May 21, 2011 in Blog by admin
Heralds of the King
Remarks by Dr. Arturo Azurdia
“Preaching Christ from the Old Testament was the name of the class. For three hours each day Dr. Clowney displayed from both exegetical and theological perspectives how the Old Testament relentlessly points to Jesus Christ. Each day my heart burned, aroused by two conflicting emotions: fresh affection (for the glory and greatness of my Savior) and intensifying frustration. I approached Dr. Clowney at the end of the third class and declared, “I can’t preach Jesus Christ if he is not in the text.” I will never forget his response. He smiled, gently put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “You don’t know your Bible well enough.” He was exactly right. I finished the class with a resolve to spend the rest of my life learning how to preach Christ from the entire Bible.”
Arturo G. Azurdia III is associate professor of pastoral theology and director of pastoral mentoring, Western Seminary in Portland, OR, and founder of The Spurgeon Fellowship, the seminary’s ministry to pastors.
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Remembrances
- ~ William Edgar Remembers Dr. Clowney
"Ed’s teaching was mind-boggling. No one had ever explained so many issues using what I now know to be biblical theology, the progressive unfolding of redemptive history, culminating is Jesus Christ, the “yea and amen of the promises of God.” A whole group of us from Harvard did come to Westminster, and we never regretted it for a minute. There we discovered that exegesis was controlled by biblical theology, which in turn yielded the good fruits of systematics. We sat under the likes of Paul Woolley, John Murray, E. J. Young. But Edmund Clowney remained a central inspiration. It was he, more than any of the others, who opened the Bible to us. Ironically, in those days, many of the courses on the Pentateuch or the Psalms or Galatians were little more than painstaking refutations of the German critics. We were no doubt still in the era of Westminster’s origins in controversy, called to “demolish strongholds.” But many of us came from outside the Christian faith and did not worry particularly about these guys with funny names like Gunkel or Mowinckle. We needed basic Bible knowledge, and we got it from Ed Clowney’s courses in, of all things, Practical Theology. Whether homiletics, worship, missions, or the church, his sermon-like lectures took us through one era after another, climaxing in Jesus Christ. As he got more and more excited about the structure of revelation, Ed spoke contagiously about the impossibility of God’s extravagant promises. How would he do it? What about Abraham rising up in the morning to sacrifice the only son of the pledge? For a people in exile, how will the very bells on the horses have the Lord’s name inscribed on them, and the cooking pots in the Lord’s house be like the sacred bowls before the altar? The answer: “Remnant and renewal! Remnant and"
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