An International Journal for Students of Theological and Religious Studies Volume 43 Issue 3 December 2018 EDITORIAL: The Changing Face of Words 339 D. A. Carson STRANGE TIMES: Meta-Madness 343 Daniel Strange How Did Job Speak Rightly about God? 350 Eric Ortlund Miserable but Not Monochrome: The Distinctive 359 Characteristics and Perspectives of Job’s Three Comforters Susanna Baldwin John’s Appropriation of Isaiah’s Signs Theology: 376 Implications for the Structure of John’s Gospel Andreas J. Köstenberger Why Paul Wrote Romans: Putting the Pieces Together 387 Will N. Timmins Self-Deception in Theology 405 Joseph Pak Answering Eastern Orthodox Apologists regarding Icons 417 John B. Carpenter The New Atheist Sledgehammer: Like Epistemological 434 Air Boxing Ernie Laskaris Book Reviews 448 DESCRIPTION Themelios is an international, evangelical, peer-reviewed theological journal that expounds and defends the historic Christian faith. Its primary audience is theological students and pastors, though scholars read it as well. Themelios began in 1975 and was operated by RTSF/UCCF in the UK, and it became a digital journal operated by The Gospel Coalition in 2008. The editorial team draws participants from across the globe as editors, essayists, and reviewers. Themelios is published three times a year online at The Gospel Coalition website in PDF and HTML, and may be purchased in digital format with Logos Bible Software and in print with Wipf and Stock. Themelios is copyrighted by The Gospel Coalition. Readers are free to use it and circulate it in digital form without further permission, but they must acknowledge the source and may not change the content. EDITORS BOOK REVIEW EDITORS Editor: Brian Tabb Old Testament Systematic Theology and Bioethics Bethlehem College & Seminary Peter Lau David Garner 720 13th Avenue South Malaysian Theological Seminary Westminster Theological Seminary Minneapolis, MN 55415, USA Seremban, Malaysia 2960 Church Road [email protected] [email protected] Glenside, PA 19038, USA [email protected] Contributing Editor and President: New Testament Donald A. Carson David Starling Ethics and Pastoralia Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Morling College Rob Smith 2065 Half Day Road 120 Herring Road Sydney Missionary and Bible College Deerfield, IL 60015, USA Macquarie Park, NSW 2113, Australia 43 Badminton Road [email protected] [email protected] Croydon NSW 2132, Australia [email protected] Contributing Editor: Daniel Strange History and Historical Theology Oak Hill Theological College Geoff Chang Mission and Culture Chase Side, Southgate Hinson Baptist Church Jackson Wu London, N14 4PS, UK 1315 Southeast 20th Avenue International Chinese Theological [email protected] Portland, OR 97214, USA Seminary [email protected] East Asia Administrator: Andy Naselli [email protected] Bethlehem College & Seminary 720 13th Avenue South Minneapolis, MN 55415, USA [email protected] EDITORIAL BOARD Gerald Bray, Beeson Divinity School; Hassell Bullock, Wheaton College; Lee Gatiss, Wales Evangelical School of Theology; Paul Helseth, University of Northwestern, St. Paul; Paul House, Beeson Divinity School; Hans Madueme, Covenant College; Ken Magnuson, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Gavin Ortlund, First Baptist Church, Ojai; Jonathan Pennington, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Mark D. Thompson,Moore Theological College; Paul Williamson, Moore Theological College; Mary Willson, Second Presbyterian Church; Stephen Witmer, Pepperell Christian Fellowship; Robert Yarbrough, Covenant Seminary. ARTICLES Themeliostypically publishes articles that are 4,000 to 9,000 words (including footnotes). Prospective contributors should submit articles by email to the managing editor in Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) or Rich Text Format (.rtf). Submissions should not include the author’s name or institutional affiliation for blind peer-review. Articles should use clear, concise English and should consistently adopt either UK or USA spelling and punctuation conventions. Special characters (such as Greek and Hebrew) require a Unicode font. Abbreviations and bibliographic references should conform to The SBL Handbook of Style (2nd ed.), supplemented by The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.). For examples of the the journal's style, consult the most recent Themelios issues and the contributor guidelines. REVIEWS The book review editors generally select individuals for book reviews, but potential reviewers may contact them about reviewing specific books. As part of arranging book reviews, the book review editors will supply book review guidelines to reviewers. Themelios 43.3 (2018): 339–42 EDITORIAL The Changing Face of Words — D. A. Carson — D. A. Carson is emeritus professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and president of The Gospel Coalition. nyone who reads thoughtfully knows that words often change their meaning with time and context. Christians are a “peculiar people,” the KJV tells us, only “peculiar” did not mean in 1611 what it means today. Sometimes an older meaning of a word continues in a restricted sec- Ator of the culture, even though most people use it in quite a different way: e.g., for most readers today, God’s gift is not “unspeakable” but “indescribable” (2 Cor 9:15), even though a conservative fringe of the populace confuse the two words. Sometimes a difference in meaning or overtone is triggered not by the passage of time, but by a different context. “Redemption” in the arcane legal terminology of a mortgage document does not conjure up exactly the same images as the use of the word in the New Testament. All of this is common knowledge. These examples are innocuous precisely because the change in meaning is widely recognized. Far more inimical to careful conversation are those expressions whose meanings, or whose associations, are frequently unrecognized. Here are a few of them. 1. Guilt For many decades now, “guilt” has sometimes referred to culpability, but very commonly referred to what might better be thought of as feelings of guilt. Our judicial systems try to establish the guilt or innocence of accused parties, regardless of whether those parties feel guilty; by contrast, our counselors often focus their attention on the guilt feelings of their clients, taking relatively little notice of the extent to which guilt feelings may be grounded in guilt. All of this, as I indicated, has been understood for a long time. When preachers talk about “penal substitutionary atonement,” they understand that the punishment is merited: before God the party is guilty and deserves the penalty which, in the case of substitutionary atonement, is discharged by another. This does not mean that wise pastors overlook the terrible burden of guilt feelings. Guilt feelings may be the psychological result of real guilt. Sometimes, however, people feel terribly guilty over things that have no valid tie to real guilt (as, for example, when a woman is sexually assaulted as she walks home from work, yet labors for years under guilt feelings [or shame? See further below.]). The careful application of passages about the cross of Christ rightly addresses both our guilt and our feelings of guilt. Efforts to expunge the latter without addressing the former may leave a sinner feeling better about themselves, but still unreconciled to God; and exclusive emphasis on addressing the real guilt before God may generate a cerebral grasp of the nature of penal substitution without providing much comfort. All of this is common discourse in Evangelical and Reformed circles, and in some others as well. The reason for bringing it up again is that current cultural pressures are making the potential 339 Themelios misunderstandings worse, and harder to clear up. To incur guilt, one must have committed an offense, whether against another individual, against the state (or the law, or the crown, or the like), or against God. Some offenses (e.g., theft) against individuals can be addressed by restitution (perhaps with an additional percentage, as in the OT); some cannot (e.g., rape). Traditionally, to avoid a swamp of subjectivity or, worse, a vendetta, most cultures have established a codification of personal offenses and the corresponding punishments for the guilty. Steal someone’s cow, and this is what will happen to you. Today, however, even though much of such codification still prevails, so much emphasis in Western culture is laid on the individual and his or her “rights” that new offenses against the individual are being discovered (or invented) every day. Who decides when an “offense” against an individual has been committed? When the individual feels offended? There is now not only tension between being guilty and feeling guilty, but between being guilty according to some codification of law and feeling the other party is guilty even though no code has been breached (or it has been breached only by the most egregiously creative legal extensions). More serious is the culture’s increasing suspicion of external authority, whether that of God, of the state, or of traditional values. The broad sweep of what that looks like, for good and ill, has been discussed endlessly and need not be canvassed again here. For our purposes it is enough to observe that the traditional understanding of guilt, of culpability, over against guilt feelings, requires the authority of a God or a state or an adopted statute to transgress. If I become my own authority for right and wrong, it is difficult to see how there can be any form of “guilt” that transcends guilt feelings. In that case, there is no need for a sacrifice to deal with that guilt, either. So in our evangelism, we simply must reserve space for talking about the God who is offended, and thus the nature of guilt, and thus God’s solution to this guilt. The gospel provides more than psychological comfort. 2. Shame For several decades, missionaries and other culture commentators have pointed out that while much of the Western world fastens its attention on guilt, most of the Eastern world fastens its attention on shame.