Explaining something new to a child is easy. Children are not born with filters for the assessment, categorization, or screening of new information. Lacking in intellectual experience, a child sees not what it expects to see. A child sees what is actually there.
Unlike a child, an academic is called to be skeptical. This is useful because God calls us to be vigilant concerning truth, and to prove (or test) all things. But once trained in a particular school of thought, our experience often results in a prejudice that prevents us from being open-minded. Even the circumspect scholar understandably becomes accustomed to judging according to what he or she already knows.
Filters, though necessary, can be faulty. Pride, fear, and laziness can ossify the mind. A constructive challenge to foundational assumptions, or a worthy contradiction of an accepted intellectual framework, might be mistaken for a mere threat to the comfortable status quo rather than perceived as an avenue for further development and discovery. Our enemies delight in rattling our foundations, but so does our God. They come only to destroy; He comes to purify. Our true foundation is Christ and His Word, so Jesus shakes what we have built upon it, carts away what tumbles down, and strengthens what remains.
The distrust of anything novel, especially in the field of theology, can be either healthy or unhealthy, but in any case it means that explaining something new to an academic, in contrast to a child, often necessitates starting from scratch. Instead of simply inviting him into the house to see what he will see, one must first prove the existence of the house, describe its history, vouch for the good character of its designer and builders, and most likely also provide evidence that the very land upon which it was constructed was not appropriated by force or deceit.
Academia, and especially Christian academia, needs its fathers, the ones who are called to sit in the gates and appraise any new theological discovery or doctrinal development. Those whose role within Christendom is preservation rather than exploration can feel their hackles rise when some perceived vagabond huckster of trinkets (that would be me) struts up to the drawbridge peddling novelties which they suspect could be filled with strange fire. Whereas a child might naively “taste and see,” a gatekeeper has upon his shoulders the burden of protecting the entire city from the plagues of foreign gods.
Having to justify the practice of “systematic typology,” a hermeneutical methodology that seems so obvious and natural, and also bears so much good and verifiable fruit, has been a frustration to me, but it has also been a useful discipline. Right from the beginning of history, the comprehension of any given truth is only deepened and strengthened when that truth is challenged and one is forced to defend it. A storm will prove a seaworthy hull.
As somebody wise observed, we never truly understand a thing until we are called to teach it to others. While even the fundamentals of the faith must be taught, one reason why God made the deep things of His book so inaccessible, requiring centuries of discussion and debate to unravel, is that we need each other to achieve success. As with all labor, the work of exegesis not only humbles us and makes us strong, it is also a project that unites us.
Of course, there is always the challenge of remaining charitable during the inevitable disputationes. Since charity among brothers includes affectionate insults, delivered with a twinkle in the eye, what follows here is seasoned with a few pinches of such salt. The ongoing, strenuous, and sometimes perilous task of theology should also be fun, so being forced as I am to provide a rational, philosophical, and methodological foundation for an approach that a child can grasp in a few minutes, I reserve the right to disparage the “closed book” that is masquerading as modern biblical scholarship.
While the incredulity of Christian academics exasperates me, I do understand that any new paradigm concerning the Scriptures must pass through the fire of criticism before it can be considered useful, let alone orthodox. But let me assure you, godly guardians, that I am on your side. My intention is not to destroy or corrupt your interpretive grid but to enhance it with a more biblical hermeneutic, one that is given to us by the text itself. The method explained and defended in the following pages that seeks to impregnate the walled cities of your intellectual and theological inheritance is, I believe, not a Trojan horse but the Ark of the Testimony. If it is indeed a discovery of a facet of the Divine mind, its outright rejection would be a loss of inestimable value.
But whether this method of interpretation is ultimately accepted or rejected, vindicated or condemned, is up to God Himself. When impatience gets the better of me, I remind myself that this protracted process of evaluation is a good thing, and that a major change in any field can take decades or even centuries. Since the current faculty of the hallowed halls of holy academe seem so bereft of actual faculties, I console myself with the possibility that I am writing for the benefit of Christians in the next century.
Although systematic typology is a fresh way to interpret the Bible, it is no more a novelty than the location of the key to a long-locked door. As a deduction of the internal logic of the inspired authors through careful observation of their use of literary structure, this Genetic rubric is as old as the texts themselves. Like the final chapters of Job, it is simply an “opening of the eyes,” a revelation of the true significance of, and relationship between, all of the wonderful, arresting, and eccentric things in the Word of God with which we are already intimately familiar.
This is the preface from the forthcoming Systematic Typology: A Manifesto. See also The Reverse Engineer.
