JY: Welcome to GearTalk, a podcast on biblical theology. Today Jason interviews Tom about his recently completed dissertation on book one of the Psalms.

JD: Welcome to GearTalk. This is Jason DeRouchie, back with Tom Kelby, and I am going to pilot the ship this morning because I want to interview Tom. This was a big week in the life of the Kelby home, at least counting the last decade, and I want to talk to Tom about it, or maybe I should officially call him Dr. Kelby. So Tom, what happened this week?

TK: This week was a big week. This week, Sarah, my wife, and I came down to Kansas City and defended the dissertation I’ve been working on book one of the Psalms. And actually it’s pretty awesome because my doctoral father in this project has been you, Jason, and so you are more intimately aware of this whole process I’ve been in than anybody really, and so I was able to talk about it and it was the second part of completing this road. The first part was obviously writing the dissertation and then defending it in front of you and Dr. David Howard, my second reader.

JD: What a joy it was to gather with you Tuesday morning, and then with that to have your girl who got to visit Kansas City and our Kansas City home for the first time, and it was appropriate that she would be able to be here for the defense. She wasn’t actually in the room when you were defending, but that she could be here because she has been part of this from the beginning, such a massive component to this entire process of the PhD.

TK: Yeah, even from the day we first decided, yes, this would be a good and important thing and feel like it would be a help to the church. We were standing together and actually received an email from you way back, just saying, wondering if you would consider working on this, just reflections we had had on the Psalms for quite some time, but Sarah and I together, saying, we feel like this would be a really good thing and we’re going to do this together.

JD: What a gift wives are in this whole journey, intimately involved in the calling that he gives couples, and without our girls, we couldn’t do what we do and—

TK: Absolutely.

JD: Such a gift. And so I just want to take this moment to honor Sarah who has truly been such a support and even a sounding board for you through this entire process.

I remember, Tom, it was the very first semester that I was part of the Midwestern Seminary faculty. We were still living on campus and I was walking around an empty neighboring apartment talking to you on the phone, following up on this email that I had sent you raising the possibility of entering in on this journey. And I want—I’d love if you could take us back to that point and kind of bring readers through or listeners through because I’m sure so many don’t have any grasp as to one, why you would get a PhD. On Tuesday you entered into our home after the defense and one of our sons is struggling with some breathing issues and you said, “Oh, I can look at that. I’m a doctor.”

So to recognize that there’s different kinds of doctors out there and why, just take us back what, maybe before you even talk about why now at this stage or you could start there, why now at this stage in your life and ministry, did you enter into an extended year process of getting another degree and then just share with our listeners a little bit about what that process actually entails because it doesn’t start with just sitting down and writing a book. There are years preceding that at least within our American PhD system.

TK: Yeah, the where this started for me was, and you were an intimate part of these conversations, it were thoughts that were forming regarding the book of Psalms and particularly what started way back was how the apostles interacted with the Psalms and applied them to the Lord Jesus and having questions about commentaries I was reading, books I was reading, sermons I preached or sermons I was hearing and feeling a disconnect between what the apostles were doing and what it seems like so many of us at least were doing. And you and I had lots of conversations. I don’t know if someday even those emails back and forth—it would be, I’ve thought about that, it would be fun just to publish those in some way because asking questions of each other and pushing but a reason to get a PhD—there would be many, many good reasons. One would be just the desire to teach in a seminary setting. For us, so I would say for myself and for Sarah, the reason really boiled down to a belief about what was happening in the book of Psalms and a thought that if I would be proposing a different approach to the book of Psalms, which I feel like the Word of God presents this approach, that it would actually need to come from—it would need to take the steps for people to take it seriously and I would need to put myself through the steps necessary to make sure I’m not missing steps or I’m not taking a shortcut and presenting something which hasn’t been carefully considered from all angles. An example I’ve used with people is if somebody came up with a new medicine and they said, “Hey, my buddy developed this in his garage,” you would say, “Wait a minute. This didn’t—no doctors looked at this? Where did this come from?” We have to take God’s Word that seriously and say it demands that close of study. And so that’s where this came from: a desire to carefully examine thoughts that I was having on the book of Psalms and to say I want to push that forward and see where that goes, see if it’s true

JD: And what a blessing to have that opportunity to put it down on paper. You mentioned PhD, that’s the kind of doctorate you received. It’s called a doctor of philosophy and it’s the general research doctorate. That’s the title that’s given to it, a research doctorate here in the United States, and it requires you to take both extended coursework advanced beyond what you would get at a master’s level and then to write a book that is engaging the highest level scholarship in the world and tackling a question that maybe even others have asked but not answering it in the same way, or it could be a completely new question that no one has ever asked before.

Now before we get into the research question itself and the thesis, just clarify for us: you have this question, this topic, this idea that you’ve been wrestling with and you’re feeling the need to actually address it at an even deeper level to really consider: is this legitimate? Now that by itself is a significant task and a reasonable task, but why for you at this time in your ministry did you sense this indeed was right? Because God has established you, you’ve pastored a church, you’re now overseeing a fellowship of churches, you’ve been the president of a mission organization for two and a half decades and the Lord is blessing that service. You’ve been writing and so many are already being blessed by what you’re doing. Why now at such a time did you alter your schedule and for how long has it been, Tom, a full four years, four and a half years?

TK: It’s been four, and graduation will be five years.

JD: Okay, so why at such a time as this did it seem important enough? Was it simply the topic that drove you to reorient your schedule and commit to such a highly demanding journey?

TK: Yeah, that’s a really good question, and you had mentioned it, that the idea of an American PhD, the American model, which would differ from models used in other places like in Great Britain, includes a heavy load of course work before writing the dissertation. I am thankful for that. I think that was important for me in particular, but why now? I made a joke with you when we started. I was like, “Jason, I would be like the oldest guy in the PhD program,” and you paused and you said, “No, there might be somebody older.”

So the thought though was a love of the book of Psalms had been growing in my heart for some time. An approach had been clarifying that I believed, going back now years, would be significantly different from what I’d grown up with, at least, in what I was reading, and I believed it would be a help to the church. And people sometimes say write the book that you would want to read yourself, and just seeing that I believe this approach would be a blessing to the church and would warrant someone taking the time to work it through carefully. And so that’s why my wife and I decided to do it when we got your email just saying I think this would be something for you to consider, Sarah said as we’re praying about it together, we’re standing in the back of our—Sarah has a store we obviously do together but in the town by us and it has a woodworking shop in it and we were standing in the back in the woodworking area and she just said, “I got chills,” and we prayed together and it was like the Lord put something in our heart of do this thing.

So, and actually that sort of component of how something is built, almost a woodworking-ish feel, readers of the dissertation will find that in certain aspects of it certainly.

JD: Yes, and I hope to come back to even that woodworking theme toward the end of our conversation today. This wasn’t only a book that you had, that you wrote, right? The book that you would want to read, you wrote the book that I would want to read and one of the privileges I have when I am recognizing I don’t have time to do all that I hope to do is to surround myself with folks like you who are able to do the kind of legwork I’ve not been able to do yet and go further than I have, and it’s such a joy to watch this process work its way out one more time. Share with us just the title of your book and the specific research question as you framed it that you felt needed an answer.

TK: So the title is, and by the way, I asked, so at one point Jason, you and I have spent so much time talking about the Psalms, so at one point I said, “Jason, you should do this,” and recognizing you didn’t have time to do this was a—so that was something at one point, just thinking Jason, you have a platform, you could do this thing, and not knowing at the time that Jason’s way of doing this would be saying, “Why don’t you do it?”

So the title is “Christ’s Prayers and the Saints’ Songs: The Eschatological King and his People in Book One of the Psalter.”

JD: Eschatological is a big word.

TK: It is a big word.

JD: So clarify for us right away, why didn’t you just say the king or why didn’t you just say the Messiah?

TK: Right, so the eschatological—if the word refers to last or last things, people sometimes talk about the eschaton, the end. So the idea is this is the last king. This is the king who will be the king forever. And the reason I didn’t use Christ or Messiah in the title and really almost throughout the entire book, obviously used it in certain places, that title is because people will refer to—the word Messiah can refer to—it means “anointed,” so it can refer to kings who aren’t the last king. People can call David, if you want to say it, a small-m Messiah or small-c Christ, and they’re not meaning he replaces Jesus Christ. It’s just an appropriate term for other people—Christ or Messiah with a small c, small m.

JD: And that’s not common within at least our circles within the normal church, but it could be common—it is common within the scholarly community. And part of the challenge is that, and this relates directly to what you were writing on in a Psalm like Psalm 2 or as we see in a place like Psalm 18, the king, the main subject of the Psalm, is even designated the anointed one or the messiah. But the whole question on the table is, is this figure first and foremost, for example, David writing about himself, or is the first and foremost figure in the Psalms Jesus?

TK: Right.

JD: And so you needed to come up with a way to talk about the anointed king and to highlight you’re not talking about David. You’re actually talking about the ultimate David, whom we know is Jesus.

TK: Right, and so somebody could read your words when you talk about the Christ, and they could think, “Yep, I have a category for that. My category is David.” And so needing to narrow in and say, “No, when I use this term, this is the one I’m talking about,” and by that I’m also excluding other people.

JD: That’s right.

TK: So again, the title, “Christ’s Prayers and the Saints’ Songs.” So saying that the book of Psalms is including two aspects: Christ’s prayers and his people’s songs. Going to talk about that. And then it says, “The Eschatological King and his People in Book One of the Psalter.” Tried to capture, so if somebody read the title, they would say, oh, I get what he’s… not meaning get the thesis, but I get the parameters of what he’s talking about.

JD: That’s right. So what was the specific question that you were seeking to answer, and then give us the specific thesis in a single sentence that you’re arguing.

TK: So my question would be this: How do the Psalms, particularly in book one of the Psalter, so Psalms one to forty-one (there’s five books in the book of Psalms), so in Psalms one to forty-one, how do the Psalms connect to the eschatological king? So what’s the—we know they do somehow because, for instance, what started me on this journey years ago is we see Jesus quoting Psalms, applying them to himself, the apostles applying Psalms of David to Jesus. So my question is, how do the Psalms in book one connect to the eschatological king? What’s the mechanism?

JD: And what was specifically your conclusion? What was the thesis that you were arguing from beginning to end in the book?

TK: All right the thesis here is this: This study argues that all the Psalms of book one directly prophesy some aspect of the eschatological king’s saving work and that the songs of the Christ become the prayers of those finding refuge in him. I can read that again: This study argues that all the Psalms of book one directly prophesy some aspect of the eschatological king’s saving work and that the songs of the Christ become the prayers of those finding refuge in him.

JD: Now before you even had an oral defense defending that thesis, you had maybe even a harder task. The night before, my kids got home from cross country practice, we gathered around the table, and you had a responsibility to share with them in five minutes or less at a level my twin 15-year-olds and my 16-year-old could understand what exactly you were arguing. So take that thesis in one sentence and just repackage it for us however you perhaps much like you did for my kids.

TK: I love it, and by the way, it was a delight. That was a delight to me, and they didn’t just put up with it. They actually were listening and nodding their heads, and they repeated back afterwards. But what I said was the idea is this: The Psalms are directly—the poetic portions of the Psalms, all of them in book one, are directly speaking about the Lord Jesus Christ, his saving work, some aspect of it. So the poetry is not first and foremost about David and then through whatever means I’m making it about Jesus. It’s directly speaking about the Lord Jesus and his work. That would be—you think about Psalms like Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd.” That we would say that’s the eschatological king speaking. Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” That one’s quoted in Matthew 27, but that would be the eschatological king’s own words. So the one who’s saying “I” in the Psalms is the one, the eschatological king, the Lord Jesus Christ. However, the Psalms aren’t just about him. People who are in him, those same Psalms are also about them. So we can claim the Psalms as our own if we have taken refuge in the king. So Psalm 23 becomes my Psalm because I’m in the one the Psalm was about.

JD: So the language there of finding refuge in the king, you’re actually drawing on the very language of Psalm 2:12. Psalm 1:1, “Blessed is the man,” and then you put that right up against, “and blessed are those who find refuge in him.” you’re understanding the man in Psalm 1 to be the same anointed one, the king, Jesus, Son of God, in whom the righteous are to find refuge.

TK: Absolutely.

JD: So if we’re in him, his songs become our songs, his prayers become our prayers. So before the Lord was ever David’s Shepherd, David was writing, saying the Lord was Christ’s Shepherd. And only because David—David’s hope was in the coming eschatological king Jesus, and because God would deliver Jesus, David found hope that he could be delivered.

That’s the basic argument that you’re making. After your introductory chapters that kind of lay out the fact that this is a different approach than many people are taking, in fact, maybe just give us a summary of how would you say most conservative evangelical commentators are thinking about the Psalms? Where would you put them? And then we can just consider how you actually went about arguing for your thesis.

TK: Right, actually they have some kind of rules for how a dissertation would be laid out after an introductory chapter. Chapter two is supposed to kind of give the state of scholarship in regard to the particular question you’re asking. And so I laid out there seven different approaches that scholars are taking in response to the question I was asking, which is how do the Psalms connect to the eschatological king, particularly the Psalms in book one? It obviously will spill beyond it because Psalms of David appear all throughout the whole Psalter, but I would say what a lot of us, if we’ve been in churches, we’ve  read certainly books that would be like devotionals and things like that, we would find a lot of things about David and what David was doing, things that happened to David, and then a connection between David and almost like an escalation of David to the greater David, if you want to say it that way. And I would say that that’s a very large percentage of  of scholars are going that direction. Is that the poetry is actually about David himself. It’s maybe telling the story of David. That’s a chunk of—so Psalm between Psalms three and all the way up through  72, you’re kind of telling the story of David and moving into Solomon and watching him, Saul fighting against him, and I would apply—I would be able to make applications to Jesus, but not totally. There would be certain places where you’d say this can’t be talking about Jesus because the king, for instance, says so many places, “I’m a sinner.” And so it would require a almost “This part I can apply to Jesus, this part I can apply to Jesus approach.” Some scholars would say there’s direct prophecy in the Psalms. Uh, Psalm 110 would be a great example: “The Lord says to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.” But some scholars would say there’s no direct prophecy anywhere in the whole book of Psalms.

But I would say an approach a lot of us, at least I have been familiar with, and we would maybe approach it on our own even apart from a book we would get, let’s say would be reading them, and the “I,” the “me” in the poetry is David, and we’re going to track that along, and we’ll make connections to Christ, but they almost pass through David to get to us to get to Jesus.

JD: And what you’re proposing is that David is not the first and foremost one that is in the poetic poets of the Psalms themselves. He’s there as author. He’s there as one experiencing, especially in the 13 historical headings that actually define elements in David’s life. You’re arguing those are historically accurate, and they’re very important because it grounds the predictive prophecy in history, and it even shows that God was providing a context out of which these predictions happened. And yet you’re distinguishing what’s going on in the headings or the superscriptions from what’s going on in the poetry and saying that the poetry itself is first and foremost about Jesus and his sufferings and his triumph.

TK: Right, and that’s part—I think everybody has to wrestle with. This is the—the Psalms have two types of literature. There’s these things that appear over the Psalms that say, “A Psalm of David when he fled from Absalom his son.” That’s not poetry. That language there, it behaves differently than the language in the poems. There’s no commands in there. There’s—the superscriptions never tell the reader what to do or how to respond or how to think. They just kind of lay out bare historical facts in those 13 historical superscriptions. And the poetry is poetry. It looks different. It includes commands. It includes adjectives and adverbs and feelings. And so I think something everybody has to wrestle with is: I should not treat these two types of literature in the same way. They may be doing something different. That’s a possibility. And what I argue in the dissertation is the evidence demonstrates yes, those two types of literature are doing different things but building towards the same purpose.

JD: And significantly, a point you make is that when we look at how the Psalms are actually engaged within the Bible itself, when we look at how the Old Testament prophets draw on the Psalms, and when we look at how the New Testament authors draw on the Psalms, we never even one time see them reading the poetry in relation to David. They are consistently applying the poetry to the eschatological king.

TK: And that’s a huge thought. I think when you’re trying to prove something, you want to certainly prove it from the text and say the text allows it to be read this way. So take, say, Psalm 2—take some whatever you’re going to go—the text permits a reading where I would apply it directly to the eschatological king, for instance. But then you also want to look at, is the thing I think I’m seeing here, do later authors, do they seem to be going in the direction I’m going, or do they present something totally different?

So I have, for instance, gone through every single quotation of the Psalms in the New Testament like you just mentioned, and does that quotation mention an activity of David? And do what so many of us, maybe if we’re pastors, have done in a sermon: “This is when David whatever.” And just want to lay out the evidence, they do not even do this one time in the New Testament. But even in the Old Testament, for instance, Isaiah frequently uses the Psalms, Ezekiel uses the Psalms, Micah uses the Psalms. Not one time do they do what so many of us have done and made a practice of, apply them to David first and foremost. They apply them to the eschatological king, his age, his people. And that’s the sort of evidence, though, if we’re proposing a shift in how we look at something, for me to say, “Okay, here’s the proposal based on the text of the Psalms,” and again, “Here’s how the later authors are using the Psalms.” It lines up with the perspective we’re saying; it doesn’t appear to line up with the opposite.

JD: Give me one example, if you can, a specific example that just illustrates the point you’re making.

TK: I think the point I’m making—so Matthew, for instance, quotes Psalm 22 repeatedly in Matthew 27 and actually in Matthew 28, and that’s the Psalm that starts “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” So many commentators will talk about David’s circumstances and then say the Gospel writers were making an application to Jesus. So Matthew refers to this repeatedly. Matthew never refers to David in Matthew 27, never talks about things David was suffering, and kind of, if you want to say it, puts the links in the chain between David and Christ. He immediately gets to Christ.

An analogy I’ve used is—of myself and changes in how I viewed and preached from the Psalms—it’s almost like somebody who, driving a car, will take a really long time to work through all the gears to finally get to, let’s just imagine, a hundred miles an hour. But it seems—and if a hundred miles an hour was Christ—it seems like the apostles just, they get to the Psalms and they slam their foot on the gas, and they’re at a hundred miles an hour instantly. And that’s what we see in Matthew.

And so going back, you’d say, “Did Matthew just not want to show his work and didn’t show how I bypass David? Or did he just show his work and show I didn’t display David as the one in the poetic text because he wasn’t actually there? It was Christ.” David was the author; he was working as a prophet.

Psalm 16 is the one both Paul and Peter talked about in Acts chapter 2, Acts chapter 13, and they explicitly say—it’s like they make a point: “David did not… his body is in the grave, his body did see decay. However, that did not happen to Jesus.”

So what’s interesting about that is it’s with their audience. It seems like they feel the need to correct something that they assume the audience is thinking. The audience is assuming it’s about David, and both Peter and Paul make comments about David even without being prompted about it, saying, “Just have to let you know, this can’t be about David because his tomb is here, his body’s decaying.”

JD: So very similar to our contemporary day where we have many scholars saying Psalm 16 was first and foremost about David, it’s almost as though the New Testament authors had a similar audience. And yet they’re saying, “Wait, you’re saying this is what would often be called typology—first about David and something about David’s life anticipating the coming of Christ.” And it seems as though Peter’s point is, “Look, David’s body is corrupted, his tomb is here to this day, there’s no type present.”

So what we’re looking at here is when it says David was a prophet and knew that God had foretold that he would have a son on the throne forever, David spoke of the resurrection. That’s what Peter says. And we’re supposed to say he’s doing it through direct prophecy because there’s no type present. This isn’t a two-stage fulfillment. This isn’t a picture followed by—like a shadow followed by substance, a type or form followed by what fills it. Instead, we have right from the beginning in Psalm 16 a direct prophecy about the Christ.

And you’re arguing that the entire Psalm, not just these little words, but the entire Psalm therefore is about the eschatological king, whom we know as Jesus.

TK: And this was a shift for me, Jason. I think the way I treated the Psalms and actually Old Testament passages all throughout is when a New Testament author would quote them, I would go back. So I talked about—well, we just talked about Psalm 16 there—I would probably look at the couple verses that have been quoted and go back there and say those particular verses are about the Lord Jesus and Peter wanted me to see it, and I would use it almost as a proof for Peter’s argument, versus Peter wanting me to go back and saying, “I’ve just given you the hook to see this whole song is about this event. Go read that song, soak in it.”

I think Matthew was doing that in Psalm 22 by sending signals the whole way through: “Go back to Psalm 22, soak in it because that is a song of the event that is just happening right now.”

So I found myself being moved to stay in the Old Testament, stay in that passage, but the whole thing, not just two verses.

JD: This is a principle that I remember sitting in Greg Beale’s “Use the Old Testament in the New” course at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary during my MDiv and hearing him talk about this principle argued by C.H. Dodd that the New Testament authors are not just cherry-picking proof texts, but that when they write, they are aware of the Old Testament context and they are writing specific verses in light of the broader context. This is how we understand everywhere outside the Psalter what they’re doing, and we shouldn’t think that the way they’re handling the Psalter is any different.

Tom, I am delighted with where this conversation is going. I want to call this episode to a close and bring it back next week and talk to you again in a follow-up conversation to understand even more the overall argument, some of the major conclusions that you draw, and how you see this truly serving the church. How does that sound?

TK: It sounds wonderful because I think anybody hearing this—something I love, the pastor of the church, good friend of both of ours, Cornerstone Church in Spooner—he’ll say this frequently. He’ll say, “Get me there, show me, show me how you got where you got.” And I think anytime we make a proposal regarding God’s Word, God’s people should say, “Get me there, show me your work.”

JD: That sounds good, Tom. We will help you get us there a little bit better next week. Until then, may God bless you. Thanks for listening.

JY: Thank you for joining us for GearTalk. For resources connected to biblical theology, visit handstotheplow.org or jasonderouchie.com.