I have read many books in my three plus decades of life. My favorite is still The Monster at the End of This Book. It’s pretty hard to top that classic. I’m certain that in some way every book I’ve read has shaped me. But not all of them have been incredibly memorable. I can still remember the main gist of most of the books I’ve read, but that isn’t true of chapters. Yet there are some chapters which have absolutely shaped and changed me. To this end, I agree with John Piper’s statement: “Books don’t change people, paragraphs do — sometimes sentences.”
What I’m going to do over the next few weeks, likely on Friday, is share with you ten chapters which have shaped me. Obviously what has shaped me more than anything are the words of Scripture. But what I intend to do here are share ten chapters which are from borrowed lights. It’s my hope that this will inspire you to pick up these books and at least read these life-shaping chapters.
Chapter 1 and 3 of Dominion and Dynasty
I was assigned this book in my Hermeneutics class my second semester of seminary. This book is part of what is now one of my favorite book series: The New Studies in Biblical Theology. At the time my exposure of to the field of biblical theology was somewhat minimal. I had read a bit of Graeme Goldsworthy and an old book by Vos called Biblical Theology. The gospel-centered movement was in full swing and I was eating it up. But never before had I viewed the Bible the way that this book opened up my eyes to.
The main point of this book is that the Bible isn’t just a bunch of scattered texts but is one Text. That shouldn’t be such a revolutionary point to a guy raised in Baptist churches or who was firmly entrenched in the movement to say that every text points to Jesus, but the way in which Stephen Dempster made this point opened my eyes. I honestly didn’t even know at this point that the Hebrew Bible was in a different order to our English Bibles. Nor did I have any idea what the Tanakh was. I thought it was a Native American wrestler from the 90s.
Here is Dempster’s major point:
…just as an individual book within the canon can be read as a text with a beginning, a body, and a conclusion, with the various parts related to the whole and vice versa, so the canon should be read in the same way. (Dempster, 42)
From this point I was hooked. I cheated a bit by including two chapters here but it was the combination of the two which convinced me. It was one thing to buy into a theory of reading the entire Bible as if it was truly one story. It was quite another to see this put into practice. This is what blew me away in the third chapter.
Dempster tells the entire story of the book of Genesis in this third chapter, but he does it in such a way that the reader truly does see that all the stories are interwoven to tell one big story. He shows how Genesis really does lay the foundation for the rest of the Book. This isn’t just the beginning of time/Creation this is the opening chapter to the greatest book in the world. Seeing biblical theology done this way changed the way I see the Bible, the way I preach the Bible, and the way I see the world.
Though the book might be a bit scholarly for some I’d recommend anyone to give this a read—even if it takes a bit of wrestling and slow reading to understand the concepts. You might start with something like According to Plan, but I wasn’t truly able to see the beauty of doing biblical theology until I read through Dominion and Dynasty.
