Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 68:4 (Dec 2025)
Article: “The Lord God Has Sent Me And His Spirit”: The Divine Missions, The Literal Sense, And Reading The Old Testament
Author: Michael J. Pereira

JETS 68:4 (December 2025) p. 639

“The Lord God Has Sent Me And His Spirit”: The Divine Missions, The Literal Sense, And Reading The Old Testament

Michael J. Pereira

Michael J. Pereira is a PhD student in systematic theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2825 Lexington Rd, Louisville, KY 40208, and managing editor for the Kenwood Bulletin. He may be contacted at [email protected].

Abstract: Many careful works on the nature of Scripture’s literal sense and/or divine and human authorship have been written by scholars in recent years. This essay contributes to this discussion with a twofold argument: 1) the communicative intent of the Old Testament human authors involved an expectation of greater, eschatological revelation of their referent and further illumination of their own inspired writings. 2) God’s full intention in these prophetic writings, which is unveiled only through the missions of the Son and the Spirit, coheres with this limited human intention to produce one literal sense normative for interpretation. I first present a brief theology of the divine missions. Second, I argue that the OT authors expected greater revelation of God and an illumination of their writings to arrive with the coming redemption. Third, I present the hermeneutical significance of the missions and this asymmetrical but unified divine and human intent for a theologically rich literal sense reading of the Old Testament.

Key words: literal sense, Old Testament, Trinity, divine missions, theological interpretation, dual authorship

In recent years, the theological retrieval movement, particularly the revival of classical trinitarian dogmatics, has opened for many people vistas of robust and historically rooted theology and exegetical practices.1 However, this classical trinitarian retrieval has led many to ask questions about the nature of faithful Christian exegesis of the Old Testament (OT). Given the influence of historical-critical hermeneutical instincts even within evangelical scholarship, a Trinitarian reading of the Old Testament presents a unique challenge. But, as John Webster asserted, proper biblical interpretation should be “informed by a theological description of the nature of the biblical writings and their reception, setting them in the scope of the progress of the saving divine Word through time.”2 Thus, the triune God and his communicative and redemptive economy must fundamentally shape proper bibliol-

JETS 68:4 (December 2025) p. 640

ogy and hermeneutics.3 What Scripture is must determi...