New Testament Introductions are definitely not all created equal.
Hi, this is Fred Zaspel, editor here at Books At a Glance. Last week you may recall that we talked to Dr. Miles Van Pelt, editor of the new A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the Old Testament. Today we’re talking to his counterpart, Dr. Michael Kruger, editor of the new A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the New Testament. Dr. Kruger is President and also Professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, NC, and today he’s here to talk about his new book.
Mike, welcome, and congratulations on this excellent new book!
Kruger:
Thanks, Fred, great to be with you and thanks for the chance to chat about the book. We’re excited about it and hope that God will use it in some special ways.
Zaspel:
Before we talk about your book specifically, let’s begin with genre – what is New Testament Introduction? And what does a NT Introduction typically look like?
Kruger:
New Testament Introductions are a type of tool, a type of reference book, really, that help people understand the message of the Bible better. It’s not the kind of book that you write and then have someone sit down and read cover to cover. It’s the kind of book that someone would just pull off the shelf when they need it. It is particularly used when they are starting a particular book of the New Testament and want to understand more about its general background, authorship, date, issues that are in play, and then a little bit about the message of that book. Imagine a local pastor or a lay leader who’s teaching a Bible study, and they are working their way through the gospel of Luke and they want to know more about who Luke was and when he wrote this book and kind of the structure of it. They would go to a New Testament Introduction, turn to the section on Luke and that would begin to give their answers to it. So a New Testament Introduction is broken up, usually, across the 27 books. They’re just covered one at a time. This allows for easy reference to those books when someone is studying them or preaching on them.
Zaspel:
Okay, now your own book. Why another NT Introduction? What is a “Biblical-Theological” Introduction to the NT? What contribution are you hoping to make?
Kruger:
When we came out with this new Introduction, folks asked us all the time, don’t we have enough of these? We’ve got a number of really good ones out there; do we really need another one? And on one level they are right. We do have some great Introductions. This is not the first one and we have no illusions that it would be the last. However, as we looked at the landscape of Introductions, we felt like there were still some gaps in what we wanted to accomplish with it. We felt like other introductions had not fully addressed. And really that gets to the essence of the title of it: A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the New Testament. I’ll say a number of things later about what makes this distinctive; but one of the main things that makes it distinctive is that this Introduction really does put the primacy and the focus on the message of these books. And for anyone who’s interested in Introductions to the New Testament and knows anything about them, they know that that’s actually not typically what Introductions do. When you read most Introductions, they tend to be heavily weighted toward background issues, higher critical issues, debates among modern scholars, and there’s hardly any discussion of the message. Usually the message is a paragraph or two or part of a chapter that really goes through it rather quickly, and most of the discussion is on these background questions. What we tried to do in this volume is actually flip that around. And to my knowledge, there’s not many other Introductions that do this. We wanted to make the message primary. We wanted to lay it out and unpack it in a way that was more full-orbed. This doesn’t mean that we don’t address the background issues, but they are addressed more quickly, more streamlined, less bogged down. We are really thrilled about that, because the whole idea behind this book is to help people teach the Bible. That’s the essence of it. We want them to be able to take what they get here, and then take that message and apply it to their audience. So we really wanted the focus to be on the message of these books. That’s part of the rationale for the title of A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the New Testament.
Zaspel:
That really is something unique about it. Typically in a New Testament Introduction, after you’ve gotten through the provenance – who wrote it and who’d he write to and the date and all of that, you might come to a few paragraphs, maybe an outline of the book, surveying it that way; but emphasizing the message is a rare thing. That’s great.
The subtitle of your book is “The Gospel Realized.” Tell us how that notion is significant in your book and for the emphasis you have on the message of each New Testament book.
Kruger:
The title “Gospel Realized,” obviously, is the corollary to the prior volume that Miles Van Pelt has edited. The “Gospel Promised” is the subtitle of the Old Testament Introduction. And those two go together – “the Gospel Promised,” and “the Gospel Realized.” The rationale behind that is that we, in this volume, don’t think that the gospel is a new thing in the New Testament era; it’s not as if it was introduced for the first time. We believe that the idea of salvation by grace alone through a Savior by faith alone is something that’s always been part of God’s people from the very beginning since the fall. So this is the full realization of that salvific plan. Obviously, people are always saved by the same mechanism; but it hadn’t been fully accomplished yet in time and space and it history, so to say that the gospel is being realized is to say that in the New Testament era is the completion of the story that’s already begun in the Old Testament era. We tried to say in this volume is something that I also regularly tell my students; when you read the New Testament, you’re not reading a new book; you’re reading the ending of an old book. You’re actually reading the completion of the story that started long before. And if you don’t understand that you’re reading the end of a story rather than the beginning of a new one, then you’re going to miss the overall import of it. That tells you that our authors in this volume are very keen to make sure that whatever book they are discussing, whether it’s 2 Peter or Luke or 1 Corinthians, that it’s set within the context of the overall flow of redemptive history. That it finds its place in God’s unfolding plan. So this is a way to capture that big timeline that we want to bring the focus on.
Zaspel:
And it is “Gospel Realized” because it is a story of rescue that focuses on Christ.
Kruger:
Absolutely. This is going to be a very Christ centered, gospel centered, type volume where we are interested in making sure the good news of Christ is apparent throughout all the Bible, Old and New, and is central to the message we are bringing. So I think anybody who reads this volume will pick up on that pretty quickly.
Zaspel:
In the Introduction to your book you list a number of “distinctives” that identify your work. Can you highlight some of that for us?
Kruger:
I spent the time in the introduction laying out why a new volume; what’s the rationale for yet another introduction to the New Testament. And I lay out a number of things there that people who check out this volume are going to want to know about. I mentioned a couple of them already, but let me mention a view more. One of the things that we do this volume is make it very accessible to people. So this is not a volume written for our fellow scholars; this is not a volume written for other academics so that there is a sort of in-house discussion or debate; this is designed for pastors and educated laypeople who are teaching the Bible. So we wanted to make this something they could pick up, understand, and have us actually filter it for them by taking out some of the extraneous things that maybe aren’t as pertinent for their Bible study prep and really focusing on things that I think are more important. So this is really a volume that we think has got some accessibility to it.
The other distinctive I had mentioned already, which is the theological message orientation, is certainly one of the big contributions here. And you find that when the chapters are read, that there is significant time spent on the message and the authors approach it in different ways. Some were going to approach it more from a systematic theology angle; some are going to approach it from a more redemptive historical angle. Either way the message is center for what we are doing.
There’s a couple of other things that I think make it unique. One is that it is reformed; it is written by professors all at Reformed Theological Seminary who are New Testament scholars, either past or present. So all of us are committed to the doctrines of grace, the essence of the solas of the Reformation, we have a confessional standard that we are working from. And so someone who is reading this volume is not going to get a smorgasbord theology; it’s going to be a more coherent, unified theology throughout. We think that’s a strength of the book, that it has that commitment to Reformed distinctives.
The final thing I will mention about it in terms of uniqueness is that it is multi-authored. This is unique in volumes like this. Most volumes are either solo authored or have just a couple of authors. This has, obviously, numerous authors across the scope of the book. There are drawbacks to that, certainly, in the sense that you have different voices, different styles and different ways of doing things. But we think the strength is that allows each author to focus in on their theological and academic expertise. And I think this is one of the strengths of the book – you get to hear from people who have done a tremendous amount of work in the specific areas they are writing on. We don’t think there’s really any other New Testament introductions that can offer that kind of honed in focus and we think people will benefit from that in the long run.
Zaspel:
Can you pick a sample for us?
Kruger:
Yes. I think an obvious example for anyone reading this is our professor in Orlando, Chuck Hill, Charles Hill who’s done a tremendous amount of work on Johannine literature, the Johannine epistles and also the book of Revelation. His doctoral dissertation was actually on early patristic millennial views so his expertise on both Revelation and the Johannine letters is unsurpassed. So imagine someone like Chuck Hill writing an introduction that he wrote every chapter in, well he’s an excellent scholar and I’m sure it would be great, but we allowed this book to have him focus in on those specific areas that he has done a lot of work in and really proven himself. That type of experience for the reader is really unique, we think.
Another example I will mention is Guy Waters who has done a tremendous amount of work dealing with Pauline studies, new perspective on Paul, doctrine of justification, and so on. He is writing the chapters on Romans, I & II Corinthians and Galatians; and those are obviously very important books for the gospel message and you are hearing from someone who’s at the top of their field in that area. So that’s exciting. I think the readers are going to benefit from that.
Zaspel:
Tell us about the occasion of this book, its significance with regard to RTS, and the motivation in bringing all this together.
Kruger:
Yes. This started a number of years ago. We are in the current year, 2016, celebrating RTS’s 50th anniversary. That’s a real milestone for us. We were started in 1956. The original campus was, of course, in Jackson, Mississippi, and now we have campuses all over the United States, including the one I’m at in Charlotte, Orlando, Atlanta, D.C., and Houston, New York, and beyond. So, on our 50th Anniversary, we wanted to do something that would capture a bit of what we are about and allow us to have a collaborative project where our professors come together and do something for the church. So that is what this book is designed to be; it is designed to take the content of our classes in a way that hopefully blesses the church and also highlights what we are about at RTS. We are about Biblical authority; we are about redemptive historical Biblical theology; we are about Reformed theology; we are about seeing Christ in all of Scripture and taking that to the church in a practical and pastoral way. So this volume, we think and we hope, embodies who we are as an institution. And so it was dedicated at the 50th Anniversary and Ligon Duncan read the Foreword highlighting that and we are thrilled to be able to do that 2 Volume set on such a special occasion.
Zaspel:
We’re talking to Dr. Michael Kruger, editor of the new Biblical Theological Introduction to the New Testament: The Gospel Realized. It’s an excellent contribution to New Testament studies and a wonderful guide for understanding the New Testament – a resource you’ll not want to be without.
Mike, thanks so much for talking to us today.
Kruger:
Thanks, Fred; great to be with you.
