An Addendum to the “Galatians 3″ Posts

I have been asked some questions which I find are better fitted to another post than an interminable reply in the combox.  The questioner is my friend Paul Duncan, and I hope he will not be embarrassed if I address my comments directly to him, though with other readers in mind.

Hi Paul, I am back in town and will try to answer your questions as asked in the comments on the fourth post.  However, I shall have to point out several presuppositions in your argument, some of which may perhaps be hidden from you.  I’m glad Tony has saved me the time of explaining Matthew’s use of Jeremiah.  Btw, this is the standard interpretation across the board, dispensational or not.  I would only add the fact that NT writers employ the word “fulfillment” in a few different ways; sometimes they point to an application as here (thus cf. 1 Cor. 10:6 “example”).  Sometimes a partial fulfillment, as when Christ read from Isa. 61 but stopped short of the whole quotation.  Sometimes, of course, the fulfillment is a direct confirmation of a prediction, as when the scribes knew Christ would be born in Bethlehem from Micah 5:2.  There is more to say on “fulfillment”, but I hope I’ve made my point sufficiently.

Your first question asks: “1. What distinction do you make between replacement theology as a hermeneutic and progressive revelation?”

Your phrasing of the questions helps my answer.  Notice “replacement theology” comes to a passage with certain theological baggage: there is only one people of God; the Church, and the Church perforce must be the “New Israel.”  But “progressive revelation” is much as you’ve defined it.  It is God who reveals, and He does so gradually.  But He never circumvents a prior revelation with a later one, which, as you acknowledge, would make His earlier revelation disingenuous (i.e. a prevarication), and so would throw suspicion on any later revelations.

CT forces progressive revelation into its premeditated mold.  Everything must conform to the covenant of grace in particular.  Hence, all those saved by grace are under that covenant (which is found nowhere in Scripture), resulting in one people of God, whether that is what the Bible actually says or not.  Thus, the Bible must be made to “teach” this via the expedient of a forced typology, which the plain-sense must yield to if it threatens the theological mold.  I teach my students never to build any doctrine on a type!  Types may illustrate an already formulated doctrine, but they can never establish it!  I hope you follow.

Progressive revelation makes no sense to me if ones hermeneutics have to change in order to keep up with it.  How does revelation progress if it flits from the plain-sense to some typological sense with such unnerving abandon?   Dispensationalists operate from the assumption that progressive revelation is tied to the dictum that God means what He says to whom He says it.  My brand of Biblical Theology, which I call Biblical Covenantalism, relies on progressive revelation which grows out of hermeneutical continuity.  that being so, once God has covenanted the “Holy Land” to Israel He cannot give it to the Church.  They are two distinct entities (e.g. Israel exists as a geo-political ethnic nation long before the Church was even formed after the resurrection of Christ).

Your second question was: “2. In what sense do you believe that Gentile-Christians are sons of Abraham?”