Another wonderful scholar has gone home to be with the Lord. Meredith Kline was a brilliant Old Testament scholar who did a lot of ground breaking work on covenant theology which many scholars refer to today, he saw the link between the Suzerain-Vassal treaties and the covenants in the Bible. He also did a lot of work on the framework view of creation.
He was an ordained minister in the OPC and he taught at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and California.
And he wrote a number of really hard to read books on the covenant. I really struggled with Images of the Spirit but had a much easier time with Kingdom Prologue (here is an excerpt for the it that explains covenants) I told my professor that he needed to provide his students with a Kline glossary because it’s hard to understand what he meant by some of phrases he used. Here are some examples:
“As the Omega-point of the creative cloning of the archetypal Glory-temple, the divine design contemplated a living temple of created spirits, God created man in the likeness of the Glory to be a spirit-temple of God in the Spirit” (pg. 21).
The statement in Genesis 1:26 that man is created in the image of God has a “visible point of reference in the Glory-Spirit theophany of Genesis 1:2” (pg. 21). Genesis 2:7 supports this since it states that man was animated by a “divine inbreathing.” This should be understood “as the vitalizing breath of the Spirit” (pg. 21). Psalm 104:29-31; Lamentations 4:20; Ezekiel 37:1-10, 14; Luke 1:35 and John 20:22 all support this interpretation. The plural used in 1:26 is the link between the creation of man and the “Glory-Spirit” in 1:2. “The Glory-cloud curtains the heavenly enthronement of God in the midst of the judicial council of his celestial hosts” (pg. 22). God is addressing an “angelic council of elders.” Support for this is Genesis 1:26, 3:22, 24; 18:2; 19:1;and Isa. 6:8.
The Glory theophany, in which God was present as Logos-Wisdom and Spirit-Power, stood as archetype at the creation of man as God’s image” (pg. 23)
But once your professor explains it to you, it’s really quite brilliant stuff.
Here’s a website that contains a bibliography of his books and articles with links to the articles that can be found online.