Walter C. Kaiser Jr. has been coming to Madison for many years. Speaking at Blackhawk Church’s expansive campus at 9620 Brader Way on Thursday evening, October 25, 2012, someone mentioned that Kaiser had also spoken at the church back in the sixties when it was a tiny congregation of the Evangelical Free Church planted on Blackhawk Avenue.
In the intervening decades Kaiser moved from teaching at both Wheaton College and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in suburban Chicago, to become vice president and academic dean at Trinity, then to become a Distinguished Professor of Old Testament at Gordon Conwell Seminary in Massachusetts, and finally president of Gordon-Conwell. As a professor at Trinity he taught a number of Madison pastors and Christian leaders who attended there, and continued to make speaking appearances in Madison, and for organizations such as Madison-based InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.
Ned Hale, a longtime Madison resident and now a retired InterVarsity leader, introduced Kaiser and recalled, “One session with him on apologetics changed our ministry a number of years ago because he gave us handles for important issues of our faith.” Added InterVarsity Christian Fellowship Campus Staff Member Jon Dahl, “It feels like we have a patriarch in our midst.”
Kaiser has helped Christians understand the Old Testament foundation of the faith with books like Hard Sayings of the Old Testament and More Hard Sayings of the Old Testament. He also served as general editor of The Archaeological Study Bible.
Challenging Issues
His talk last Thursday dealt with some of the issues that challenge believers when they read the Old Testament: “Big Money, Holy War, & Polygamy: Why is the Old Testament God for Things I am Against?”
As he addressed each of the three issues–handling wealth, genocide, and polygamy–Kaiser provided a broad variety of biblical texts that added a more nuanced perspective of the issue, and explained why a simple reading of the text is not always the complete story. Kaiser also suggested that having a good understanding of the Bible was important for believers. “God has a point of view for which He will hold each person responsible in the final day,” he said.
He observed that a verse that is often incorrectly translated states not “where there is no vision the people perish,” (Prov. 29:18) but rather, “Where there is no input of the Word of God, the culture goes crazy.” He lamented the lack of input from the Word of God in the contemporary culture and suggested that conditions were indeed reflecting the true translation of that verse.
Kaiser now lives in semi-retirement at a farm near Sheboygan in eastern Wisconsin, but keeps a busy speaking scheduled. His Thursday evening talk was sponsored by a variety of local Christian fellowships: Blackhawk Church, Christ Presbyterian Church, Presbyterian Student Center Foundation (PSCF), Youth With A Mission (YWAM), InterVarsity Graduate and Faculty Ministry, and New College Madison (NCM).