×

A precious older lady in our church approached me last week with a concern:

“I ordered a book from Reader’s Digest on the great mysteries of the Bible. As I’ve looked through it, I don’t see our view is presented anywhere.”

She was concerned that the book’s viewpoint, though under the guise of Digest objectivity, was putting forth a “universal consensus” that was not so universal.

In recent weeks, I’ve been reading Jonathan Pennington’s book, Heaven and Earth in the Gospel of Matthew. If you’ve studied the Gospel of Matthew, you know that Matthew uses the phrase “kingdom of heaven” where the other Gospel authors write “kingdom of God.”

Almost every scholar calls this tendency a “reverential circumlocution”, meaning that Matthew (good Jew that he was) wanted to avoid saying “God” where he didn’t have to. Thus the “heaven” references.

Pennington challenges the near-universal consensus on this phenomenon. He doesn’t deny that Matthew chooses to use “heaven” instead of “God”. But Pennington doesn’t believe Matthew’s reason is because of reverence. Instead, Matthew’s choice reflects his particular theological emphasis on heaven.

One way Pennington challenges the consensus is by tracing the “reverence” argument back to the 1800’s where it started: in the scholarship of Gustaf Dalman. By all accounts Dalman was an impressive thinker, but on this issue at least his case doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. Pennington points out:

  1. There is no clear evidence that the generic term “God” was being replaced in the first century out of reverence.
  2. Dalman uncritically utilizes rabbinic sources in his reconstruction of Second Temple and NT practices.
  3. Even the Rabbinic materials are mixed in their witness to this supposed phenomenon.
  4. There simply is not enough evidence of “heaven” as a reverential circumlocution during the time of Jesus.

Pennington makes a good case for disregarding an explanation that has been generally accepted by virtually all New Testament scholarship. It is striking that the “reverential circumlocution” argument – so widely accepted in scholarship today – can be traced back to one man’s theory (and a not very strong one at that!).

May this example give us with pause whenever we point to the “universal consensus” to bolster our point of view. Yes, the fact that the vast majority of scholars may think a certain way today can be a good indication of what is true. But scholars can be wrong. And sometimes, “universal conclusions” may be built on bad assumptions and faulty research from centuries ago.

LOAD MORE
Loading