Sailhamer- The Meaning of the Pentateuch
Introduction (pp. 11-14)
Revelation and Religion
· “Revelation, classically understood, is the divine act of self-disclosure put into written form as Scripture by the prophets.” (11)
· “…the classical evangelical view was replaced by one that builds on the notion of the Bible and religion. That replacement came to mean that for evangelicals, a theology of the Pentateuch was little more than a historical reconstruction of what the Israelites once believed rather than what its readers should believe- not a prescription of what its early readers were to understand as their faith, but a description of what ancient Israel once believed.” (12)
· “What has the church to do with Israel, how could its message of be applied to the church? What has the church to do with Israel with the OT? The evangelical answer to those questions consisted of a return to the application of NT typology to the OT. Israel in the OT was identified with church in the NT. That which applied to the people Israel in the OT was replaced by its application now to the church. Seen in that light, the Pentateuch cannot serve a normative role in the church; it can only point its readers to the religion of ancient Israel as the ‘faith once give.’ (12)
· “An additional part of the aim of this book is to demonstrate that in the writing of the Pentateuch, various selections of Sinai laws were included to show the great difficulty of living a life of faith under the Mosaic covenant and its law (Num 20:12; Deut 13:29).(13)
· “Israel’s religion established at Sinai with Moses as mediator was not the ultimate concern of the message of the Pentateuch.” (13)
· “The laws are put in the Pentateuch to give the reader a sense of the kind of religion that once characterized the covenant at Sinai. The law given at Sinai neither had the same purpose nor carried the same message as the faith taught by the Pentateuch.” (13)
· “The purpose of the Pentateuch is not to teach a life of obedience to the law given to Moses at Sinai, but to be a narrative admonition to be like Abraham, who did not live under the law and yet fulfilled the law through a life of faith.”(14)
· “The Pentateuch lays out two fundamentally dissimilar ways of ‘walking with God’ (Deut 29:1): one is to be like Moses under the Sinai law, and is called the ‘Sinai covenant’; the other, like that of Abraham (Gen 15:6), is by faith and apart from the law, and is called the ‘new covenant.’ (14)
· These two central themes (law and faith) are played out in the Pentateuch and into the prophetic literature as a contrast of two covenants, Mosaic and Abrahamic, or law and gospel. We will see the prophets were aware of the meaning of the Pentateuch through their own reading and study of it. As a result of that, they helped to preserve it by producing a new ‘prophetic edition’ of the Pentateuch based on their understanding of Mosaic law. This is the ‘canonical Pentateuch’ in our Bible today. (14)
Introduction (pp. 11-14)
Revelation and Religion
· “Revelation, classically understood, is the divine act of self-disclosure put into written form as Scripture by the prophets.” (11)
· “…the classical evangelical view was replaced by one that builds on the notion of the Bible and religion. That replacement came to mean that for evangelicals, a theology of the Pentateuch was little more than a historical reconstruction of what the Israelites once believed rather than what its readers should believe- not a prescription of what its early readers were to understand as their faith, but a description of what ancient Israel once believed.” (12)
· “What has the church to do with Israel, how could its message of be applied to the church? What has the church to do with Israel with the OT? The evangelical answer to those questions consisted of a return to the application of NT typology to the OT. Israel in the OT was identified with church in the NT. That which applied to the people Israel in the OT was replaced by its application now to the church. Seen in that light, the Pentateuch cannot serve a normative role in the church; it can only point its readers to the religion of ancient Israel as the ‘faith once give.’ (12)
· “An additional part of the aim of this book is to demonstrate that in the writing of the Pentateuch, various selections of Sinai laws were included to show the great difficulty of living a life of faith under the Mosaic covenant and its law (Num 20:12; Deut 13:29).(13)
· “Israel’s religion established at Sinai with Moses as mediator was not the ultimate concern of the message of the Pentateuch.” (13)
· “The laws are put in the Pentateuch to give the reader a sense of the kind of religion that once characterized the covenant at Sinai. The law given at Sinai neither had the same purpose nor carried the same message as the faith taught by the Pentateuch.” (13)
· “The purpose of the Pentateuch is not to teach a life of obedience to the law given to Moses at Sinai, but to be a narrative admonition to be like Abraham, who did not live under the law and yet fulfilled the law through a life of faith.”(14)
· “The Pentateuch lays out two fundamentally dissimilar ways of ‘walking with God’ (Deut 29:1): one is to be like Moses under the Sinai law, and is called the ‘Sinai covenant’; the other, like that of Abraham (Gen 15:6), is by faith and apart from the law, and is called the ‘new covenant.’ (14)
· These two central themes (law and faith) are played out in the Pentateuch and into the prophetic literature as a contrast of two covenants, Mosaic and Abrahamic, or law and gospel. We will see the prophets were aware of the meaning of the Pentateuch through their own reading and study of it. As a result of that, they helped to preserve it by producing a new ‘prophetic edition’ of the Pentateuch based on their understanding of Mosaic law. This is the ‘canonical Pentateuch’ in our Bible today. (14)
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