Proclaimer Blog
Fresh insights
I like reading theology. Maybe it’s just the way my brain is wired. It’s not that I read theology in place of grappling hard with Scripture for myself and then coming to Bible commentaries and biblical studies.
It’s not (I hope) that I’m filling my mind with a framework that I can neatly shove any Bible passage into, preaching a theological system rather than the content and aim of this particular text. Instead, at its best, I like reading theology most especially when the writer builds his case through a series of insightful and careful readings of Scripture, rather than just stringing together theological assertions and adding a list of ten different Bible verses in brackets at the end.
That’s why I’ll look forward at some point to dipping into volume two of Douglas Kelly’s Systematic Theology, on Christology, because a review promises me that he regularly does the former. I’ve also been stirred recently by the same kind of thing in Donald Macleod’s little book of short essays on Christ, From Glory To Golgotha. Writing of the Transfiguration, he says that it was an encouragement from the Father to the Son: presumably Jesus did not stand talking with Elijah and Moses simply to make a show to the three disciples who were watching for their benefit. The Father, says Macleod, is reminding Jesus of his own essential glory; is giving him a foretaste of the future transformation of his humanness; and is giving him a glimpse of what his death will mean for others.
Are these going to be my headings in a sermon on the Transfiguration? Probably not! But does Macleod capture something significant in the way the Transfiguration is related to us in Scripture, and the context in which it is set in the Gospels? I think he does, and adding that to the spectacles with which I read the Transfiguration can only help.