{"id":1259,"date":"2011-01-29T22:06:41","date_gmt":"2011-01-30T04:06:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/29\/fig-leaf\/"},"modified":"2011-01-29T22:18:06","modified_gmt":"2011-01-30T04:18:06","slug":"fig-leaf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/29\/fig-leaf\/","title":{"rendered":"Fig Leaf"},"content":{"rendered":"

I never would have guessed that when lines would be drawn at the school where I’m studying that I would find myself firmly on the side of Zane Hodges<\/em>.  But I am.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the memory that will stay with me most distinctly from my years of study here is the moment in one of my first classes when a student said that many professors at the school didn’t believe that most of the messianic prophecies in the Old Testament are about Jesus.  I almost called him a liar.  That was impossible, I thought.<\/p>\n

Well, anyone who knows anything about the subject knows I am (was?) an idiot.  Did I really come to this school and not know this?  Yes.  It just wasn’t on my radar, I guess.  After living so long in Israel, I knew who saw Jesus in the Old Testament (believers) and who didn’t (non-believers).  <\/p>\n

I was wrong.<\/p>\n

Today I’ve read a large portion of a book that I read previously in 1996.  In a chapter written by Hodges (one-time professor at DTS), he names a couple of DTSers who denied that the OT predicted Jesus (for the most part).  I read this statement once, so I have no excuse for not knowing.  And I know I read it because I underlined the next sentence.  Make sure you read to the end.  He nails it.<\/p>\n

\n

Historically, liberal exegetes have denied direct Old Testament prophecy about the Lord Jesus Christ and have sought the meaning of such prophecies in the immediate historical context (i.e., the so-called sitz im leben<\/i>) of the Old Testament. The wholesale abandonment of direct messianic prophecy by many evangelicals is a capitulation to this view, for which’typology ‘ is a fig leaf.  <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Source: Zane Hodges, “A Dispensational Understanding of Acts 2,” in Willis and Master, eds., Issues in Dispensationalism<\/a><\/em>, page 180, note 12.<\/p>\n

For my readers who are less up to date on this issue, I ‘ll explain briefly how this works.  An OT passage that has always been understood as about Jesus is denied to be about Jesus by modern evangelicals.  It’s not about Jesus, it’s about David, they say.  But when you read Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 (for instance), he says that David said this about Jesus.  So was Peter wrong?  No, they say.  Why not, you ask.  Typology, they answer.  No need to explain, no need to show how one is a type, no need to show the pattern or correlation.  Usually they do offer up some words, but in my experience, they don’t answer the question.  It just comes back to\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwell, Peter said it’s about Jesus, but clearly in the OT context it is not, so they must somehow be related.  Let’s call it typology.  Typology covers over a multitude of sins, so they think.  The only ones who are deceived, however, are their evangelical students.  The Jews aren’t deceived.  They know.  Peter and Paul made it up.  There is no basis for believing that Jesus of Nazareth was the one predicted by the OT.  We only believe that he is because we assume our conclusion.  <\/p>\n

I’m not buying it.  There is a better way, no fig leaves required.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I never would have guessed that when lines would be drawn at the school where I’m studying that I would find myself firmly on the side of Zane Hodges.  But I am. Perhaps the memory that will stay with me most distinctly from my years of study here is the moment in one of my\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-isaiah","category-phd-coursework"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1259\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}