How to Understand and Apply the New Testament by Andrew David Naselli

Some months ago, Andy Naselli (professor of NT at Bethlehem College and Seminary) sent me a PDF of a new book he had just completed entitled How to Understand and Apply the New Testament. Over the next few weeks, I read it with great interest and, more importantly, with great benefit.

Here’s my bottom line: I like this book and I commend it to you.

Now a brief, informal review.

As you can tell from the title, this book serves as a basic primer on how to study the NT. The principles in it are, of course, applicable in many ways to the OT but there is a companion volume on the OT by Jason DeRouchie (who also teaches at Bethlehem). This book seems targeted primarily at students, perhaps the very people Andy teaches. It starts at the beginning and walks the reader through the process of, well, understanding and applying a NT text.

However, it is not just students who will benefit. Anyone with an interest in knowing the Word deeper will find this book and its methodology helpful. Sunday school teachers, Bible study or small group leaders, or any sort of Christian who takes the Word seriously will benefit. Even pastors who preach regularly will find it helpful as a refresher and a refiner of methods they already use. The chapters on Greek require some knowledge of Greek, but those who don’t know Greek can just skip them, or read it and learn a little.

There are twelve chapters, each of which deals with a specific area of study such as genre, text criticism, Greek, context, theology, application, etc. Each chapter is filled with clear and concise steps that are illustrated by examples that show the method being applied.

The book contains many personal anecdotes and stories because it was originally developed as a lecture series. This lends itself to an informal style of writing which actually helps the reading of it.

One of the downsides of this book is its length, running almost 350 pages of text not counting the front matter (TOC, Intro, etc.) and the end matter (glossary, indices).

But here’s why that doesn’t matter as much: Much of the length is found in the illustrations, which help the reader, but are not necessary to the point of the book. Don’t read that as an excuse to skip the illustrations the first time through. Read it as freedom to skip them the second or third time through and focus just on the steps as they apply to the passage in front of you. One could even benefit from a methodological handout that condenses the key questions to ask and things to look for to just a few pages. You might create that handout on your way through, or wait until Andy creates one of some sort. As Andy notes in the Introduction (don’t skip it), exegesis can’t be boiled down to a steps. It is both a science and an art that, over time, will become second nature of a sort. But until then, it is helpful to have a list of questions you need to answer and things you need to look for. This book will identify those things for you and give you direction on how to find them.

One thing I have noticed in Andy’s writing is his use of very detailed outlines. This book is no exception. Though it has a table of contents in which each chapter is named with a one line explanation, it also has a twelve-page Analytical Outline that is more detailed that gives all the major headings in the book and serve as a summary of the book. The downside of this Analytical Outline is that it doesn’t include page numbers. (Andy, see if you can get P&R to add those in.) This outline will help you to find particular parts of the book as you need them or want to review them.

Much more could be said and others have done that elsewhere.

In the end, I recommend How to Understand and Apply the New Testament and encourage you to pick it up and work your way through it. You will benefit from it.

The Pastor as a Generalist

The exegete has to find the meaning of the text and its witness to an event and for this the tool is grammatical-historical exegesis. To relate it to other events recorded into the Bible is the task of the biblical theologian and historian; to relate it to the modern Christian experience is the task of the preacher.

This is from an article by David L. Baker entitled “Typology and the Christian Use of the Old Testament” (Scottish Journal of Theology 29 (1976), 155).

Though there is much about this article not to like, this is helpful.

Good preaching (by which I mean biblical preaching that engages both the ancient text and the modern audience) must do all three things. It must engage the text itself to find it meaning, it must relate that text to the rest of the revelation of God (the canonical context and redemptive-historical context), and it must also relate both the text and its place in the canonical context to the life of the person listening.

Failure to do the first (exegesis), but only the second or third, might result in a message based on something God never said or did.

Failure to do the second (place it in its canonical and redemptive-historical context), but only the first or the third, might result in moralistic, “Be” preaching that ignores the redemption on which “Be” preaching should be based. (Remember Chapell’s comment that "Be messages are not wrong in themselves; they are wrong messages by themselves" (Christ-Centered Preaching, p. 294).

Failure to do the third (relate it to the modern Christian experience), but only the first and second,  might result in messages with lots of information, even interesting stories, that fail to be the voice of God to the individuals.

This means that the pastor has to be a generalist of sorts. He must be able to do all three, each week.

Exegesis that Makes Me Nervous

Sometimes the text of Scripture is pretty simple. Too simple, in fact. So it seems that some commentators and preachers begin to look for something to beef up the biblical record. The problem is that it is not always firmly rooted in the text. And this makes me nervous.

Consider this example from a commentary on Mark addressing Mark’s account of the feeding of the five thousand:

Mark next vividly describes the orderly seating of the crowds on the green grass. Is he just creating a vivid narrative? Is he preserving historical reminiscences, passive proofs that the account is factually reliable? Or is he dropping hints as to the secret meaning of the feeding?  Interpreters have suggested that there are subtle clues here:

1. Green grass is possible in this desert place only in early spring, thus around Passover time. That may mean that the feeding foreshadows the Lord’s Supper and Jesus’ death as the Passover lamb.
2. Green grass echoes Psalm 23:2; “He makes me lie down in green pastures.” Mark is still portraying Jesus as the Good Shepherd.
3. Green grass is not characteristic of a desert. The greening of the desert is evidence that God is fulfilling end-time promises (cf. Isa. 49:9–10; 51:3). That in turn makes the meal a foretaste of the end-time feast that God prepares. NRSV says the people sit, but the Greek says they recline, the posture of a feast, not a normal meal.

Timothy J. Geddert, Mark, Believers church Bible commentary (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2001), 148-49.

What if the “green grass” simply means that the grass was green? It may indicate something about the time of the year, as his mentioned in point 1. But foreshadowing? Psalm 23? Eschatology? It simply isn’t in the text.

The fact is that nothing in this “exegesis” is actually rooted in the text. There is simply no textual reason to suggest this understanding. It preaches really well, but it abandons the preacher’s only authority – what the text actually says. And that makes me nervous.

It’s hard to imagine Mark’s audience hearing “green grass” and thinking of Psalm 23 or end-time promises. It’s easier to imagine them hearing “green grass” and thinking of ground cover of a particular color that was the seat upon which people sat.

If you want to talk about Jesus as the Shepherd, why not go back to v. 34 where the text addresses that. (Perhaps the most poignant point about the Good Shepherd metaphor in this passage is that Jesus taught shepherdless people. He didn’t do great miracles to win their confidence and belief. He opened his mouth and taught them many things. The miracles only come later. That should inform those who want to minister like Jesus did. But I digress.) Or go to John 10.

If you want to talk about Psalm 23 and green grass, then go to Psalm 23 and talk about it. If you want to talk about eschatology, the Bible says a lot (much more than some people think and much less than other people think), so go to where the Bible says it and talk about it.

But don’t abandon this text because you are familiar with other texts. If you are going to appeal to people to understand God from the text of Scripture and to live a certain way because of the text of Scripture, then preach the text of Scripture. There is plenty there. We do not need to find more.

Explaining the text this way may cut a 40 minute sermon to 20 minutes, but I’m told that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It has the added benefit of not only rooting your message in what God said here, but also showing your congregation how they can study the text for themselves.

And then when people are called to live a certain way in response to the King, they can point to the words and say, “This is why.”

What Did You Find?

I have been browsing through a book entitled Egyptian Mummies: Unraveling the Secrets of an Ancient Art by Bob Brier. It is an interesting book, though not one that I will read in depth.

In it, Brier laments that one of the earliest remains of a Pharaoh, an arm of King Zer of the First Dynasty, was thrown away by someone who had no interest in mummification techniques, but rather only in the chronology of the First and Second Dynasties. In this case, the excavator had no interest in what the physical remains might reveal about the practices of mummification, and so he discarded them.

Brier makes this observation:

It is generally acknowledged that the particular interests of an excavator will influence what he finds and, even more so, what he records (p. 81).

The seems to be true no less in theology. A student of the word will often find just what he is looking for in a text, not because it is necessarily there, but because his mind is tuned to that particular matter, and is looking for a way to support it.

Perhaps even when the topic of interest is legitimately a subject of  a passage, other truths go unnoticed. I am reminded of the story of the fish. If I were a better notetaker, I would tell you where to find the story of the fish. But alas, my memory fails. (Someone feel free to help me out here.)

The story of the fish is that you have to keep looking.

In our study of the word, let us not draw up short of mining the depths. There is no substitute for time spent in careful reflection of a passage. We must be wary of tunnel vision that cuts off the reflective process too soon.