The Pressure of Triune Revelation on the Composition and Reading of Holy Scripture

The various phenomena referred to in Holy Scripture, is the same phenomena we experience currently in the world. The world of the Bible, not its ANE (ancient near eastern) parallels, is definitive in regard to the way we think about the world. To use extrabiblical data, and read that into the “gaps” of Scripture, is neither safe nor sound. To speculate is to go beyond the things that have been revealed by God (Deut. 29:29). There is an inner-logic to Scripture, but that is biblical not speculative.

This is not to say that gaining an understanding of ANE and Second Temple Judaism, and its nearer antecedents, isn’t valuable towards understanding the cultural and literary milieu Scripture was written in. But it is to say that Scripture is driven by its revealed reality in Jesus Christ; that Scriptural reality, and the Revelation it bears witness to, takes a hold of the cultures and literary elements that make up Scripture, and retexts them with a new meaning from above even as it takes its literary grammar from below (think from the analogy of the incarnation).

Athanasian Reformed