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This episode has been edited for clarity and space.
Gary Burge
My name is Gary Burge, and I am a professor of New Testament. I taught for a very long time at Wheaton College in Wheaton, IL, and I’m now Professor Emeritus there. Then I picked up another job. I think I’m failing at retirement! I joined the faculty of Calvin Theological Seminary, and eventually became the Dean there, and today I direct PhD dissertations at Calvin Seminary. We live in West Michigan as of seven years ago. It was a brand new place to us, and it is lovely. We just enjoy living here so much.
David Capes
Dr. Gary Burge, Gary, good to see you. Welcome to “The Stone Chapel Podcast.” I’m looking forward to our conversation.
Gary Burge
Great to be with you. Yes, I am too. I’m too.
David Capes
We have in common that we both worked on this series together. I’ve finished my book “Matthew Through Old Testament Eyes,” about a year ago. Yours just came out this year. It was a really interesting project that you and I both worked on.
Gary Burge
Yes, it’s a beautiful project. It’s published by Kregel Academic, and it’s a first-rate publication. All of these commentaries are produced at the highest level, and the scholars who are writing them are skilled at what they’re doing. It was delightful to see how this thing came together.
David Capes
When I’m working on a project like this, it takes years to write. I don’t know about you, but in my case, it does. And you go see family, and people say, what are you working on. I always love to ask authors, when people ask what are you writing these days, what did you tell them about writing this book?
Gary Burge
I said, one of the things that we all assume, but we rarely articulate is that Paul was Jewish. Well, that’s a no-brainer. Paul lived and breathed Jewish theology. He had a great theological educational formation, and it was with a rabbi in Jerusalem. He was at the very top of his game when it came to thinking theologically as a Jew. And when he becomes a Christian and he meets Messiah Jesus, it upends his entire world. But it does not upend the way in which he thought. He still thinks like a Jew.
His life, his consciousness, is saturated with the Old Testament, therefore we have to step into his world a little bit and to begin thinking as he thinks in order to understand his letters.
I’d say, I’m working on Galatians and Ephesians, and I’m asking the question: how has the Old Testament and Jewish writing from that period shaped Paul’s thought? It sets up an ordinary commentary in so many ways, but we do have an eye on one thing. What were the scriptural ideas, the Old Testament ideas, the Jewish ideas that were pouring into Paul’s thinking as he wrote out his primary thoughts here in Galatians and Ephesians?
David Capes
I think that’s a great way to frame the whole project. When I was asked that question, I would say something like, I’m asking the question: if we knew the Old Testament as well as Matthew and his readers, how would we read it differently today? The historical question but also how can we enter into that mindset that Paul and his readers had.
Gary Burge
Whenever we talk or explain things, we share a body of assumptions. Our context is filled with allusions. I was just talking to my 11-year-old grandson the other day about a movie I took him to see called “How to Train Your Dragon.” He wants the LEGO set next. I’m thinking to myself, I bet most of our listeners will know something about that movie. They’ll know what a Lego set is. But in 1,000 years, those might be things that will be hard for people to identify unless they do research. Then they would discover what a LEGO is. They would discover what a movie is. When you and I talk, we are always alluding to things in our context. So often, with Paul, we miss what he is saying, because we really don’t have a grasp of his context.
David Capes
This set of commentaries is designed to help us get that bit of leverage on the context.
Gary Burge
Yes, that’s right. And the other thing about the commentary set is, it’s accessible. David, you know, we always write for an intended audience. We know who our reader is going to be. And these books are intended for pastors, teachers, lay persons who have studied the scriptures a good bit. So it’s accessible. It is not filled with Greek that is required of you to know, though we will allude to that all the time. It becomes a wonderful tool that a lot of people can read.
David Capes
Yes. Galatians and Ephesians are two very different books!
Gary Burge
Oh, my goodness, yes!
David Capes
As you entered into these books, did you have expectations that were upended by your research?
Gary Burge
First, you’re right. The two books are in canonical order, so I think that’s why the series is set it up like that. I’m thinking Galatians and Romans would have worked well together. And maybe Ephesians and Colossians.
David Capes
But if it was Romans, you would still be working on it, because there’s about 90 different references to the Old Testament in that book!
Gary Burge
My goodness, and my word count would be completely out of control. You really are switching gears when you’re moving from Galatians to Ephesians. In Galatians, you’re at the raw, front end of Paul’s ministry. I believe it’s his first letter that he writes. Some of the critical ideas that are just forming in his mind are coming now to bear in his ministry. He has seen a problem inside of the church, a misunderstanding of how grace operates, and so he is actually having to work this out in a crisis. He has just completed an extensive missionary trip. He’s discovered that this kind of twisted teaching is inside of his churches, and so he’s trying to address it. He’s trying to build this plane while it’s flying. And you can see, even in the Greek language of Galatians, there’s a kind of raw immediacy inside of it.
There are sentences that are not [proper] sentences.
David Capes
They start and then they trail off.
Gary Burge
It’s like somebody who’s speaking like we are right now. We have fragmented sentences because we want to get the message out so, so quickly. You get to that, and you think, wow, this is dynamic stuff. This is like being in the ER, the theological ER.
When you get to Ephesians, everything is calm. It’s very different. It’s liturgical. I think it is toward the end of Paul’s life. Therefore, Paul is reflecting broadly in large brush strokes about his understanding of the church in relationship to Israel and how a mature church is supposed to operate. In Galatians, he’s on the battlefield, he’s in the trenches. But in Ephesians, he’s now retired, and he’s at the University.
David Capes
He’s the dean of the college, or something like that. I don’t know that we can track the idea that Paul would not have developed theologically over that decade, this tumultuous decade of the 50s. He’s traveling and planting churches and negotiating through all kinds of crazy things that are going on as this movement is rubbing up really close with paganism and pagan ideas. The idea that he himself would not have developed. That he’s static from the very beginning of his ministry, and then at the very end, he’s going to be the same way, have the same values. I know I’ve changed. We do change. And I think he did, and this is a part of the maturing of the apostle.
