrace my steps to see where I went wrong in my interpretation. I do not go on feeling comfortable with nonsense. 

Typology assumes that redemptive history was in the mind of God from the beginning and that he designed the type to show that he is writing Israel’s redemptive history. The Antitype event fulfillment of the event type is just as much‘‘fulfillment’’as an intentional verbal prediction of an event that finds fulfillment in a later event. Typology assumes a high view of inspiration in that its fusion of the event horizons assumes God has a design for sacred history, and that that revealed history points to him as the Author of that story. 

It would be helpful if Enns would define more clearly what he means by ‘‘midrashically generated’’ stories. If he intends to blur the distinction between ‘‘history’’ and ‘‘fiction’’—as James Mitchner did in his historical novels—he needs to state clearly what is historical, as Mitchner did in some of his novels. In the case of The Da Vinci Code, it made a big difference to people whether Dan Brown accurately represented his alleged historical data in his foreword. For most, Brown’s ‘‘doctrine’’ of Christ stands or falls on that issue. Note that the apostles argue at numerous points that they are writing real history, not myths in the sense of fictions, so evidently the distinction was important to them, not just to moderns. Elsewhere, Enns uses the word ‘‘Midrash’’ to refer to what moderns think of as specious argumentation; is that what he means by ‘‘midrashically generated’’? 

Enns takes us beyond diversity. His alleged entailments of his interpretation of the model of incarnational inspiration include—at least so it seems to me—such human foibles as contradictions, mis- taken teachings in earlier revelation, and building doctrines on pesher, arbitrary interpretations, and he does not correct me. These assertions go beyond mere tensions and call into question the cogency of the biblical writers, the inerrancy of the Bible’s Source, and the infallibility of the divine/human texts. WTJ 71 (2009), 115-116,125-127.

Against the Gods

John Currid's new book, Against the Gods, has been receiving some buzz. It's largely in response to recent views on the evangelical left regarding the OT and comparative mythology. In general, I think Currid's book is an excellent corrective.

I have a few reservations. Although his position on the birth of Moses is defensible, I also think it's unnecessary. But my major disappointment is with his handling of the Enuma Elish. Here I prefer John Oswalt's treatment, in The Bible Among the Myths.

Christians who take an interest in this issue would do well to read both scholars.

I'd add that Currid has covered some, but not all, of the same ground in his earlier Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament. His new book is pitched at a more popular level.

Anatomy of a resignation

"OT Professor Bruce Waltke resigns from RTS Orlando Faculty amid historical Adam and Eve controversy."