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Originally posted by Wannabee
Dr. Clark,
Temple, taken literally, is a building. I hope we can agree on that. Simply and clearly speaking, if we were to speak to the average person of any time, in any place, and refer to a temple a mental image of a physical place would come to mind.
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Well, actually, no we don't agree. The new covenant church is LITERALLY the temple.
There was a Solomonic temple and a Second Temple. They aren't any longer.
Christ was literally (if "literal' = the intent of the divine and human authors of Scripture) "the temple."
"Destroy this temple...." They all thought he was speaking about "the temple," but they were wrong. He was speaking of himself.
The function of the two temples in redemptive history was to point to Christ. That was their divinely intended purpose. When they had fulfilled their purpose, they were destroyed.
As I said, Moses (including the temple) works for Christ, not the reverse.
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We can understand it to mean body because of NT passages.
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No, if you'll permit me to be direct, you don't get to establish a priori what "temple" must mean. Clearly Jesus and the Apostles took a dim view of what most ordinary folk thought about most things.
Most ordinary folk were expecting Messiah to arrive on a white stallion and, to paraphrase a movie, "open up a can" on the Romans. He came on a donkey and submit to brutal humilation.
That may be "no way to run a kingdom," except it was Jesus' way of running his kingdom.
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What would the original readers thought of when reading "temple" in this passage?
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If you're referring to the OT then the answer is twofold, who knows really and who cares?
Now that's a little hyperbolic, but the point I'm trying to make is this, the quest to know what Isaiah might have understood by the promise of the virgin birth is fruitless! The quest to find a contemporaneous fulfillment of the same is equally fruitless.
We know what "and a virgin shall be with child" means. We know what God thinks it means. We know what the gospel writers thought it means.
What else do we need to know?
What did Isaiah think about the suffering servant? Who knows? Maybe he was puzzled? We know what it means however, because the deacon explained it to the Eunuch and Luke recorded it for us.
The apostolic interpretation of Scripture is not just one option among many. It is THE interpretation of Scripture.
That's why I said earlier that if I must choose between the apostles and Ryrie, I choose the apostles.
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This is where the NT is being used to interpret the OT. But shouldn't the OT meaning be understood in its own context first?
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I don't accept the implied premise that the apostles didn't do this. I don't accept the implied premise that the Apostles did poor exegesis. See Greg Beale's work on this. It was his PhD diss and he's published articles on it. He makes a brilliant case that, contra the assumption by many, the apostles did very good exegesis and we should follow not only their conclusions but their method.
We really should repent of our (I am guilty of this) high-handed approach to the apostolic reading of Scripture. We've been deeply influenced by the Modern notion that we're better, more rational, and more clever than everyone else.
rsc