The Promise of Elijah’s Arrival

The Promise of the Arrival of Elijah in Malachi and the Gospels
—
Walter C. Kaiser, Jr.

Was John the Baptist the fulfillment of Malachi’s prediction about Elijah the prophet who was to come before that great day of the Lord comes? The hermeneutical solution to this question is offered in a generic fulfillment, or what the older theologians called the novissima. Therefore, Elijah has come “in the spirit and power” witnessed in John the Baptist, and will yet come in the future. Generic prophecy has three foci: (1) the revelatory word, (2) all intervening historical events which perpetuate that word, and (3) the generic wholeness (one sense or meaning) in which the final or ultimate fulfillment participates in all the earnests that occupied the interim between the original revelatory word and this climactic realization.

* * *

The NT’s interest in the prophet Elijah may be easily assessed from the fact that he is the most frequently mentioned OT figure in the NT after Moses (80 times), Abraham (73), and David (59); Elijah’s name appears 29 or 30 times.¹

Even more significant, however, are the six major and explicit references to Elijah in the Synoptic Gospels. There, some of Jesus’ contemporaries identified our Lord—in the second of three opinions—as Elijah (Mark 6:14–16; Luke 9:7–9). Jesus’ disciples were also aware of this popular confusion, for they too repeated it (Matt 16:13–20; Mark 8:27–30; Luke 9:18–21). This connection between Jesus and Elijah continued to hold its grip on many even up to the time of the crucifixion, for those who heard Jesus’ fourth word from the cross thought he was calling on Elijah to rescue him (Matt 27:45–49; Mark 15:33–36). And who should appear on the mount of transfiguration but Moses and Elijah, talking to Jesus (Matt 17:1–19; Mark 9:2–10; Luke 9:28–36)?

But there were two other references in the Synoptics which referred to a future coming of Elijah. One came when Jesus’ disciples asked why the scribes claimed it was necessary that Elijah had to come first (Matt 17:10–13; Mark 9:11–13). Jesus responded that “Elijah had come” and said it in such a way that the disciples knew that he meant he was John the Baptist. If any doubt remained, Jesus said just that in Matt 11:14—”he is Elijah, the one who was to come.”

However, when one turns from the Synoptics to the Fourth Gospel, none of these six references are present. Instead, we find John categorically denying that he was either Christ, “that [Mosaic] prophet,” or Elijah (John 1:21, 25)! John’s clear disavowal is so stark by way of contrast with the way he is presented in the Synoptics that the Synoptics and John appear to contradict one another flatly. What explanation can be offered for this phenomenon? And what impact does it have on the question of the NT author’s use of OT citations?^[1]

Download the entire paper here.

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¹ J. Jeremias, “ἡλ(ε)ιας,” TDNT 2 (1964) 934. The disparity of 29 or 30 is due to a textual problem in Luke 9:54.

^[1] Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., “The Promise of the Arrival of Elijah in Malachi and the Gospels”, Grace Seminary, Grace Theological Journal Volume 3 (Grace Seminary, 1982; 2002), 3:221-222.

Dr. Kaiser on the Promise-Plan Theme

There’s a 3 minute video of Dr. Kaiser talking about how the Promise Plan Theme became important to him here.

The Promise-Plan of God

The latest book by Dr. Kaiser is a re-working of his previous Toward An Old Testament Theology, plus the addition of welcome comments on the New Testament side of Biblical Theology. Overall, it succeeds in simplifying the sometimes intense complexity of Toward An Old Testament Theology.

Dr. Kaiser proposes that there is indeed a unifying center to the theology and message of the Bible that is indicated and affirmed by Scripture itself. That center is the promise of God. It is one all-encompassing promise of life through the Messiah that winds itself throughout salvation history in both the Old and New Testaments, giving cohesiveness and unity to the various parts of Scripture.

After laying out his proposal, Kaiser works chronologically through the books of both testaments, demonstrating how the promise is seen throughout, how the various sub-themes of each book relate to the promise, and how God’s plan to fulfill the promise progressively unfolds. Here is a rich and illuminating biblical theology that will stir the emotion and the
intellect.

The Promise-Plan of God

The Old Promise & the New Covenant

The Old Promise And The New Covenant: Jeremiah 31:31-34
Walter C. Kaiser, Jr.
(then) Associate Professor of Old Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Bannock-burn, Deerfield, Illinois.

One of the most important, yet most sensitive of all theological texts, is the new covenant theme of Jeremiah 31:31–34. Hardly has the exegesis of this passage begun when the interpreter discovers to his great delight and consternation that he is involved in some of the greatest theological questions of our day. No matter what he says, some evangelicals are bound to be scandalized because of their commitments either to a covenantal or dispensational understanding of theology. Nevertheless, the issues are too exciting and the passage is too important for a simple retreat to past theological battlelines. For one thing, God’s action in historical events has made the contemporary evangelical too responsible and blameworthy for him to simply repeat the previous generation’s theology. For another, too many excellent points have been made by both of the current evangelical schools of interpretation to abandon the attempt for a reproachment.

The Issues At Stake

The time is now ripe for evangelical scholarship to restate for our age our credos on the following relationships: (1) the amount of continuity and discontinuity between the two testaments, (2) the separate and/or identical parts played by Israel and the Church in the composition of the people and purpose of God in the past and the future, and (3) the crucial importance of authorial will, i.e., the truth as intended by the writers of Scripture as a basis for resolving the present stalemate on a hermeneutical stance and a Biblical philosophy of history. This latter question is handled so brilliantly in its basic theoretical argumentation by E. D. Hirsch that no attempt will be made to repeat his invincible arguments here. Evangelicals would be well advised to study this volume carefully and then apply its insights to such debate-able areas as eschatological hermeneutics. The other two questions however, will be features in the ensuing discussion.

Download the entire paper here.

God’s Promise Plan And His Gracious Law

God’s Promise Plan And His Gracious Law
Walter C. Kaiser, Jr.
as published in Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society Volume 33, Page 289
The Evangelical Theological Society, September, 1990

The way to test the greatness and incisiveness of any truly evangelical theology is to ask how it relates Biblical law to God’s gospel of grace. The history of the Church’s achievement on this issue has not been remarkable or convincing.

The so-called three uses of the law were vigorously debated by the Reformers, and more recently by their descendants, but with few clear exegetical results that have stood the test of time….

Download the entire paper here.

Hermeneutics of Promise Theology

The Eschatological Hermeneutics Of “Epangelicalism”: Promise Theology
Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., M.A. (now Ph.D.)
(then) Associate Professor in Old Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois

Amongst Biblical scholars, no question has begged more insistently for an answer than the problem of the Christian interpretation of the O.T. No other issue seems to get closer to the heart of the problem than the concept of prophecy and the Old and New Testament allusions to specified fulfillments, for “whether modern scholars like it or not, prediction was the way the New Testament writers themselves related the testaments … “

Evangelicals have not doubted, at least in theory, that there is a unity to be found between the testaments and that verbal prediction of the future was one of the ways this unity evidenced itself. This admission immediately scandalizes a large segment of Biblical scholarship which feels that the Claus Westermann collection of Essays on O.T. Hermeneutics (Richmond, 1963) has effectively said “no” to that type of intra-testamental and inter-testamental correspondence; rather the relationships are now to be sought on a level of a typological correspondence; between the events of history (not the words) of the two testaments.

Evangelical scholarship, while acknowledging O.T. revelation to be a revelation in a person and in historical events, also has found a Biblical claim to revelation on the verbal level. This increases the complexity of the answer to the problem of the amount, and kind of continuity/discontinuity between the Old and New Testament. The questions come quickly: What parts of the text are to be jettisoned and on what bases? What about Israel and the Church? Does our Lord have two peoples or one at a time in the history of redemption? Certainly there is growth and progress in the unfolding of revelation since Hebrews uses the comparative word “better” and Jeremiah and Hebrews talk about a “new covenant.” Wherein, then, lies the continuity? In a covenant? In a system of redemption? Or are there distinguishable and conditional economies laid out in stages of testing and failure? What of the mass of O.T. predictions made to Israel and reflected in such N.T. passages as Romans 9–11? Does the Church fulfill them? Interrupt them? Or partially continue them? …

Download the entire paper here.

The Promise

The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “ALL THE NATIONS WILL BE BLESSED IN YOU.”…for we also have had the gospel preached to us, just as (those Moses led out of Egypt) did… and we preach to you the good news of the promise made to the fathers… for the promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call to Himself… This is the promise which He Himself made to us: eternal life.- Galatians 3:8 (Genesis 12:3); Hebrews 4:2; Acts 13:32; Acts 2:39; 1 John 2:25

What

THE PROMISE DOCTRINE
The promise of God is one of the greatest unifying themes running throughout the various books of the Bible and binding them into one organic whole. The N.T. men regarded this one Promise as the theme of the whole O.T. Paul argued this way before Agrippa in Acts 26:6–7 saying “And now I stand to be judged for the hope of the promise made of God unto our fathers; whereunto our twelve tribe nation, strenuously serving night and day, hopeth to obtain …”  Paul’s hope was located in the promise. It is expected that someone who is on trial and whose life is on the line would “formulate most carefully the central article of [one's] creed.” The most surprising fact is that the apostle did not base his appeal to Agrippa on a number of scattered prediction in the OT (which would be accurate enough in substance but certainly not scriptural in form). Instead, Paul founded his case on a single, definite, all-embracing promise. And the context clearly indicated what promise Paul meant – the same one given to Eve, Shem, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David. Thus, the offense for which Paul stood accused was the offense that the promise included the Gentiles as well as the Jews! The writer of Hebrews (6:13–15, 17) says Abraham “having endured, …obtained the promise.” Isaac and Jacob were also “heirs with him of the same promise” (Heb. 11:9). There is the formula: “the promise made of God unto our fathers”; not promises, but promise, not predictions, but promise, not a promise, but THE promise doctrine.

This one promise stretches over the total history of the Scriptures in an arc from promise to fulfillment.  Often the language of the promise is cast in technical terms of collective nouns (e.g., “seed”) and in carefully chosen phrases  deliberately reflecting a “corporate solidarity” of a representative office or a personified people, which finally narrows down to the man Christ Jesus (e.g., Son, Servant, Messiah, Holy One, Chosen One, Branch, etc.). In this way of speaking, the will of God remains single and ever open to its ultimate fulfillment in the triumph of the Man of Promise, but the interim between promise and fulfillment is not filled with separate meanings or senses to these promises which will await another and later sense or meaning in Christ (double fulfillment), but rather the interim is filled with a series of fulfillments or historical events which in themselves as corporate parts of the single plan of God, as seen in this representative office or personified people, constitute a further realization and/or “pledge” of the final accomplishment of that multi-form salvation and triumph of God. Hence the expressions are deliberately made inclusive of this larger whole by the writers of Scripture, to denote either the many ( Israel ) or the one person (Christ) and so Paul argues in Galatians 3:16, 19. This is neither a double meaning, equivocation of terms, rabbinic exegesis or spiritualizing the text for Christian edification; on the contrary it argues that the writers of Scripture knowingly intended that both their readers and our contemporaries might see that the Promise doctrine was a generic unit with a series of parts, separated by time intervals, but expressed in a language which deliberately could be applied and was applied to the whole process: its nearest fulfillments or even ultimately to the crowning fulfillment which supplied the perspective, joy, and hope for each contemporary manifestation. Only on this basis can one explain the “Servant” simultaneously being explicitly designated as “Israel” (Isa. 44:1 ) and the person of Christ (Isa. 52:13–14) or the “Son” at once being explicitly designated “all Israel” (Ex. 4:22, Hos. 11:1 ) and Christ (Matt. 2:15).

Therefore, the promise of the “seed” to Abraham is “fulfilled” when Isaac is born and the promise of “a place” is “fulfilled” when Joshua takes Canaan. Fulfilled, yes, but only as “pledges” of the one who can gather up all of the manifold parts of the one promise in himself in their ultimate fulfillment. Thus, a connection is seen between the doctrine of the promise and many of the great doctrines of the gospel, e.g., the salvation of the Gentiles (Gal. 3:8 , 29), the gift of the Holy Spirit (Gal. 3:14; Acts 2:33; 38–39; Luke 24:49; Acts 1:4–5), and the Kingdom of God (Ps. 2:8 ; 45:8; Luke 1:51–55).

It would appear that the Epistle to the Hebrews does not warrant a radical break between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’…The Old Testament saints already participate in the New Age in an anticipatory fashion, even though chronologically-speaking they still belong to the old order… The ‘new’ is only different from the old in the sense of completion. ”The “new” began with the “old” promise made to Abraham and David. Its renewal perpetuated all of those promises previously offered by the Lord and now more. Therefore Christians presently participate in the new covenant now validated by the death of Christ. They participate by a grafting process into the Jewish olive tree and thus continue God’s single plan.  However, in the midst of this unity of the “people of God” and “household of faith” there is an expectation of a future inheritance. The “hope of our calling” and the “inheritance” of the promise (in contradistinction to our present reception of the promise itself) awaits God’s climactic work in history with a revived national Israel, Christ’s second advent, his kingdom, and the heavens and the new earth. In that sense, the new covenant is still future and everlasting but in the former sense, we are already enjoying some of the benefits of the age to come. With the death and resurrection of Christ the last days have already begun (Heb. 1:1), and God’s grand plan as announced in the Abrahamic-Davidic-New Covenant continues to shape history, culture and theology.

The book of Hebrews “notes the difference between receiving the promise and receiving what is promised. In receiving the promise, recipients are declared heirs; in receiving what is promised, they obtain their inheritance” (Heb. 9:15). 

This promise is eternally operative, immutable and irrevocable as witnessed by Hebrews 6:13, 17–18 where God made a promise to Abraham and swore by himself “to show more abundantly unto the heirs of the promise the immutability of his counsel …”  Nor does this immutability concern just the “spiritual seed,” but the “national seed” also as shown by the prophets prediction in Zechariah 10:9–12, after Israel’s return from the Babylonian exile and Paul’s discourse in Romans 9–11.

sampled from:
Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., “The Eschatological Hermeneutics Of ‘Epangelicalism’: Promise Theology“, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 13:2 (Spring 1970), pp. 92-99

Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., “The Old Promise And The New Covenant: Jeremiah 31:31-34“, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 15:1 (Winter 1972) pp. 12-23

Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., “The Theology of the Old Testament”, Expositors Bible Commentary (Zondervan 1979), Volume I-Articles, pp 285-305

Walter C. Kaiser Jr., Toward Rediscovering the Old Testament (Zondervan 1987), pp. 89

Who

From what I am able to gather, Promise Theology was first taught by Dr. Willis Judson Beecher (Presbyterian) at Princeton Theological Seminary during the Stone Foundation Lectures between 1902 and 1903. These lectures have been pulished in book form as “The Prophets and the Promise – Being For Substance“.  Dr. Beecher’s biography can be found in this article from Cayuga County, New York, 1904, ‘Brief Sketches – Men of Affairs and Professions‘, third column from the right, fifth paragraph down. His photo may be found in the same publication in ‘Photographic Reproductions – Men of Affairs and Professions‘, far right at the top.

Picking up the Epangelical baton is Dr. Walter Christian Kaiser, Jr. (Evangelical Free Church of America). Dr. Kaiser (PhD. Brandeis university) is the Colman M. Mockler Distinguished Professor of Old Testament and President Emeritus of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hampton, Massachusetts. His bio and photo may be found on the GCTS Faculty page. He has taught at Wheaton College and at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Dr. Kaiser has written numerous books (which I detail elsewhere on this site) including Toward an Exegetical Theology, Hard Sayings of the Old Testament, “Exodus” in the Expositor’s Bible Commentary, “Leviticus” in The New Interpreter’s Bible: Volume 1, A History of Israel, and The Promise-Plan of God, and co-authored An Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics. Dr. Kaiser and his wife, Marge, currently reside in Cedar Grove, Wisconsin.