Wisdom from Graeme Goldsworthy

I just finished reading The Goldsworthy Trilogy, three early works of Graeme Goldsworthy, published here in one volume. The first two, Gospel and Kingdom and The Gospel in the Revelation were exceptional. I can't praise them highly enough. The third, Gospel and Wisdom, focused on the wisdom literature of the OT (mainly Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes). I was less enamored of this one, but on the strenth of the first two I would give this volume an A+ rating. This is a great resource for understanding the Gospel-centeredness of the OT and also of The Revelation of John.

About a year ago Justin at Buzzard Blog actually interviewed Dr. Goldsorthy. Some highlights:

"...contrary to some inexact Christian pious talk, we cannot live the gospel. We can, and must, seek to live consistently with it, but only Jesus lived, and died, the gospel."

"...evangelical piety can lead people to rush from reading a text straight into the question of what this says to us and about us. But, there is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus and [Biblical theology] helps us to see how Jesus mediates the meaning of any text to us. The Christian is defined by his or her relationship to Christ, not to any other person or event. Thus all persons and events in the Bible must stand in a discernible relationship to Christ if they are to say something about us."

"...the first question we put to a text is not 'What does this say to or about us?,' but 'How does this text testify to Jesus?' I say again, the Christian life is defined by our relationship to Jesus, so until we understand who and what Jesus is, we cannot properly understand what our relationship to him is."

The good news of a slaughtered Lamb

I've been quoting Graeme Goldsworthy a lot lately. The Goldsworthy Trilogy is a collection of three seminal works by this author, they being The Gospel and the Kingdom, The Gospel in Revelation, and The Gospel and Wisdom. I've just begun the third of these, and no doubt will be sharing some of Goldsworthy's own wisdom concerning "wisdom." But for now, I want to quote for you the penultimate paragraph of The Gospel in Revelation, a book that has impacted my own thinking in a significant way:

The world looks on the slaughtered Lamb with pity, disdain and even abhorrence. Through the tinted glass of self-importance it views his sacrifice as a joke, or as the natural end of an outmoded ethic based on superstition. But the world itself gives the lie to its own interpretation. For had the Lamb provided such a senseless life and death, the remedy would be to leave it alone to fester and wither away. Instead of a few bleached bones and the smell of putrefaction he left an empty tomb and his Spirit who so seared the truth of the gospel into the hearts and minds of his little band of followers that they began to turn the world upside down. For this the world will not forgive him. It rises up and lashes out at the Lamb while pretending that he isn't real. It does this because the one whose spirit pervades the world knows full well that the slain Lamb is his downfall.

The meaning, motive and power for Christian life

Graeme Goldsworthy's The Gospel in Revelation is one of those books that is so packed with Biblical wisdom, one feels the need to read certain passages aloud to whomever happens to be sitting near. The book was originally published back in 1984. At that time Goldsworthy had looked around the world of Evangelical religion and found a striking decline in the preaching and teaching of the Gospel. For example, he writes:

It is regrettably true that much Christian literature and preaching has lost the essential ingredient of a sound method of interpretation. It has allowed the Gospel to be demoted into something less than the preeminent and central characteristic which interprets the whole meaning of the Bible.

Or how about this one:

All problems, heresies and deviations from the true course of Christian living which occupy the writers of the New Testament Epistles derive from the same basic problem: a failure to bring the gospel to bear on this or that aspect of life. Consequently there is only one remedy that can ever be prescribed and that is the gospel. This assertion may surprise many, for Christian living or the general subject of sanctification (holiness) is so frequently dealt with in Christian teaching and preaching as if the gospel were only the means of beginning the Christian life, and not also the means of continuing it. The New Testament, however, teaches that it is the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ which constitute the meaning, motive and power for Christian life.