I recently read and reviewed From The Finger of God by Philip Ross. He was kind enough to answer a few questions for me about himself, the topic, and the book.

1. Philip, not much is known about you across the web. The bio on the back of your book is fairly vague. I’d like you to tell my readers a little bit about yourself. Where did you go to school, what does it mean to be a theological editor, who are some of your heroes in the faith?

Greg, the bio on my book is indeed rather uninformative, but that’s because there is not much about me worth knowing and definitely nothing that merits broadcasting on the web. Being a theological editor is one aspect of my vague existence. It can mean a variety of things—sometimes the uninterrupted tedium of trying to turn someone’s English into English, sometimes the cruel savagery of determining that the latest manuscript submission should not be allowed to proceed from masochism to sadism, and occasionally more pleasurable pursuits. My most satisfying editorial work has been to produce older writings in a more user-friendly format. This means writing subtitles for books by writers such as Boston, Goodwin, and Owen. The aim is to make it easier for readers to see the shape of classic works and to grasp the point of each section.

As for heroes in the faith, I don’t think I have any. If had to select heroes, I would choose not one or two above all others, but all those unsung men, women, or children who lived in quiet faith and died unnoticed. They obeyed the gospel and prayed without ceasing. Some of them preached for decades with very little fruit. Others laid down their lives rather than deny Christ. Many of them spent their days sinking in deep waters where there is no foothold, yet even in darkness and numbness, still they clung to Christ. To quote Samuel Rutherford, such were believers who ‘never feel the comfort of faith till the splendour of glory glance on their eyes’. This is not heroism. It is something greater. This is faith.

2. If someone is going to write a book I assume they will have a burden for the subject they are writing on. Where has your burden come from to write on the law?

My interest in this subject was not driven by a special interest in biblical law, but by a wider interest in the relationship between the testaments. Where we stand on matters of continuity and discontinuity affects various doctrinal matters—ecclesiological, eschatological, doxological, soteriological, and moral. It also affects how we teach or preach both testaments. While reading on these subjects I noticed that many late twentieth century writers, particularly American evangelicals, tended to dismiss the threefold division of the law with a sentence or two. I found it amazing that writers who claimed to be the most faithful guardians of apostolic doctrine could be so cavalier with almost twenty centuries of Christian teaching. Could it really be the case that men like Martyr, Aquinas, and Calvin were so thick-skulled that they did not notice that the abiding validity of the Decalogue had no biblical basis? Could the same Holy Spirit have led them to hold fast to such teaching, yet led twentieth century exegetes to reject it? Why did he leave the church in such abysmal gloom until the publication of the Schofield Reference Bible? What other foundational beliefs had Christians misguidedly cherished as sound doctrine for the last two millennia?

These were the kind of questions that came into my mind. I neither wanted to believe something that was not rooted in Scripture, nor to embrace teaching that had no more pedigree than some of the prominent scholars of the day. I wanted to find out if the threefold division had a biblical and theological foundation, or whether the twentieth century rejection of the abiding validity of the Decalogue had a solid lineage in the Christian faith. I could not find any work that singly investigated those issues, so that is what led me to the subject.

3. By reading through From the Finger of God I got the sense that it was geared much more toward the academy than the church. However, I think there are a lot of helpful things in it for the church. Could you describe how you see your book serving the church?

The contents of From the Finger of God combines work I have done for the academy and the church, which may account for the duotone aspect that you detect. I would not, however, embrace a dichotomy between the academy and the church even if such a divorce may be what prevails in many places. I find that churches or training schemes that despise academic study generally end up in unconscious thraldom to a particular product of the academy such as biblical theology. They also produce people who, with a summer school or a year of training, feel they have comprehended the incomprehensible and solved every crux interpretum, such that with Bible in hand they trample over the academy and brush aside the creeds, councils, and synods of Christendom as the debris of apostate generations. On the other hand, ambitious academics have a unique ability to produce work which is of no practical use to anyone. Even angels might be left speechless at their fantastic discoveries—the influence of Sufi poetry on Jonathan Edwards or the idea that Jesus had children with Mary Magdalene, to name a couple that I have heard in recent years. This only shows that intellectual ability and madness may happily co-exist in the same person, as may ability and heterodoxy, which is more likely to harm the church.

Hopefully my work in this book falls between those two demented extremes and reflects my desire to hold to ‘the pattern of sound words’ rather than to rearrange it in a piece of avant-garde theological choreography. To the extent that I have achieved that, it may be useful to the church, without being useless to the academy. I will be glad if From the Finger of God helps pastors in their work, if it enables church members to understand what it means to love the Lord with all their hearts and their neighbours as themselves, or even if it contributes a little to Christians across denominations agreeing on the Scriptural answer to such a basic questions as ‘What is sin?’. Beyond that, I hope that this book will increase the church’s dependence on the lamb without blemish who was slaughtered on account of her transgressions. He was the greatest law-keeper that ever lived, yet he feared the penalty of the law more than the greatest sinner. If this book does nothing to increase her love for him then it is simply useless.

4. If you could summarize From the Finger of God in a few statements how would you do that?

Throughout church history, theologians have divided biblical law into moral, civil, and ceremonial categories, believing that Scripture supported this approach (the Westminster Confession of Faith ch. 19 provides the most recent and comprehensive restatement). Towards the end of the twentieth century, some scholars dismissed this threefold division as a dogmatic imposition on Scripture, sometimes because of their methodology or hermeneutical presuppositions.

From the Finger of God argues that if we read the Bible as a coherent, progressive, and self-interpreting whole the ancient threefold division has a secure biblical and theological basis. It appears in embryo in the Old Testament, notably in the way Moses and the prophets treat the Decalogue. When it comes to Jesus’ attitude to the law, the Gospels are in continuity with the Old Testament and present him as law-upholding. Some aspects of the division find support in Acts, but it is the epistles that establish finally the categories and practical-theological claims of this ancient hermeneutical framework. It is of continuing relevance and importance to the church not simply so that we would ‘keep his commandments’, but also that we may have a clear understanding of sin and of Christ’s saving work.

Thanks so much Philip for answering some of my questions and giving my readers some more insight to your book!