Three Christian Uses of Scripture

I'm convinced that most of the regulatory discourse certain Christian social groups use in relation to the Bible is inadequate to the hermeneutical situation. The postmodern discussion has raised issues that reveal the previous descriptions and discussions unable to address the most fundamental issue--which potential meaning and significance of the biblical text is the Christian one?

Previous discussions have tended unreflectively to treat the meaning of the biblical text as a given and have thus focused on the matter of either affirming or denying that meaning. It's now difficult even to fathom how someone could have ever thought that approach was adequate.

The question of the Christian use of Scripture leads in my view to three complementary models. I see these three as complementary rather than contradictory, and each finds a center in a different segment of the church.

1. The Spiritual Model
This approach to Scripture is most comfortable in charismatic circles and in "revivalist" circles like my own. God can say whatever God wants to say through the biblical text. Words are flexible enough for God to speak directly to you whatever He wants to say. Vanhoozer's "the Spirit can blow wherever he wants but not whatever he wants" deconstructs simply by looking at the way the NT interprets the Old. Bye bye.

Of course it is dangerous to validate this approach. More often than not, what people say is the Holy Spirit speaking to them is the enchiladas they had for lunch. Practically speaking, this approach must be tempered by wisdom, particularly the wisdom of the community of faith. But it must remain on the books.

2. The Contextual Model
This approach to Scripture maps most closely to the evangelical hermeneutic, which has become more and more complicated as the twentieth century went on and the complexity of the contextual situation became more and more apparent to those who truly wanted to listen to the biblical text.

Each book of the Bible is a moment of God addressing a situation in history, within the flow of revelation. Read in context, these moments are time-related and thus often time conditioned. Those moments of inspiration were most literally moments for them, not directly for me. Further, those were often moments of revelatory movement, when ideas and practices in tension were working themselves out in the flow of revelation (e.g., the contrasting perspectives on the afterlife in the OT).

Further, the details were not fully established even when Revelation was written. Paul teaches universal sinfulness, not total depravity. To affirm total depravity requires us to affirm the unfolding of Pauline theology in the Western church. Colossians and John model Christ on the logos, which would in the end prove inadequate as a model for the Trinity.

Scripture is the fountainhead of God's story, but it is a story that needs to be heard in full, and the story is not yet ended in history. The evangelical model eventually pushes us to see the Bible as the seminal revelation but a revelation that requires us to look beyond it into the church for some of its most crucial theological resolutions and perhaps to the kingdom for some of its ethical resolutions.

3. The church model
The Catholic and Orthodox traditions have always excelled in this piece of the puzzle. The Protestant objection to them has always been how far they were willing in the Middle Ages to move the core pieces of the story to the the period after the NT. However, the Protestant formulation of this objection as "sola scriptura" has become increasingly problematic in the latter part of the twentieth century because of the very issue we raised at the beginning of this post, namely, the fact that the meaning of a text is not self-evident until we find a proper context for that text. A "text alone" has no clear meaning until we place it in a particular context.

The current trajectory even within evangelical circles is to recognize that the proper context for reading Scripture as Christians is to read Scripture as Christians, to read the words in a Christian context. Thus the Christian meaning and significance of Scripture is not so much the meaning tied up with the circumstances of the ancient cultures in which the books of the Bible were produced but with the communion of the saints of the ages.

Read this way, it doesn't really matter whether Colossians 1:15 was comparing Jesus to wisdom or to the logos. What matters is that, for Christians, Jesus is eternally begotten of the Father, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father. This is the most Christian context against which to read the affirmation that Jesus is "the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation," even though it is not a meaning Paul himself could have exactly anticipated.