Scholars often refuse to do theological synthesis or interpretive borrowing among different authors of the sacred text. So in the academic guild (I almost said guild of unbelief), Paul's thought world and vocabulary are so distinct from, say, John's (or Moses's, for that matter), it's regarded as hermeneutically unacceptable to ever use John to help understand Paul or to see John as saying similar things to Paul. (Lest I be misunderstood, I realize the benefit of using each author's corpus to try to understand each author's intention and thinking. After all, the Bible was written by humans. It is a very human book. I acknowledge that.)
However, when evangelicals give way to the academy's way of handling the Word, we betray that we don't really think there is one mind behind it all. We don't acknowledge that Author. We say we believe all Scripture is from God; but in practice we act otherwise. I want to see evangelical Bible scholars and pastors who are convinced that the Bible is every bit as much God's mind as it is the mind of human agents, who expect it to bear resemblances to human writing but also expect it to differ as well— since it is the mind of a supremely, infinitely wise God, whose mind thinks coherently and connectedly (and no doubt very creatively), who does not speak out of both sides of his mouth.
In other words, evangelicals shouldn't play by the rules of unbelieving academicians, and should do the hard brain work of theological synthesis. Anything else is laziness and unbelief. So evangelical preaching and teaching should not sound like a commentary coming out of the learned halls of higher critical doubt.
Think, for instance, of Calvin, who wrote full-scale commentaries on more books of the Bible than anyone today. And he didn't seal off the rest of Scripture when he was interpreting, say, Paul. And this Bible scholar, doing the hard brain work of theological synthesis, gave us the Institutes, perhaps the most brilliant piece of biblical scholarship ever penned.
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