Theologia et Vita

Making the Case for Cases: Five Endings, Eight Labels, and a World of Exegesis J. Neil Daniels One of the first things a student of New Testament Greek discovers is that nouns refuse to sit still. Just when you think you have learned a word, its ending changes, and suddenly you're wondering what happened to the vocabulary you memorized yesterday. But there is a method to the madness. Greek is an inflected language, meaning that the forms of words communicate grammatical relationships that English ordinarily expresses through word order and prepositions. This brings us to the concept of case, which identifies the grammatical function of a noun, pronoun, adjective, or other declined word within a sentence. The nominative ordinarily identifies the subject; the genitive expresses various relationships, including possession, description, and source; the dative commonly indicates interest, location, or means; the accusative ordinarily identifies the direct object; and the vocative is use...

Saul falls in with a band of ecstatic prophets and starts prophesying himself, transformed on the spot into someone else entirely (1 Sam. 10:1-13). Samson tears a lion apart bare-handed when the Spirit rushes on him (Judg. 14:6). These are the images most people carry of the Spirit in the Old Testament: sudden, overwhelming, a little frightening. They are not wrong, but they are a small slice of something much larger. Of the 389 occurrences of ruach in the Hebrew Bible, only 107 refer to the divine Spirit at all, and John Levison notes that of those, only a smattering thrum with untrammeled impulse.¹ Lee Roy Martin, surveying the same material, gives up trying to force it into one category and instead reads it through five: Yahweh's Spirit as savior, sanctifier, empowerer, healer, and the one who rests on Israel's coming king.² The real portrait is stranger and more interesting than Saul on the ground or Samson with a jawbone in his hand. Start where the canon starts. "The...

  Billy Graham fielded the question often enough that his answer settled into a formula: if it would make you happy, and it isn't beneath God's goodness, then probably yes.¹ It is the most quoted sentence in the entire literature on animal eschatology, and it comes from a pastoral letter, not from anything Graham would have staked his ministry on. The Second London Confession, closer to my own tradition than Westminster, says nothing about animals after death. Neither does Westminster. That silence is not an oversight. It reflects a judgment older than either confession: that when Scripture talks about resurrection and glory, it has one species in view. Thomas Aquinas gave that judgment its sharpest form. The human soul, he argued, exists independently of the body ( per se subsistens ): it can understand without depending on any bodily organ, which is why it survives the body's corruption. The soul of a brute animal has no such independence. Sensation, appetite, locomotion,...

  Read Revelation 21:1–22:5 slowly and you will find the Father on the throne and the Lamb, a bride, a city with Israel's twelve tribes written on its gates, a tree whose leaves heal the nations. Look for the Holy Spirit and, at first, you will not find Him named. E. K. Galle raised the issue; David Mathewson asks the question outright: where is the Spirit in the new creation, and should readers even expect to find Him there?¹ Daniel Castelo notes that some have called the Spirit "the shy member of the Trinity," and the last two chapters of the Bible can seem to prove the point.² The Old Testament shows Him hovering over the deep, filling Bezalel, rushing upon Samson, breathing life into Ezekiel's valley of bones. The New Testament gives us Pentecost and a Pauline pneumatology so pervasive the apostle can scarcely speak of Christian existence without speaking of the Spirit. Then the canon reaches the eternal state and the explicit references thin almost to nothing. A ...

  I keep hearing that biblical inerrancy is a modern invention, a rationalistic box imposed on Scripture by nervous fundamentalists who needed the Bible to behave like a science textbook. Historically, that simply will not do. Yes, inerrancy as a technical term was sharpened in later controversy, the way Trinity , homoousios , and hypostatic union are all postbiblical terms too. But the question was never whether Christians in A.D. 180 used our vocabulary. The real question is whether they believed the thing the vocabulary names. Jude urges believers to "contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints" (Jude 3), and Lee Allen Anderson traces that "faith" to an objective body of revealed truth whose authoritative source is the God-breathed Scriptures themselves.[1] If the God who gave them cannot lie, his Word cannot finally be a mixture of divine truth and human falsehood. The biblical case is short and direct. "All Scripture ...

  Finis Jennings Dake had a proof text for every body part he gave God.¹ Richard Howe uses him to make a point most of us grant in the abstract and dodge in practice. Once the verses are all on the table, the argument that remains is about which of them to read literally. Howe's test case is Genesis 3:8. Ask a friend whether God has legs, given that he walks in the garden, and the friend says no and cites John 4:24, that God is spirit. Ask why John 4 gets to be the literal text and Genesis 3 the figure, and the friend has run out of Scripture and started doing philosophy. Every systematic theologian makes that move daily, usually without announcing it. The open question is whether the theory of predication doing the work has ever been examined. Paul warns the Colossians against being taken captive through philosophy and empty deception (Col. 2:8, LSB), and Christians have read that as a ban for most of two thousand years. Howe follows Alford and Peake on the grammar. The missing ar...