Bahnsen's theonomic hermeneutic

In By No Other Standard, Bahnsen notes that a distinction between the ceremonial and moral law can be validly drawn and alludes to Hosea 6:6 and Ephesians 2:5 to support this. While noting that some laws have both ceremonial and moral elements to them he suggest that Israel did not need Old Testament law to be "written out in delineated literary subsections in order for them to be, nevertheless, clearly distinguishable." Further, Bahnsen claims that with the "coming of New Covenant revelation which helps us understand even better the meaning and purpose of Old Covenant commands, the cogency and necessity of something life the moral/ceremonial distinction becomes all the more apparent." (BNOS 97)

The distinction between moral and ceremonial laws can be explained thus:

Moral laws reflect the absolute righteousness and judgment of God, guiding man’s life into the paths of righteousness; such laws define holiness and sin, restrain evil through punishment of infractions, and drive the sinner to Christ for salvation.

On the other hand, ceremonial laws — or redemptive provisions — reflect the mercy of God in saving those who have violated His moral standards; such laws define the way of redemption, typify Christ’s saving economy, and maintain the holiness (or “separation”) of the redeemed community. (BTS 135-6)

Ceremonial laws were binding to Jews not Gentiles and displayed the way of redemption. Moral laws, on the other hand, were to be emulated as the effect of redemption. Thus Judaizers are those who seek to enforce ceremonial boundary marking laws on Gentiles under the New Covenant, laws that had been abrogated under Christ (Eph. 2:15). For Bahnsen it is then, ceremonial law that is the schoolmaster whom, "we are no longer under in our Christ-given maturity".

But in that Bahnsen can affirm that ceremonial law was a "foreshadow of the Messiah and His redemming work, applied to the Jews (and to us) by faith", he does not deny that Old Covenant ceremonial ritual has import into New Covenant ceremony.

theonomic hermeneutics

Here is Bahnsen (No Other Standard - Appendix B: Poythress as a Theonomist) on Poythress (The Shadow of Christ in the Law of Moses) on theonomy and specifically hermeneutical method.

Poythress agrees with theonomists that “all the commandments of the law are binding on Christians,” and he then adds that “the way” in which they are binding is determined by Christ’s authority and “the fulfillment that takes place in His work”; “the way in which each law is fulfilled in Christ determines the way in which it is to be observed now” (pp. 268, 269). He writes that “Christ’s work defines the true nature of continuity and discontinuity between Old and New Testament situations” (p. 286). These are true enough, as formal statements. The question now becomes how this fulfillment is to be defined by the faithful student of Scripture – by the text of Scripture interpreting redemption for us, or by the theologian’s creative and abstract notions of what the age of redemption means?

The dispute between Poythress and theonomy, it seems to me, is over the way in which the discontinuities with the Old Testament law are to be identified in the Bible. We would have to say that Poythress’ general hermeneutical style is not adequately controlled by the text of Scripture. As we saw above, he gives too much room to playful imagination and loose, ambiguous, thematic connections for there to be any confidence in his conclusions. His reasoning has little protection from unreliability and arbitrariness. You can prove just about anything by means of it. Thus it is theologically unacceptable. To use Poythress’ own words: “If we do not pay careful, detailed attention to explicit texts, we may be filling ourselves merely with our own ideas” (p.350).

It is much safer and Biblically sound to presume continuity with Old Testament moral demands (Deut. 4:2; Matt. 5:17-19) – as properly understood through exegesis of their own original text and context — and then allow specific, relevant texts in the rest of Scripture to amplify or transform or even put aside those requirements, given the inauguration of the radically new age of salvation brought by Christ (e.g., the paradigm of Acts 10). This does not exclude the use of topological interpretation, nor does it prevent reasoning by analogy (regarding classes of laws). It simply demands that the premises of such arguments be justiilable on the basis of textual exegesis.

The danger in having only as yet read this appendix from Bahnsen is that presently I'm in the dark about how/if Bahnsen is going to distinguish between moral and ceremonial / ritual laws. Even if as Leithart states this classification is 'legally unworkable and practically awkward', assuming we are able to draw some distinction between here, would the same principle outlined in the final paragraph of the Bahnsen quote hold also for ceremonial law?

exegetical presuppositions

Longenecker (Bibilical Exegesis 93-95) points out that it has been observed that “it is doubtful whether we can hope to understand the contents of any mind whose presuppositions we have not yet learned to recognize.” If we are to appreciate the exegetical practices of the apostolic writers, it is necessary to have an awareness of their basic hermeneutical outlooks and attitudes. He then lists four major exegetical presuppositions in early Christian preaching.

Corporate Solidarity. In the first place, the concept of “corporate solidarity” or “corporate personality” had a profound effect upon the exegesis of early Jewish Christians. The concept has been defined as “that important Semitic complex of thought in which there is a constant oscillation between the individual and the group—family, tribe, or nation—to which he belongs, so that the king or some other representative figure may be said to embody the group, or the group may be said to sum up the host of individuals.” The precise nature of the relationships involved is not always entirely clear from the literature of the Jews, nor from that of their semitic neighbors. Probably this is due in large measure to the fact that “ancient literature never does fit exactly into our categories.” But though there are uncertainties as to precisely how the idea expressed itself in ancient life generally and as to the degree of influence it exerted in specific instances in the literature, there seems to be little question of its presence in the structure of Jewish and early Jewish Christian thought.

In biblical exegesis, the concept of corporate solidarity comes to the fore in the treatment of relationships between the nation or representative figures within the nation, on the one hand, and the elect remnant or the Messiah, on the other. It allows the focus of attention to “pass without explanation or explicit indication from one to the other, in a fluidity of transition which seems to us unnatural.”

Correspondences in History. Stemming in part from the concept of corporate solidarity is the understanding of history or, at any rate, of the history of the people of God as evidencing a unity in its various parts which is there by divine ordination. For both Jew and Jewish Christian, historical occurrences are “built upon a certain pattern corresponding to God’s design for man His creature.” This is but one aspect of a larger Hebrew-Christian Weltanschauung, wherein the nature of man, the relations between man and man (contemporary, past and future), the interaction between man and the universe, and the relation of both to God, their Creator and Redeemer, are viewed in wholistic fashion. In such a view, history is neither endlessly cyclical nor progressively developing due to forces inherent in it. Nor can it be considered in a secular manner. Rather, in all its movements and in all its varied episodes, it is expressive of the divine intent and explicating the divine will. With such an understanding of history, early Christians were prepared to trace correspondences between God’s activity of the past and his action in the present—between events then and events now, between persons then and persons now. Such correspondences were not just analogous in nature, or to be employed by way of illustration. For the early Christians they were incorporated into history by divine intent, and therefore to be taken typologically. Their presence in the history of a former day is to be considered as elucidating and furthering the redemptive message of the present.

Eschatological Fulfilment. An obvious presupposition also affecting early Jewish Christian interpretation is the consciousness of living in the days of eschatological fulfilment Peter’s sermon on the day of Pentecost begins with the assertion that the “last days” are being actualized now. And this theme is recurrent throughout the preaching of the earliest Christians. As with the covenanters of Qumran, early Jewish believers in Jesus understood their ancient Scriptures in an eschatological context. Unlike the Dead Sea sectarians, however, whose eschatology was mainly proleptic and anticipated, Christians were convinced that the coming of the Messianic Age was an accomplished fact. Messiahship had been realized in Jesus of Nazareth, and the last days inaugurated with him. While awaiting final consummation, their eschatology was rooted in and conditioned by what had already happened in the immediate past. The decisive event had occurred, and, in a sense, all else was epilogue.

Messianic Presence. In addition, as F. F. Bruce reminds us, the New Testament interpretation of the Old Testament is not only eschatological but Christological.” For the earliest believers, this meant (1) that the living presence of Christ, through his Spirit, was to be considered a determining factor in all their biblical exegesis, and (2) that the Old Testament was to be interpreted Christocenrically. W. D. Davies has pointed out that at least in popular and haggadic circles within Judaism, there existed the expectation that with the coming of the Messiah the enigmatic and obscure in the Torah “would be made plain.” And such an expectation seems to have become a settled conviction among the early Christians, as evidenced by the exegetical practices inherent in their preaching.

Longenecker on NT exegesis

It has become all too common in theological circles today to hear assertions as to what God must have done or what must have been the case during the apostolic period of the Church—and to find that such assertions are based principally upon deductions from a given system of theology or supported by contemporary analogy alone. The temptation is always with us to mistake hypothesis for evidence, and to judge our theological and historical formulations by their coherence and widespread acceptance rather than first of all by their correspondence to historical and exegetical data. History is replete with examples of this sorry condition and its sorry results, and hindsight permits us to recognize it in the past for what it was: a perversion of truth. But we are “sons of our fathers,” composed of the same stuff and subject to the same pressures and temptations. And nowhere do we need to guard against our own inclinations and various pressures more carefully than in our understanding of the New Testament writers’ use of the Old Testament. Neither piety nor speculation—both of which are excellent in their own ways when properly controlled—can here substitute for careful historical and exegetical investigation. Nor can traditional views of either the right or the left be allowed to stand unscrutinized in light of recent discoveries.

The Jewish roots of Christianity make it a priori likely that the exegetical procedures of the New Testament would resemble to some extent those of then contemporary Judaism. This has long been established with regard to the hermeneutics of Paul and the Talmud, and it is becoming increasingly evident with respect to the Qumran texts as well. In view of these materials and the light they throw on early Christian presuppositions and practices, we must abandon the mistaken idea that the New Testament writers’ treatment of the Old Testament was either (1) an essentially mechanical process, whereby explicit “proof-texts” and exact “fulfillments” were brought together, or (2) an illegitimate twisting and distortion of the ancient text. It is true, of course, that literal fulfillment of a direct sort occurs as one factor in the New Testament. The Christian claim to continuity with the prophets could hardly have been supported were there no such cases. And it is also true that the exegesis of the early Christians often appears forced and artificial, particularly when judged by modem criteria But neither approach does justice to the essential nature of New Testament hermeneutics, for both ignore the basic patterns of thought and common exegetical methods employed in the Jewish milieu in which the Christian faith came to birth.

There is little indication in the New Testament that the authors themselves were conscious of varieties of exegetical genre or of following particular modes of interpretation. At least they seem to make no sharp distinctions between what we would call historico-grammatical exegesis, illustration by way of analogy, midrash exegesis, pesher interpretation, allegorical treatment, and interpretation based on a “corporate solidarity” understanding of people and events in redemptive history. All of these are employed in their writings in something of a blended and interwoven fashion, even though there are certain discernible patterns and individual emphases in their usage. What the New Testament writers are conscious of, however, is interpreting the Old Testament (1) from a Christocentric perspective, (2) in conformity with a Christian tradition, and (3) along Christological lines. And in their exegesis there is the interplay of Jewish presuppositions and practices, on the one hand, with Christian commitments and perspectives on the other, which joined to produce a distinctive interpretation of the Old Testament.

Richard N. Longenecker, Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period 205-6