(Note: this post is part of the series: “How the Gospel Changes Church”)
In the 2011 Gospel Coalition conference, which had the theme of preaching Christ in the Old Testament, Dr. Al Mohler made an interesting observation. The church, as Mohler assessed it, is full of “practicing Marcionites.” (Marcionites were heretics who believed that the god in the Old Testament was different than the god in the New Testament.) People read the two testaments differently, as if they were about distinct gods. Probably the biggest repercussion of this false and heretical mindset is that we fail to read the Old Testament as being about Jesus, the One True God.
Hopefully this website will help address the issues of Old Testament interpretation adequately, but I want to point out that the Old Testament is not the only victim of this mindset. One bad assumption that seems to be underlying the whole discussion of Old Testament interpretation, in my opinion, is the idea that we have already figured out the New Testament. Most people seem to see the Old Testament as “foreign territory” – to quote Dr. Mohler again. It seems to me that in many Evangelical churches, our “comfortable” places are the exhortations in the New Testament Epistles. I would like to suggest that it is just as easy, if not more so, to end up with a sort of moralistic self-righteousness if we fail to read the New Testament as being basically about Jesus, as it is with the Old. We read the New Testament as a “roadmap to life,” with lots of checklists, and miss the power of the Gospel.
In light of these concerns, I would like to study through Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, hopefully giving some helpful insights on the centrality of the Gospel in this letter. My focus here will be largely how our doctrine, namely what Christ has done for us, interacts with the application. Christ was not just our example, but our Substitute. The Epistles start, as a general rule of thumb, with a reminder to the Church of who they are because of what God has done through Jesus. We will see that 1st Corinthians is no exception, and that the Gospel of Jesus Christ will be the underlying factor in all of Paul’s exhortation.
My next post will give insight into how I go about studying a given text of Scripture, so that you will be able to (by God’s grace) glean some helpful insight. How I go about things, however, is not the only way, or the best way. Everyone on this site will do things a little differently, so please check out the other authors as well.
Aye. It's so easy to reduce the New Testament to some sort of moralism… yet ridiculous at the same time 'cause the authors (like Paul) won't actually shut up about Jesus. When I read the epistles, I tend to start out expecting and even wanting simple commands, but it's always the best when those expectations get blown away and I'm confronted once again with the Gospel.
I know exactly what you mean. Things get very dangerous very fast when you look at the commands apart from the Gospel (hence the blog series). I was reminded of a quote from The Prodigal God by Tim Keller, about the two sons in Luke 15:
Nearly everyone defines sin as breaking a list of rules. Jesus, though, shows us that a man who has violated virtually nothing on the list of moral misbehaviors can be every bit as spiritually lost as the most profligate, immoral person. Why? Because sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life.