The Gospels as Scripture

More material for a class.  Feedback welcome.
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The central part of the Scriptural story, the central part of the Christian story, is when the problem of the story is overcome.  The problem of our story is the alienation of the creation from God, including humanity.  The goal of the story is the reconciliation of humanity and the creation to God.  The incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus are the means by which God brings this reconciliation about.

The Gospels thus stand as the heart of the Bible read as Scripture.  Think of the central part of the Apostle’s Creed: “I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered, dead, and buried.  The third day he arose from the dead.  He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of God, the Father, Almighty.  From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.”  When we read the Gospels as Scripture, we read them with all these things in mind.  The New Testament letters and Acts may unpack them in terms of doctrine, but the story of the Gospels is the starting point.

It is right for us to read them in this way as Christian Scripture, even though we may also know how to read the Gospels in terms of their original historical-cultural context.  For example, the incarnation—Jesus as God becoming flesh—is only a feature of John’s Gospel.  Only Matthew and Luke tell of Jesus’ virginal conception.  Mark and John do not mention the virgin birth.  From a historical/contextual perspective, we lack sufficient evidence to say whether they knew about it or believed it.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke do not speak of Jesus as God becoming flesh, as John does.  From a historical/contextual perspective, we lack sufficient evidence to say whether they knew about it or believed it.  Indeed, many Christians prior to the 300s did not read John to say that Jesus was fully God in the same way that God the Father was God.  We find contemporary Jews who used language similar to that of John 1 in relation to the “word” of God (logos), which was above all the rest of the creation as the “firstborn” of all creation, but was still created.  Further, the word for worship in Matthew could be used of human kings (proskyneō).

What the last two paragraphs say is that to read the Gospels as Christian Scripture is to see more in them than they may have originally meant or than we can prove that they meant.  The tools of inductive Bible study require us to read an individual book in its own right, not to see more meaning in the text than is required or justified by what that text actually says, following its own clues.  Inductive Bible study thus can never conclude that Mark or John believed in the virgin birth, for they do not mention it, and we lack sufficient historical evidence to say that Christians at the time commonly did.  But when we read Mark and John as Scripture, we are free to read them with the assumption of the virgin birth.

As Christians, we read the Gospels also with the assumption that Jesus is the second person of the Trinity.  The Nicene Creed (AD381) says that Jesus was “the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; Light from Light; true God from true God; begotten, not made; of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made.”  These distinctions all reflect debates that took place in the centuries after the New Testament, but Christians ever since have believed them.  For example, at the Council of Nicaea (AD325), they debated whether Christ was of similar substance to God the Father or of the same substance, one substance with the Father.  We have believed as Christians that Christ was fully God like God the Father ever since.

It would be anachronistic to read these positions into the original meaning of John or any other New Testament text.  Christians carried out these debates on the playing field of Scripture, but they were discussing issues that went well beyond anything the historical context of the New Testament books addressed.  No inductive reading of the New Testament books in context will surrender clear answers on these issues.  Indeed, it is possible to argue that we must believe in a Spirit-inspired, unfolding development and progress of understanding in the church in order to arrive at the Nicene Creed.

But it is perfectly legitimate for us to read the Gospels in the light of these later Christian beliefs.  After all, this is the way that we understand the Christian story.  So this is the way we bring the stories of the gospels into our Christian story.  We incorporate the stories of the gospels into the overarching story of Scripture, a unified story we believe the Spirit has inspired the church to see in the words of Scripture.  The Spirit working through the church has provided the glue of a story we experience as seamless and unified.

However, we can also see the historical writing of each Gospel as a moment in salvation history.  Most experts would say that Mark was the first gospel, written perhaps in the late 60s or early 70s.  Historical scholars have hypothesized any number of possibilities—many impossible either to prove or disprove—about how Mark’s material came together.  It currently seems beyond question that we find in Mark what were originally oral traditions, many of which must have circulated widely.

Most experts believe that Matthew and Luke, perhaps in the 70s or 80s, then used Mark as the starting point for their Gospels, both incorporating almost all of Mark into their presentation.[1] A majority—although this issue is more subject to debate—continue to believe that Matthew and Luke also had another common source, mostly a collection of Jesus’ sayings.  It is then thought that the Gospel of John reached its current form last, perhaps some time in the 90s.  Even here, though, some argue that John may have been written in stages.

Many scholarly theories, such as those presumed in the last two paragraphs, can neither be definitely proved or disproved.  There is a sociology to such theories.  Experts “get used to” certain ideas, ideas they may never have fully explored on their own.  They will know the basic case, evidence most people will not know, but they may never have struggled with other possibilities to the level of those who first came up with an idea.  New evidence can also arise.  The point is that scholarly agreements can change, just as scientific theories or historical reconstructions can.

The reading of the Gospels as Scripture is not contingent either on historical reconstruction, nor is it dependent on historical accuracy.  Both the modernist drive to get back to the historical Jesus and the fundamentalist drive to harmonize the content of the Gospels are both equally out of focus.  Certainly there are features of the story that must be historical for the Christian story to be true in its normal, orthodox, historical sense.  Jesus must really have existed.  He must have truly risen from the dead in history.  But even such minimal historicity is enough to support faith in the incarnation. [2]  Our point is not to dispute the historicity of the Gospels, only to point out that Christian faith does not clearly stand or fall on the historicity of the bulk of the Gospels.

The fundamentalist reading of the Gospels is also not necessarily the same as a Christian reading of the Gospels as Scripture.  The fundamentalist reading insists that we be able to fit all the details of the Gospels together as history, while reading the Gospels as Scripture only requires that we read the Gospels in relation to the one story.  It is not that we have any interest in saying that Jesus did not do something in the Gospels or did not say something.  It is only to say that we can read the Gospels as Christian Scripture regardless of these decisions—many of which can neither be proved or disproved from a historical standpoint.

We derive immense truth from the parables without even considering their historicity.  In the same way, reading the Gospels as Scripture is not dependent on historicity.  The problem with the fundamentalist drive to harmonize is that it often requires us to disregard what the Gospels actually say.  We create a “fifth gospel” that differs more from any of the four gospels than any of them actually differ from each other, and all this effort in the name of an idea we have, rather than in the interest of listening to what each individual gospel itself has to say.

Reading the Gospels as Scripture is not dependent on such things.  It need not ignore the kinds of things those who truly are experts have hypothesized or discovered.  But it also must not think that a unified reading of the four Gospels is bound by an inductive reading of each individual text.  We are free to see more in the Gospel texts than they themselves say, while recognizing the writing of each individual Gospel as a moment in God’s never-ending walk with his people, a moment in salvation history.

We believe that the second person of the Trinity came to earth and was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the Virgin Mary.  He walked the earth as one of us.  He experienced what we experience.  He was tempted in every way as we are but did not sin.  He did miracles through the power of the Holy Spirit, just as we can.  He healed; he cast out demons.  He went to Jerusalem and died to reconcile humanity and the creation to God.  He rose from the dead, and God enthroned him as king of the universe.  He will come again to reconcile all things to God.  When we read the Gospels as Christian Scripture, we read them with this faith in mind.

[1] A minority argues that Matthew was first, with Mark then abridging it and Luke reordering it.

[2] For example, even the virginal conception does not seem essential to Jesus' divinity.  No one miracle, no one healing or exorcism, no one event or saying of Jesus seems essential for Jesus to be divine.  Certainly the Christian story would be anemic without these elements, but we could still believe the Apostle’s or Nicene Creed even if most of the stories of the Gospels were not historical.

Even John Meier can illustrate...

... how hard it is to get into the world of the text, rather than bring the text into your world.

Since I've read Charles Taylor, I have been using this lens to try to help students see the difference between inductive Bible study and theological interpretation as I define it. I consider both approaches valid, with theological interpretation as the default Christian approach (I won't take the time to clarify). The problem I see with evangelical hermeneutics is that it can't tell the difference between the two. It pretends to do the former to get the latter, when in fact the two are logically distinct and both legitimate.

Inductive Bible study aims to read the biblical texts on their own terms in their own categories. Theological interpretation brings the text into the Christian world of the interpreter. IBS is exegetical. Theological interpretation has an element of eisegesis that is not only appropriate but is necessary for biblical theology even to exist. Theological interpretation is the ground floor of the Bible as the living word of God. Inductive Bible study is the basement of the original, ancient meaning.

The distinction I am getting at is very hard to convey by telling, as I continually try. It is much easier to show by example. When talking about outlining biblical texts today, another example popped up, and this by the brilliant and renowned John Meier.

Meier and others see a chiasm in Hebrews 1:5-14. (It has occurred to me that the tendency to see chiasms is in certain individuals a tell tale symptom of "bringing the text into my world" rather than "getting into the text's world.") A chiasm is an A-B-B-A pattern and I have heard astounding papers that see ingenious ABCDEFGGFEDCBA patterns in a text. Such papers reflect the ingenious active mind of the interpreter--and the interpreter's complete inability to listen to the text on its own terms.

Back to Meier. His chiasm sees something like the following (I'm doing it from memory, so I'm sure I'm messing it up a little, but you'll get the picture)

1:5 exaltation (A)
1:6 pre-existence (B)
1:8 eternal God (C)
1:10 pre-existence (B)
1:13 exaltation (A)

This seems to me a wonderful example of an eisegetical outline. It brings the text into Meier's theological world and connects the words of the text with ideas in Meier's head.

But an outline that is inductively driven looks for literary clues in the text to discern the structure of argument rather than imposing ideological labels on the text. Topical outlines of biblical books are thus always impositions of meaning on the text.

Here is an outline that is based on the text itself and its categories:

1:5a To which did God say... (inclusio with 1:13)
1:5b And...
1:6 And...

1:7 On the one hand (contrasts with)
1:8-12 On the other (quote one and quote two)

1:13 To which did God say (end of inclusio)

Outlines that follow the ideas a reader sees in the text are always eisegetical rather than truly inductive. And I tell my students that once they truly understand what I am saying, they can easily be a better scholar at some points than some of the most recognized scholars out there.

Fowl on Theological Interpretation

Came across this quote from Stephen Fowl in an Interpretation article students in our seminary leadership class read this Spring:

"Theological interpretation of the Bible is not determined by any particular method but by the goal of growing into ever deeper communion with the triune God and with others" ("Know Your Context: Giving and Receiving Money in Philippians," Int. [2002]: 45).

This statement confirms my feeling (and those of others I've talked to) that theological interpretation is really more about a goal than a method. This also potentially signs its death warrant as a movement because all it amounts to is to try to find a way to connect the biblical text to Christian faith and practice today. For example, the new Brazos commentary series will simply be Christians reflecting on the biblical text theologically with no clear commonality except for that end goal.

That reduces these sorts of series to the novelty of buying a Matthew commentary written by Stanley Hauerwas.

P.S. A very small installment of the Great Time for the Wesleyan Tradition is up on the Dean's blog (Wesleyanism in the 1900s).

Biblical-Theological Relationships

John Drury had an excellent probing of a post I did yesterday. I tend to emphasize the distinction between earlier meanings of biblical texts and later uses of them (NT use of OT, orthodoxy's use of NT). "What, however, is the appropriate conversation between the Bible and theology?" John probes. Surely we are more interested in the end with how the two connect rather than how they might separate.

Here's a first attempt at potential relationships between the Bible and Christian theology or, as I would put it, between earlier and later points in the flow of revelation:

1. A biblical meaning may be "mature" revelation on a certain point and thus equate to Christian theology.

• The "pre-modern" interpreter usually assumes that all points of Scripture reflect fully mature Christian theology and perceives no distance at all between the biblical text and Christian theology. Moses, David, and Isaiah all understand about the Christ. The Trinity is in Genesis 1:27, etc.
• The "covenantal" or dispensational interpreter usually has some sense of the development between the OT and NT but sees this not as a development of understanding but as a divinely intended implementation plan.
• A contextual interpreter recognizes a real and substantial development in understanding that takes place between the testaments and even between the NT and full Christian orthodoxy.
• Nevertheless, there are moments of "mature" revelation in the biblical texts. Faith in resurrection is barely present in the OT (Daniel 12) but arguably reaches a mature form in the NT.

2. An earlier meaning of a biblical text may be general, but "underdeveloped" in a sense that a later biblical text or later Christian theology "fills in" or provides greater specifics.

• The OT arguably reaches a point of maturity on monotheism in the middle part of Isaiah where revelation has moved beyond henotheism. But such monotheism is still "underdeveloped" in relation to the trinitarian Christian understanding.
• A passage like 2 Corinthians 13:13 mentions all three persons of the Trinity but does not specify the relationship between them. (I'm putting this here for illustration--it might go more under 3 and 4).

3. An earlier meaning may stand among other moment-points whose mean is on the kingdom trajectory but which in itself is not precisely on the kingdom trajectory.

• The idea here is that prior to a doctrine reaching "maturity," there can be a sampling of revelatory moments that have elements of the kingdom trajectory but also elements in tension with the kingdom trajectory. Alternatively, we might have a text that is further along on the path toward mature doctrine than another.
• A difficult example of this might be some of the NT Christology that played into the hands of sub-orthodox positions in the early Trinitarian and Christological debates. Paul clearly considers Christ to be subordinate to God, for example (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:28) and relating such verses to Christ's humanity (versus his divinity) introduces elements into the discussion completely foreign to Paul's own.

4. The wording of a biblical text may be subject to a polyvalence which, whatever it meant originally, can be reinterpreted in such a way as to fit with later revelation.

• The Spirit danced with the polyvalence of any number of OT texts to reflect mature doctrine, such as when Acts 2 uses Psalm 16 in reference to Christ's resurrection, even though this was not at all the likely original meaning of the psalm.
• Arguably the Spirit danced with the polyvalence of a number of OT and NT texts to reflect mature doctrine in the early church, such as the common sense that the "we" of Genesis 1:27 refers to the Trinity or the tendency to take "You are my Son, today I have begotten you" in relation to the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father.

5. An earlier meaning of a biblical text may be context-particular in a way that does not move forward on a kingdom trajectory.

• Although in a very broad sense this might be a sub-category of three, we have in mind here accommodations God made to cultures and or moments in the flow of revelation that represent elements left behind rather than carried forward.
• Those parts of the OT that not only do not know about resurrection but that actually argue against any meaningful afterlife (e.g., Job 14:12; Ecclesiastes 3:19-20).
• So God allows for divorce in Deut. 24, even though it turns out not to be his ideal. The same might be argued for God's accommodations to slavery and patriarchy within the biblical text, perhaps even the genocide of various races.

Christian Fathers and Interpretation

One debate point among theological interpreters is the role of the Christian fathers in interpretation. There has been a tsunami of interest in the early fathers as interpreters of Scripture. Here is my position on the issue.

First, the early fathers are very helpful for helping is see the consensus of faith coming together. It is a rather simple observation, but it only clicked with me last week that the strongest reason for us to use the consensus of faith that developed in the first few centuries as the proper vantage point for integrating the varied parts of Scripture is... because that is actually where the integrated Christian view of Scripture actually came from in the first place!

That is to say, the common Christian view of Scripture that most Christians have had throughout history and that evangelicals and theological interpreters in general are trying to justify in their readings of Scripture actually developed in the first five centuries of the Christian era. The fathers (I'm sorry history hasn't left us too much evidence of the mothers from this period) thus give us witness to the development of an integrated view of Scripture and are of great interest. This would be fun to write on--to explore the fathers on the path to an integrated and commonly agreed understanding of the Bible. Someone's probably writing the book as we speak.

The fathers were, however, horrible original meaning interpreters. From Clement of Rome to the Epistle of Barnabas to Irenaeus to Origin to Augustine on, they simply weren't any more wired to read the Bible in its full historical context than anyone one else at the time. The person who uses them as a guide for what the books of the Bible actually meant originally is barking up the wrong tree. Such a practice is simply a retreat into pre-modern interpretation, which is not wrong at all. It just isn't the same as the original meaning.

Conclusion of Paper

This was the bulk of the conclusion of the paper, which I gave yesterday.
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We have aimed to describe what is actually the case in the way Christians use Scripture. It is actually the case that the individual texts of the Bible had particular original meanings in their own contexts that were overwhelmingly a function of the language games of their day. It is actually the case that the unified perspective from which Christians read Scripture developed over time in Christian history. These would seem to be unavoidable realities, even if a good deal of intellectual energy has been devoted to denying them.

If we wish to conceptualize a Christian hermeneutic that is coherent, we thus need to take these things fully into account. I can think of no way to do so other than the general schema I presented in the introduction, namely, 1) to consider the individual texts of the canon as points in a flow of revelation, genuine points of partial revelation in a progressive flow and 2) to consider the consensus of faith that the Holy Spirit unfolded in the Church as the appropriate vantage point from which to read these texts as a unified whole with a unified Christian message. The postmodern attention to the polyvalence of language proves to bolster and indeed justify this hermeneutic.

This approach is not specifically Wesleyan, of course. I am suggesting it is the only way to have a coherent Christian hermeneutic per se, let alone a Wesleyan one. But I close with two ways in which these developments cohere well with the Wesleyan-revivalist tradition. First, pneumatic interpretation is not foreign to us revivalists. The charismatic use of Scripture, long scorned by the well informed, turns out to have the imprimatur of New Testament interpretation itself. Secondly, there is great potential in Vanhoozer’s sense of Scripture as performative, a drama for the people of God to perform. There is great Wesleyan potential in a view of Scripture as a whole that sees its primary purpose as the formation of a holy people, that is, discipleship.

Integrating Scripture

This now an excerpt from part 3 of the paper. Portions of Part 1 and Part 2 can be found at these links.
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Where we believe Vanhoozer’s program fails is, again, in his inability to let the new level of holistic Scriptural meaning involve significant changes or developments of meaning from the intended meanings of individual texts. He writes, “Does reading the Bible as Scripture change or develop its meaning? … On my view, to view the Bible as ‘Scripture’ best accords not with the illocutionary but rather with the perlocutionary aspect of communicative action.” In other words, the effect of these texts taken together as a whole involves new impact, but the fundamental meanings and purposes of the words do not particularly change. This is an important point for Vanhoozer, for he does not want the meaning of Scripture to depend on an interpretive community but to have a meaning of its own.

He is not even willing to lend such polyvalence to the Spirit. The Spirit bears witness to the meaning of Scripture. He does not innovate meaning. The Spirit is the one who “leads the community into the single correct interpretation: the literal sense.” “If there is a sensus plenior, then, it is on the level of God’s gathering together the various partial and progressive communicative acts and purposes of the human authors into one ‘great canonical Design’ Vanhoozer uses “literal” here in an interesting way. It is presumably the normal sense and purpose of Scripture as a whole to God.

As impressive as this construction is, it faces numerous serious and fatal challenges. For one, Vanhoozer’s sense of literal turns out to be rather figurative when it comes to any normal sense of the word. The literal sense of something, in normal usage, refers to the most straightforward sense in a particular context. To speak of Christ’s death as a sacrifice is thus a metaphor in terms of the normal sense of the word sacrifice in any of the original contexts of any of the biblical books. Vanhoozer might, on the other hand, consider us to have literal the wrong way around. The most literal sense of the word sacrifice is in relation to Christ’s death and, in that sense, the use of “sacrifice” in relation to an animal killed on a stone altar is the more metaphorical sense of the word.

This is not, of course, the way the meaning of the word sacrifice has been experienced by the mortals who offered them in ancient times. Such a meaning is not a part of any specific text of the Old Testament. Indeed, it is quite possible that only Hebrews in the New Testament has anything like what would become the fully Christian sense of sacrifice that would be the most “literal” sense in Vanhoozer’s schema—and the idea was still probably a live metaphor for its author. In Acts 21, for example, we find Paul offering a sacrifice at the Jerusalem temple in relation to a vow made by certain Jerusalem Christians. The event was apparently appropriate to the author of Acts, who interestingly was himself probably writing after the destruction of the temple.

Yet for early Christians to offer such a sacrifice seems odd and inappropriate from the standpoint of Hebrews. Vanhoozer would presumably consider Hebrews’ point of view to be the appropriate “literal” vantage point from which to integrate the rest of the biblical texts, including “the various partial and progressive communicative acts and purposes of the human authors” somewhere along the way to this understanding. But it is questionable that the author of Leviticus or Ezra would have agreed with Hebrews that the death of a single righteous individual might suffice to atone for all the sins of all time and that their own offerings did not truly take away sins. Indeed, it is not obvious from a historical-cultural perspective that the author of Acts would take this perspective.

This line of thinking points to two very important critiques of the way Vanhoozer formulates the relationship between the canonical meaning of Scripture as a whole and the historical meaning of individual texts. First, it is the nature of the situation that the integration of Scripture as a whole requires a vantage point from outside the individual texts themselves. In their original, contextual meanings, we do have some interaction between the New Testament and Old Testament that might suggest how to integrate them. Even at this level, Vanhoozer’s model of “interpretive virtue” is deconstructed by the actual way the New Testament uses the Old, regularly interpreting it in pneumatic ways that sometimes have little to do with its original meanings.

But we have little explicit interaction between New Testament texts, and the New Testament’s engagement with the Old Testament is not systematic but depends on the individual New Testament books themselves. In short the individual books of the Bible were originally individual books and so do not intrinsically provide us with a definitive fulcrum point from which to integrate the entirety. For example, there is nothing about the texts themselves that would keep us from considering Ezra the fulcrum point, with the New Testament books a horrible case study in deviation from orthodoxy. Indeed, this is something like how an orthodox Jew might integrate these texts together.

It is thus a Christian point of view outside the biblical text that would center the integrated perspective on sacrifice in Hebrews or the integrated perspective on the Old Testament Law in Romans. Vanhoozer might suggest that the integrated perspective comes from God who has an intended “literal” perspective for the whole. This is a perfectly appropriate position. It is just a perspective that does not derive from any of the individual texts in their original settings. It comes from a vantage point outside the texts that is not intrinsic to the texts themselves. It requires us to organize the texts in ways that their authors at times would have disagreed with. Imagine telling the author of Leviticus that none of the sacrifices in his book actually took away sins and that God’s real intent for the book was to point toward the death of a righteous Israelite who would live centuries later and do away with all sacrifices for good!

Theological Micromanagement of Historical Judgments

I've decided not to post the entire second section of my paper (see here for the introduction), but I thought I'd throw out a quote. In this section I am using the Philippian hymn as a case study for how scholars sometimes let appropriate theological beliefs micromanage their interpretations of historical texts, engaging N. T. Wright, Richard Bauckham, and David Yeago.

Here is an excerpt:

"... to let theological preferences count as evidence toward historical judgments in this way raises significant questions about historical method. We cannot explore these issues to any significant degree here. On the one hand, it is clear that our presuppositions are an unavoidable element in historical judgments. Do we believe miracles and resurrections are possible? This presupposition will markedly influence how we reconstruct the history of Jesus and how we interpret the gospels historically.

"But if some element of progressive revelation is acceptable—and this bare claim is not particularly controversial—then it is not clear that we have a firm theological presupposition in play in a situation such as this one. We have a historical inkling based on later developed theology. Such historical inklings may of course prove to be true, but it is not at all clear that they are an appropriate element in serious historical judgments. They are the stuff of coffee talk rather than serious historical scholarship.

"More seriously, they reflect the questionable underlying presumption that common Christian understanding is in some way enhanced the more it correlates closely to historical judgments about earlier historical periods—earlier is better, original is better than revised. This presumption fuels an impulse to let developed theology micromanage historical judgments. Space does not permit a defense here, but it seems more likely that such serious historical judgments are rather more peripheral than essential to common Christian understanding, despite their instrinsic value."

David Treier's Introducing the Theological Interpretation of Scripture

This is a great little book. I skimmed it yesterday. The value of a book like this one is to give you a sense of the lay of the land. What was gratifying is the fact that he managed to mention just about every book I have on my shelf about biblical hermeneutics in relation to theological interpretation and generally locate each one. With so many variations among individual scholars, this is quite a task to do without drastically oversimplifying.

No doubt his book could be improved on, but this is the best overview of biblical hermeneutics as it relates to theological interpretation out there right now that I know of (do tell if you know another).

The Impact of Background Literature

I am teaching a course on "Intertestamental Literature" this semester. I do not believe you need to be able to read the New Testament in its historical context to read it as Christian Scripture and God's living word to believers today. But it seems impossible to understand what these books actually meant without some sense of this background.

Any curriculum that truly aims for its students to understand the Bible in context should significantly engage this material. It provides such depth of understanding, reveals our inconsistencies! It holds a mirror up to ourselves and exposes the extensiveness to which our varied Christian traditions control our interpretations. It is no surprise that John Piper discouraged engagement with this material in his debates with Tom Wright--it reveals the fact that Piper's Calvinist theology derives more from Reformation theology than from what the New Testament actually meant.

I'll leave it at that. Like I said, one can certainly use the Scriptures Christianly, as God's living word to believers today, without being able to read it in historical context. As long as one does this in a mature community of faith, you should not go wrong. The common Christian understanding of these texts is a stable and enduring understanding. But this reading, which we might call theological interpretation, does not change the actual meaning these texts had originally, which was largely a function of their ancient contexts. A Christian hermeneutic that cannot account for both is either not fully Christian (over-emphasis on the original meaning) or shallow (over-emphasis on the Christian understanding).

IMHO

Wesleyan Hermeneutics (plural): My Take Away

The symposium was a great time to refect on things, to hear new ideas, to get a feel for where others are. Here is my take away from the weekend. First, it is clear that not everyone in the room operates with the same hermeneutic. For many, their system of interpretation is actually unknown to them. Others lean toward a fundamentalist/old school evangelical hermeneutic. Some have incorporated some postmodern elements. Some are in a "second naivete" and reclaming the "pre-modern" hermeneutic of the late nineteenth century holiness writers.

So it is no suprise that some wondered whether there really is such a thing as a Wesleyan hermeneutic, although Dr. Tom Armiger, one of our General Superintendents, did a superb job of capturing the dominant points of the weekend. I'm sure they will be posted online soon, probably here.

But I think I can map all this confusion and thus specify clearly a number of Wesleyan hermeneutics, plural, none of which we can properly reject.

A Tale of Two Hermeneutics
I am quite certain that you could approach this issue from another vantage point than the one I take here. But I can't think of any other approach that will bring greater categorizing power than the following.

Hermeneutical theory, in my mind, is a given. It is not Wesleyan. It is not Calvinist. It is not this or that. It just is. It is a science, and it is valid. It is the question of how one assigns meaning to a text.

There are only two ways to interpret a text, when we approach them from my categorizing approach. 1) You can try to read them in terms of their original contexts or 2) you can read them against some other context. There is no other option from this categorizing standpoint.

Now, there is, of course, a multiplicity of contexts other than the original ones against which you might read a text. This is where the notion of polyvalence, much invoked in the conference, come into play. These are almost impossible to categorize exhaustively.

It is also true that there is some degree of ambiguity about what it might mean to read a text in the light of its original contexts. An author might have a different understanding of a text than his or her audience, even though they partake of the same general context. Texts often have unintended potentialities, as anyone who has taken a true/false quiz will recognize. Texts leave gaps... and so forth.

But the general distinction seems unassailable. There is a kind of reading of a text that listens to it in the light of its original contexts and there are a multitude of other readings that loosen the text to one degree or another from those original contexts.

A Wesleyan Hermeneutic: Original Meaning
Clearly at the conference were those who find the locus of biblical authority in the original meaning. I consider this meaning valid as well. (I didn't like the way the term "historical-critical method" was painted as evil in contrast to "grammatio-historical method." At some point it would be fun to go through the history of biblical interpretation Terry Paige did and show the positive contribution of each figure rather than treating them all as the spiraling demise of the Enlightenment.)

Now there are right and wrong answers as to what the original meaning was. We cannot know them for sure, but there is surely nothing wrong with trying. My critique of those who operate with a more rigid understanding of inerrancy is that, in my opinion, they do not actually do what they say. They impose boundaries on what the text can and cannot say. If the text wanted to stay within those boundaries, it would not be a problem. I just personally think that the text doesn't want to stay within those boundaries.

What is a Wesleyan version of this hermeneutic?
Since we cannot change what the text meant, a Wesleyan version of the original context hermeneutic is distinctive in the sense of 1) the questions it approaches the text with from today, 2) the way it prioritizes biblical material, 3) the way it organizes the individual books of the Bible into a biblical theology, and 4) the contemporary context with which it is establishing points of continuity and discontinuity.

These are of course a matter of contemporary Wesleyan community and Wesleyan theology. The same elements apply to a Calvinist or Lutheran appropriation.

A Wesleyan Hermeneutic: Beyond the "Literal"
Once we have loosened the original contexts, a number of potential Wesleyan readings come into play, each with varying degrees of continuity with the original meanings.

1) There is a reading that dialogs between us and Wesleyan readings of the past. We read the Anglican, pre-modern Wesley reading Scripture and appropriate what we like. We read the nineteenth century pre-modern holiness writers reading Scripture and appropriate what we like. We read twentieth century fundamentalist/old school evangelical Wesleyans reading Scripture and appropriate what we like.

But we do the appropiation in the light of our sense of the Spirit's leading today, not as slaves to any particular way Wesleyans in the past have read Scripture. We are twenty-first century Wesleyans. If there is not some continuity we may as well change our name. But we have yet to define who will dominate our hermeneutical flavor this century.

2) There is an openness to pneumatic, spiritual readings in the Wesleyan holiness tradition that you do not find in evangelical Calvinism. John Drury pointed out that Calvin say the Spirit's role more in terms of illumination of what the text already meant, while Wesley was more open to unique inspiration of us as readers. We are clearly more closely related to Pentecostals than to the Reformed or Presbyterians, and we have a place for direct inspiration in reading the text--in ways never intended originally.

3) There was talk of the "rule of faith" and the "rule of love" as controls on non-contextual reading. There is a kind of Wesleyan "rule of faith" that goes beyond the core. I personally, however, would not recommend us validating Wesleyans reading the biblical text ideologically, however, unless it is the Spirit leading as in #2. However, we probably do want to affirm that in the past the Spirit has led us as a community to read the text pneumatically. But such a reading seems a combination of #1 and #2.

Conclusion
There is more than one valid hermeneutic. There is a valid original meaning hermeneutic and there are valid non-contextual hermeneutics. God has used both in the past. God will continue to use both in the future.

Wesleyans have in the past employed both hermeneutics differently. In the late twentieth century, some Wesleyans at Houghton and Asbury employed a fundamentalist/old school evangelical approach that is at least partially an original meaning approach, riding the wave of Reformed influence in the earlier part of the century. In the eighteenth century, our forebears were far more non-contextual and pneumatic in orientation. Wesley, although he did not know it, employed a theological hermeneutic not unlike most of the principle church "fathers."

So one thing that does make us somewhat unique among evangelicals is our openness to both hermeneutics. You will not get the Calvinists at Trinity or Gordon Conwell to condone the hermeneutic employed by Daniel Steele in the 1800s. But it is a part of our heritage that postmodern philosophy actually has justified. No one can say it is not properly Wesleyan.

In my opinion, I cannot say that the fundamentalist inerrantist approach is not properly Wesleyan either, for it has been practiced by a slice of the Wesleyan Church in the late twentieth century. I'm glad, however, that the Wesleyan understanding of inerrancy is bigger than it, as Dr. Armiger pointed out in his final summary.

Magisterial Paper by Steve Lennox at Symposium

Steve is in the middle of a tremendous paper on the hermeneutic of 1800s holiness revivalists. It pulls the rug out from under the Hermeneutical Spiral and Vanhoozer's half-way reformation.

This quote from Daniel Steele (1894) is shocking and significant:

"It will not do to lean on the authority of a majority of experts; but on the practical question of the extent of gospel salvation from sin. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, the unlearned minority who have put the doctrine to experimental proof may be very much wiser than the learned majority of the magnates of the modern church, who have never subjected the question of the test of personal experience. Here the testimony of some Uncle Tom or Amanda Smith of the slave plantation may outweigh the opinion of a whole faculty of German theological professors. Experience outweighs theory; faith makes philosophy kick the beam" (Half-Hours with Saint Paul and Other Bible Readings, 239-40).

To read Lennox's paper, go here.

A Missional Hermeneutic: The Mission of God

What is missional?
What is a missional church? Treasure in Clay Jars puts it well when it says, "Missional churches see themselves not so much sending as being sent." [1] Churches used to have a part of their overall life they called "missions." It was the part of the church's life where they sent people out to try to see souls "saved." And, indeed, it was not about sending people across the street or even to the next town. Missions was about sending people overseas, to evangelize those in far away lands.

The missional shift that has taken place this last decade is not just the realization that the person next door might not believe in Christ. [2] It is a huge step back to see the big picture--God's big picture. It does not ask, "What mission do I/we need to send others on?" It is much bigger than that. It is not even just, "What is my/our mission?" It is much bigger than that. It is not even as big as "What is the Church's mission?"

Missional thinking is thinking that steps way back for the biggest picture of all--at least the biggest picture we finite humans can grasp. Missional thinking asks, "What sort of mission is God on in the world?" What is God's plan not just for me, not just for us, not just for the Church, but for the entirety of the universe? Why did God create the world and where is it all headed? The "mission of God" is about the story of God's walk with the creation from beginning to end, and not just about the salvation of us humans, but God's redemption of the world as well.


The Inevitability of a Hermeneutic

One of the must reads of this shift to missional thinking is Christopher J. H. Wright's The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative. [3] One of Wright's main purposes is to show that "the mission of God provides a fruitful hermeneutical framework within which to read the whole Bible." [4] A "hermeneutic" is a way of interpreting something. Everyone has one whether they realize it or not. Some of the most dangerous Bible readers are those who don't know they have one, the ones that assume they just read the Bible and do what it says.

The person who starts down the path of reading the books of the Bible on their own terms soon runs into some interesting issues he or she may not have anticipated. For example, most of us who are Christians read and value the Bible because we believe it to be God's word, God's word to us today. We thus eagerly read the Bible to hear God's living voice, giving us the answers to our life's questions. Perhaps we take a course in Bible study.

Ironically, this drive of ours to listen to the Bible and to hear what it has to say may lead us directly into a conundrum. We are reading, say, Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. We notice that this chap named Paul is writing it. Perhaps we think for a moment. Now who was this Paul and when did he live? The answer to the question is not particularly controversial. He lived some two thousand years ago. So God is speaking to me through the words of a man who has been dead for some time now.

But wait. This letter does not say it was written to me. Indeed, it quite plainly says it was written to a group of people who lived in a place called Corinth. And I have assumed it is a letter. This would seem a fairly good suggestion, since this Paul chap seems to be responding to a letter himself (1 Cor. 7:1). Again, where was this Corinth place? The answer to the question is not particularly controversial. It was a fairly large ancient city in Greece, situated in the Mediterranean Sea.

The more I pursue the original location of this letter in time and space, the more distance I may feel between myself and this ancient letter. I will discover that the meaning of actions in one culture may very easily differ from the meaning of actions in another. When Paul wrote the Corinthians, Romans, Thessalonians, and so forth with behavioral instructions, the meaning of those actions surely had much to do with those contexts such that even if I were to mimic the actions, I would not be doing the same thing.

An amusing example is the old Levitical instruction not to boil the kid in the milk of the mother goat (Exod. 34:26; Deut. 14:21). Even to this day in Israel, you cannot eat milk and meat in the same meal or serve it under the same roof because of the longstanding Jewish application of this verse. The reason for the original prohibition is not entirely clear, although it has often been suggested that it had something to do with the religion of the Canaanites who surrounded Israel. What it likely was not about, is some arbitrary and inexplicable desire on God's part to keep a person from drinking milk with eggs at breakfast.

Whenever we have this sort of puzzled reaction to the Bible, we are very likely reading stories or instruction whose most direct meaning is largely locked away in its ancient context. What? A woman should have authority on her head because of the angels (1 Cor. 11:10)? What does that mean? What? Jacob put speckled rods in front of sheep having sex so they would have spotted offspring (Gen. 30:37-43)? What does that mean? What? Women will be saved from the transgression of Eve through childbearing if they live in continued faith, love, and holiness (1 Tim. 2:15)? What does that mean?

Most Christian readers never pursue the contextual reading of the Bible far enough to have a crisis. Although most of us are hardly aware of it, we have a way of reading the Bible as a single story with a single plot, a "hermeneutic" that goes back to Bible times. God created the world good, but the first human Adam disobeyed God and set the world at odds with God in sin. But God set to work at reconciling the world, first by calling Abraham, who became a model of faith. Then he called Israel, Abraham's descendants, with the goal of ultimately bringing salvation to the whole world through them.

Then God came to earth in person as Jesus, a child of Israel. He died on the cross to make cosmic reconciliation possible. God raised him from the dead and, in time, he will return to earth to redeem the creation fully and to raise the dead to life, some to eternal joy and others to eternal condemnation. And thus we read the Bible as a single story with an overall plot that binds all the individual pieces together.

Something like the above two paragraphs is indeed the Christian way to read the Bible, although no doubt different Christian groups would write the two paragraphs slightly differently. The myriad variety of Christian churches each have their own spins and emphases, even though the cast of characters and basic storyline remains the same. One of the things that distinguishes one Protestant group from another is the specific "glue" used to connect the story pieces to each other.

But for some, the deeper exploration of reading the books of the Bible on their own terms begins to pull against this unified story. Indeed, it is one reason seminarians sometimes find the Bible begin to lose some of its living quality for them, which ironically was one of the reasons they went to seminary in the first place. For example, Adam plays a very important part in the Christian story. But when a person reads the Old Testament on its own terms, Adam plays almost no role at all. He is mentioned in the second and third chapters of Genesis, and thereafter is not mentioned again as a person. The role of Adam in the Christian story does not come from his role on the Old Testament's own terms.

The virgin birth is similar in the Christian reading of the New Testament. It appears in Matthew 1 and Luke 2, but then plays no role in the thought of the rest of the New Testament nor even in the rest of Matthew and Luke. The significance of the virgin birth in the Christian story thus does not come from its role on the New Testament's own terms.

Learning to read the books of the Bible in context is not something to try to avoid, although this has been the initial reaction of many--either to fight context or flee it. Twentieth century fundamentalism and, to a lesser extent, evangelicalism, tried to make the most likely original meanings of the books of the Bible go away when they seemed to come into conflict with reading the Bible as Christian Scripture. Sophisticated--and sometimes not so sophisticated scholarship was developed as a coping mechanism to deal with the so called "higher criticism" that rose in the late 1800's.

Sure, Genesis never says that Moses is its author. Reading Genesis on its own terms would not lead a person to this conclusion, nor would reading Exodus through Deuteronomy on their own terms, since they talk about Moses. They do not read as the voice of Moses narrating the story. But for some it seemed important to find a way to defend Mosaic authorship for the sake of the story's unity. Sure, the varying accounts of the four gospels at times seem difficult to reconcile historically. But intellectuals in the fundamentalist tradition found ingenious ways to deny what seemed an unavoidable conclusion to others, sometimes suggesting amusing scenarios to reconcile minute details. And the suggested harmonization often gave us a storyline that differed from the four gospels far more than any of them actually differ from each other!

But the "liberal" conclusion was wrong as well. The liberal lost faith in the possibility that the Bible might present a unified story and that this story might be the Christian story. This person may at times have understood better what it means to read the individual books of the Bible in context, indeed, may in some cases have been more "honest" with the evidence in his or her interpretations. But the unfortunate consequence was that the meaning of the Bible's books ended up locked up forever in the ancient near east or in the Mediterranean world. The meaning of each biblical text became so particular, so foreign to our world, that it became irrelevant, certainly not God's living word for us today.

The way forward, however, was neither to deny the insights of reading in context (as the fundamentalists) nor to consider the unity of Scripture no longer viable (the liberals). The way forward has proved to be two-fold, and the second way has only emerged clearly in recent days. The first way was recognized by some who managed to keep their faith without running away from the genuine insights of a historical approach to the Bible. For example, Oscar Cullmann and others read the Bible in terms of "salvation history," where the story of salvation is not only a story in the Bible's literature but the story of God moving through history including the events of writing the books of the Bible. [5]

Thus God's story is not merely Adam to Abraham to Moses, in Genesis and Exodus. But God inspired the writing of Genesis and Exodus as moments in the history of salvation. It is the paradigm shift that takes place when one begins to see how to read the books of the Bible in context. You see the books of the Bible themselves as key events in the story even moreso than the characters and statements in those books. The books of the Bible thus become the story of God moving humanity forward toward a better understanding of Him in history, progressively, making the message take on flesh.

The "pre-modern" reader who cannot yet read the Bible in context goes through the books of the New Testament in their literary order--Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. This person has a tendency to think the gospels were written first because they are about Jesus. Paul's books are taken in the order they appear in the New Testament.

The contextual reader sees God walking with the early church through a series of revelatory events. Paul's writings were written first. 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians are early. But we see God walking with Paul into Philippians and Romans, whose teaching seems somehow to reflect a minister nearing the end of a decades long ministry. The gospels were some of the latest writings of the New Testament, especially John. And they reflect a whole generation or two's reflection on Jesus, his teaching, his ministry.

The writing of each of these books was a moment in a flow of revelation that has surely been underway since the creation. The same is true of the Old Testament. Abraham probably understood so little of what we understand that we would scarcely recognize him if we were to meet him. Moses understood a little more, and Isaiah still more. But we may, with 2000 years of God walking with the Church, understand things about the Trinity that the apostle Paul would not have clearly seen. Here is the contextual way to see the unity of the books of the Bible as inspired--inspired within the story of salvation's history.

But postmodern attention to the flexibility of the meaning of texts has also made it possible to return to reading the Bible as a single book once again, just as Christians did before the crisis of historical criticism. Before the modern era forced us to read the Bible in context--or led us to run away from it into separatist enclaves--Christians read the Bible as a single story from creation to final restoration. They read the text of the Bible as a single piece of inspired literature with a single meaning. They placed themselves within that single story they read into the Bible. Ironically, it was the Protestant Reformation's rejection of non-literal interpretation that most set us on a trajectory away from such a unified reading. A unified reading of this sort requires us to de-emphasize the original contexts of each book in deference to a unified perspective we inevitably have to provide as readers.

Paul does not tell us how his "justification by faith" fits with James' "justification by works," nor does James tell us. We are forced to glue them together. The fundamentalist pretends that the unity of these sorts of diverse texts is somehow in the Bible, but it is not. These were separate documents. The gluing together is entirely a function of us as readers looking on. A process of unifying is required to fit the teaching of all the books together, and it is inevitably something we have to do because the Bible itself does not tell us how to do it.

And that is okay. Indeed, it is more than okay. It is the way Christians since before the New Testament have, by the Holy Spirit, found the unified story of the Bible. It is the way the Church, the body of Christ universal, has always read the books of the Bible. It does not matter that it is a slightly different way of reading the books than reading them in context. It is the Christian way of reading the texts.

A Missional Hermeneutic
This discussion may seem tangential to reading the Bible as the mission of God, but it is essential if a person is to appreciate the depth and profundity of what we mean by a "missional hermeneutic." Postmodernism has enabled us to loosen the words of the Bible from their original contexts enough so that we can once again read it as a single story of God creating and redeeming the world. We are currently witnessing the thriving of what is called a "theological hermeneutic" that can once again justify reading the Bible as a single book with a single story even while recognizing the Bible is a collection of books, plural, written in multiple languages to address multiple contexts.

But many readers have simply taken this climate as an excuse to continue reading the Bible in ignorance, never to confront the question of what these texts actually meant in the first moment of inspiration. True, it is most important that we read the Bible as Christians and thus that we hear in the words of the Bible the unified voice of God to us today. But the history of faith crisis will only postpone and reassert itself in the next generation if we pretend that the crisis of context never took place. The challenges of higher criticism were not all the vain attacks of the faithless. Many of them had real substance, and if we cannot proceed with faith without facing them, then we are begging the faith of our children to fail.

Christopher Wright puts it this way, "a missional hermeneutic must include at least this recognition--the multiplicity of perspectives and contexts from which and within which people read the biblical texts." [6] A deep missional hermeneutic will not just read the whole Bible as the single story of God working out His mission for the world, although certainly this will be the centerpiece of a missional hermeneutic. But a missional hermeneutic with depth will recognize, as Wright puts it, that the "writings that now comprise our Bible are themselves the product of and witness to the ultimate mission of God." [7] "[T]he Bible itself is in so many ways a missional phenomenon in itself." [8]

Here is how Wright summarizes a missional hermeneutic:

"A missional hermeneutic, then, is not content simply to call for obedience to the Great Commission (though it will assuredly include that as a matter of nonnegotiable importance), nor even to reflect on the missional implications of the Great Commandment. For behind both it will find the Great Communication--the revelation of the identity of God, of God's action in the world and God's saving purpose for all creation. And for the fullness of this communication we need the whole Bible in all its parts and genres, for God has given us no less." [9]

Wright closes his introductory chapters with the following elements of the story of God on His mission. These headings provide us with a fruitful way to integrate the biblical material into a single, Christian, coherent storyline of salvation's history:

1. God with a mission
God created the universe for a purpose. He is the center of the story, not us. We are small players in a story that is, from beginning to end, about God, not us. The driving force of the plot is the mission of God.

2. Humanity with a mission
Christians understand God to have created a good world that Adam's sin put into crisis, however we conceptualize that sin. One key feature of a missional emphasis is the recognition that God's business is bigger than us. God may have put us above all things in the creation, but He didn't expect us to be "rulers" who couldn't care less about those over whom He placed us. A missional hermeneutic will take concern for the creation as something over which God placed us as stewards.

3. Israel with a mission
The Old Testament is the first part of the story. If we are to take Christianity seriously, then we have to see Act 1 as a true part of the story, where God used one nation out of all the earth to begin the slow process of bringing the whole universe back to Him.

4. Jesus with a mission
Jesus' mission spans Act 1 and Act 2. He comes to earth and ministered to the smallest part of humanity, the back hills of Galilee, truly insignificant by any human reckoning. But by the time he is done, he has died to bring the cosmos back into order and has risen from the dead as the first installment of a victory over the power of death that will be universal.

5. The Church with a mission
This is the part of the story that we are currently in, and the New Testament inaugurates this phase with the Day of Pentecost, placing us in the age of the Spirit. When this phase comes to a close, Christ will come again and bring about the decisive denouement of the plot.

Conclusion
These are the elements of a missional hermeneutic. A missional hermeneutic will not only read the whole Bible as the single story of God's mission to create and restore a world in a book. It will see the books of the Bible themselves as moments in God's mission to restore a fallen world in history. In both cases, the mission of God provides an appropriate unifying principle by which to see the Bible as a whole.

A story, by its very nature, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the beginning of a story, a goal is unfulfilled. Sometimes we do not know how the situation comes about. In the story of Cinderella, for example, we never learn how Cinderella came to be living with her step-mother without her father. But every story has in its origins a problem situation of some kind. It is this problem that the middle part of the story works to overcome. And if the story has a happy ending, the end will see that goal--or some related goal--accomplished.

When we read the Bible through the lens of the mission of God, the goal of the story was for God to create a good world, a world over which humanity would serve as God's steward and representative. The problem at the beginning of the story is that humanity's sin has separated it from God and spoiled the creation. The rest of the story, particularly as found in the Bible, is the working toward a solution, a solution that finds its double climax in the death/resurrection and then second coming of Christ. This plotline of the mission of God to redeem humanity and creation, provides the most appropriate Christian hermeneutic through which to read the texts of the Bible.

[1] Lois Barrett et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), x.

[2] None of this talk of shifts is to say that we are saying something unknown in previous generations. Indeed, these "momentous" shifts are often where the quiet, holy folk in the pew have been all along. And they have patiently watched energetic speakers pontificate to some extreme or another, themselves overreacting to the same speakers in the generation right before them. Meanwhile, the quiet, wise souls in the pew smile and wait for the next circus clown to come through their church, overreacting yet again to the previous speaker with the latest new thing.

[3] (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006).

[4] Mission of God, 26. A slightly earlier book with a missional hermeneutic was Announcing the Kingdom: The Story of God's Mission in the Bible, by Arthur E. Glasser with Charles Van Engen, Bean S. Gilliland, and Shawn B. Redford (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003). Its authors are Fuller professors and come at God's story from somewhat of a Calvinist perspective.

[5] Christ and Time (London: SCM, 1962).

[6] Mission of God, 39.

[7] Mission of God, 48.

[8] Mission of God, 50.

[9] Mission of God, 60-61.

Missional Hermeneutics

Both Brian Russell of Asbury Orlando and IWU's own Steve Lennox, not to mention the prolific Scot McKnight and the lovely Mission of God by Christopher Wright, have been knocking at the door of my mind on missional thinking. (Steve will have to read on to have any clue what I'm talking about :-) "Missional" is a big buzz word right now. IWU's MDIV has actually named a 6 hour course "Missional Christianity," which includes not only the traditional topic of evangelism, but church "multiplication" (another buzzword) and Christian service, which relates to the growing return of the church to its mission to the poor and needy.

The idea that the church is missional does not seem controversial to me, that one of its principal duties is to go as ambassadors of reconciliation between God and the world in all its aspects (not just spiritual but social, economic, psychological, etc...). But Brian asked me today what I thought about a missional hermeneutic. To my shame I admitted to myself that I just haven't been getting the big picture of the missional movement or how its current flavor might differ from the missions, evangelism, and church growth movements of the past, other than the welcome addition of service.

So I grabbed Wright's Mission of God off the shelf to try to figure out what a missional hermeneutic might be and I think something clicked. Here's what it was:

The thing that, for Christians, pulls the Bible into a single book is not really a creed. Protestants have often had a tendency to reduce the Bible to a set of propositions, which is why we love Paul's letters and sometimes ignore the Gospels. Calvinist evangelical/fundamentalist institutions like Wheaton or Westminster Theological Seminary formulate their identities by way of lists of desicated beliefs. My strong hunch is that these cognitive elements are way more important to belonging at these institutions than personal piety or godliness.

But at least half of the Bible is narrative, and virtually none of the remaining material appears in the form of philosophically absolute propositions. The drive to encapsulate the Bible in propositional form is understandable, but clearly there is a huge gap between any set of such propositions and the biblical texts themselves. Anyone who knows me knows that I do not reject the "rule of faith," by which I understand the basic propositional beliefs held by the consensus of Christians throughout the ages.

But as I think Brian has realized long before me, and as Lennox has been hinting at as he alludes to his forthcoming book on the story of God (that he needs a sabbatical to write, say, Spring of '11), Christians don't join the individual pieces of the Bible together so much by way of propositions. We join the individual, distinct books of the Bible together into an overarching narrative, into God's story. We do this just as the Christians of the ages have.

I looked at this dimension to Hebrews' use of Scripture in a forthcoming chapter in a collection of essays from the 2006 St. Andrews Conference on Hebrews and Theology. Pre-modern use of Scripture both places ourselves as readers in the story of the text while at the same time placing the text in the story of history. So we like the New Testament authors are awaiting the second coming in the same age as they were--we are part of the story in Luke 21. But Genesis is in the overarching story of salvation's history as well.

Most of us do not notice that this overarching story is as much a Christian as a biblical creation. Nothing about Leviticus requires us to consider Hebrews as an appropriate later "chapter" in the story. As Christians, we take cues from the New Testament and the later church on how to situate the books of the Jewish Bible within the story. Paul's understanding of Genesis goes well beyond anything Genesis requires, and most of us read Paul reading Genesis through the eyes of Augustine.

So I think I might now understand what a missional hermeneutic might be--or at least the way in which I might conceptualize and embrace one. Far more than a Christian propositional framework for reading Scripture, the Christian way of reading Scripture reads it as the story of God moving in history, from creation to ultimate redemption. Like most stories, this story has a direction and an appropriate denouement.

God had a reason to create, a purpose for the creation. The driving point of any story is an unfufilled goal or purpose. The story of God in history is the story of God's mission to redeem, to reclaim, to reconcile the world to Himself. The principal moment in the story and the turning point in the mission is the incarnation, resurrection, and exaltation of Jesus Christ. The rest is the working out of those events. God's coming to Israel, God's mission in the church are both part of the mission.

A missional hermeneutic is thus a Christian approach to Scripture that reads the individual texts of the Bible as a part of this story.

This is a Christian reading of these texts together. The "Old" Testament texts do not in any way beg to be read in this way, which is why Judaism can have such a drastically different understanding of God's story than Christians do. And key features of the Christian reading of the New Testament come more from the church than from the Bible. The incarnation, for example, seems to play no appreciable role in the soteriology of the New Testament. I included it above because it is essential to the Christian understanding of the story, not because it plays a major role in the New Testament. The same could be said of the virgin birth.

So thanks Brian for the push! I do not think that mission is the only hermeneutical category for a Christian reading of Scripture, but clearly it is one of the most important, perhaps the most important.

Friday Review: Hauerwas--"The Way the Words Run"

Chapter 1 of the Richard Hays Festschrift: The Word Leaps the Gap. This chapter is by Stanley Hauerwas, "Why 'The Way the Words Run' Matters: Reflections on Becoming a 'Major Biblical Scholar.'" The "major biblical scholar" of the title is none other than Hauerwas himself, who has just published a theological commentary on Matthew in the Baker series.

I've never read Stanley Hauerwas' Unleashing the Scriptures, but I've read enough references to it to know I am at least half sympathetic to Hauerwas' hermeneutic--that is, except that Hauerwas is a far truer postmodern than I am. And as such, he strongly resists laying out any "superdescription" of how his readings work. As a true postmodern, he would like you catch the way he reads Scripture, to apprentice with him and be trained.

Of course he is not really interested in you watching him per se. He wants you to follow Jesus with the biblical text as you read it situated in the church. I offer not a summary, but a response to some interesting quotes from this piece, at least half of which is long footnotes. The essence of the piece is a response to critique Richard Hays offered in his Moral Vision of the New Testament. Hauerwas recognizes that Hays' thought has evolved somewhat in the more recent compilation he coedited with Ellen Davis, namely, The Art of Reading Scripture.

1. "Hays was kind enough to attend to my account of the role of the Bible in theological and ethical reflection" (2). "I use the word 'role' to avoid the word 'use'" (2 n.2).

It is going to hurt for me to suggest that use is way more accurate to what actually takes place in the relationship between Christians and the biblical text. This is way more true of theological hermeneutics than even original meaning interpretation, in my opinion.

2. "fundamentalism and historical criticism are but two sides of the same coin: they are both developments of the Protestant stress on sola scriptura, transformed by the printing press into "sola text." These developments were given ideological formation by democratic social orders that created something called the individual citizen, which presumed the ability to read the Bible without spiritual formation and moral guidance. As a result, the Bible was separated from the community necessary for it to be read as the word of God, that is, the church" (3).

This is Hauerwas' own summary of his earlier book, Unleashing the Scripture. I would agree with the bulk of this statement.

3. In Moral Vision, Hays suggests that Hauerwas' argument should lead him to become a Roman Catholic (4), a question Wieland Willker raised of a post of mine this week.

Hauerwas is not concerned to work out a finely tuned method, of course. He is truly postmodern. This comment is reflective: "Attempts to develop a hermeneutical theory that can resolve such differences in advance are doomed to failure. The church did not develop a theory to resolve conflicting readings; rather, the church was given an office to ensure that one church's readings would be tested by other churches. The name of that office is 'bishop'" (7 n.15).

In my own hermeneutic, it is neither Scripture nor the Church that are the final answer but the Spirit. The consensus of the Church reading Scripture is as sure as any indication of the Spirit's direction we might have. In that sense I reflect the emphasis of my revivalist roots, now balanced with the emphasis of the evangelical (Scripture) and catholic (Church).

I've written it up in popular form in my self-published, Who Decides What the Bible Means?

4. "contemporary preaching too often takes as its task to find 'applications' for the text, when its task should be to lead a congregation away from one narrative world and into another" (6 n.12).

"I avoid using the language of 'interpretation,' because I think such language suggests that the text has a 'meaning,' which must then be interpreted" (7 n.14).

"There is, moreover, no 'original historical sense,' and it is not at all clear why the 'literal sense' should be identified as that which the 'original' authors and readers understood. The very presumption of 'original' needs to be left behind" (6 n.13)

"I remain unconvinced that the so-called historical knowledge is a trump or even is necessary for how the Scripture is to be read by the church" (9).

While I agree with the legitimacy and primacy of Hauerwas' theological reading of Scripture, my main disagreement is his apparent denial of an original meaning for the biblical text. A theological reading without any reference to the original meanings of the Bible will be prone to run away into the celibacy of the clergy and purgatory. In this respect I remain a pietist Protestant--the consensus of the church at any point in time is not definitive or preclusive of reformation. I believe in meta-language, even if it is ultimately itself metaphorical or expressive.

5. "That historical critics will not let the church avoid the bits of Scripture that do not confirm our contemporary sensibilities is also a contribution we dare not ignore. Of course, I do not believe that historical criticism was necessary for the recovery of the significance of Jesus' life or for forcing us to attend to the unpleasant parts of Scripture. It just worked out that way" (12).

:-)

All true truth is God's truth, so our faith is always potentially enriched by any true pursuit of truth for its own sake.

6. Hauerwas refers to several co-conspirators in this movement that is significantly in play in Christian biblical studies. They should be mentioned.

a. Hays himself in the Art of Reading Scripture.
Hauerwas mentions some of the nine key theses of this book: "Scripture has multiple complex senses given by God," "Scripture is rightly understood in light of the church's rule of faith as a coherent dramatic narrative," and "Though the Bible contains the voices of many different witnesses, the canon of Scripture finds its unity in the overarching story of the work of the triune God," seem particularly relevant.

b. The Baker theological commentary series:
"this commentary series is based on the assumption that the Nicene tradition, in all its diversity and controversy, provides the proper basis for the interpretation of the Bible as Christian Scripture" (13).

Again, I affirm the legitimacy and primacy of this way of reading Scripture. I also affirm without reservation that hermeneutically this is a reader-response approach to the text of Scripture in which the words are not read in context and that the contextual, "original" meaning of Scripture will regularly diverge with this manner of reading, often simply being something almost completely different and, indeed, at times directly conflicting with the meaning thus found.

7. "the way the words run" names the way a community has learned to read texts through training..." (15).

"Christians so naturally read scriptural texts as shaping a form of life... moral readings" (15 n.36).

Reminds me of a comment by Keith Drury, something like "the only real function of the Bible in the life of the church is to create a holy people."

Monday Editorial: The Postmodern Biblical Consultant

I'm in the final stages of a piece I'm writing on Hebrews and the worship of Jesus. In the process of writing, I've engaged heavily with Richard Bauckham's impressive interpretive construct of how Jesus' enthronement at the time of his exaltation to God's right hand connects to his inclusion within the divine identity since eternity past. Bauckham's exegetical conclusions are so different from mine that it has been difficult for me to get inside his head.

But I think I have and, as you might expect, his interpretation is ingenious. Jesus inherits the name, YHWH, at his enthronement, but Jesus has been included within the identity of the one God since eternity past. The early Christians would have recognized this fact as soon as they understood Jesus to be on God's divine throne a la Psalm 110:1. Only the one God can be on that throne, so Jesus must be included in the identity of the one God. He therefore must have been involved with creation as part of the one God and he must be worthy of the worship of the one God.

As I said, I find this ingenious. It applies all Bauckham's exhaustive knowledge of second temple Jewish literature to the particulars of the New Testament text and comes up with an interpretation that sees the later Christian affirmations of Nicaea and Chalcedon about Jesus already there in a nutshell in the NT, "the earliest christology was in nuce the highest christology," as Bauckham says repeatedly in the string of works he's written related to this topic.

This ought to be great, right? He's done what Christian Bible scholars are supposed to do, right? He's found a way to configure the biblical evidence in its historical context so that an interpretation of the original meaning fits with later Christian faith. I don't think he would put it that way, but we should expect it to work out that way, right?

This post really isn't about Bauckham. It relates to my sense that theological hermeneutics can't quite seem to admit to itself that it is a form of reader response. In his piece on biblical monotheism, Bauckham suggests at one point, in so many words, that when we can't know for sure what a historical conclusion should be, why not assume it fits with the conclusion most convenient for faith. Again, he doesn't quite put it that way, but that's what I take him to be saying.

The problem here for me is that, in my experience, there often is a distinction between the eyes of later faith and the original, historical eyes. The way the NT interprets the OT is a case in point, and it is both predictable and amusing that some of the key hermeneutical players have devoted some energy to the NT's interpretation of the OT. Why? Because this is a point of "naughty data" that truly threatens to deconstruct the paradigm.

Kevin Vanhoozer wants to see the authoritative meaning of the biblical text as the original meaning, yet see the significance of the text as something that can vary. I would say that theological hermeneutics often goes further to change the meaning of the text by reading it against the context of the later church. I don't have a problem with this way of reading the text. What I have a problem with is what I see as the frequent slight of hand to argue that this reader response approach is really the same as an original meaning approach that gives the benefit of the doubt to Christian faith.

Perhaps I have misread what theological hermeneuticians are really trying to do. But it seems to me that the theological hermeneutic approach is a bit like having someone from your team referee the game. It's like letting the people who stand to gain from the bailout decide how to dispense the money from the bailout. It's like chairing the rank improvement committee when you're up for rank improvement. It's like having all your friends on the jury and being able to change the judge if you don't like what he or she decides.

It seems to me there is an inherent conflict of interest in the current, very popular postmodern drive to wed theology back to Bible.

My thoughts here will not be popular, and they won't open up for me an opportunity to write one of the many new commentaries that are now coming out from the standpoint of a theological hermeneutic. But after much reflection I believe that the wedge between biblical interpreter and theological appropriator should be retained, like the division of powers in the United States government. It is not that the same person can't perform both roles, it's that there is an inherent conflict of interest between the two approaches to the text.

What I want to suggest is that it is ultimately unhealthy to go completely in the way of theological hermeneutics as it currently seems to be practiced. Its current approach, as I read it, seems to be that, since the original meaning is uncertain, why not go with whatever option fits best with Christian faith. Yet this approach seems to me only a sophisticated version of the older fundamentalism. A postmodern reading of the biblical text doesn't need to be tied to the original meaning at all.

I think another, more healthy postmodern approach to biblical interpretation would see a biblical interpreter as a consultant for many readers across the spectrum. For the original meaning part of the consultation, I might suggest several possible ways of reading the biblical text depending on varying assumptions. If you believe in the possibility of miracles, here are some possible meanings the gospel texts might have had. If you don't, here are some possible meanings the gospel texts might have had. If you are interested in the original meaning of the text, here are the most likely options. If you are interested in reading these words in the light of later Christian faith, here are some possible resonances.

To let the text be the text, and not let it become a slave to theology, this is how I believe it must be. Otherwise we are only playing games with the biblical text, never truly listening to it. Of course this does shift the onus of Christian faith to the theologian. The ministerial and Christian curriculum of the postmodern age will end up having more theology than Bible or, contrariwise, the Bible taught will focus on theological readings and/or appropriations, rather than the original meaning.

We'll still want some biblical consultants around to keep theology honest and to give it historical depth. And while I'm arguing for the old division of powers here, I'm not at all suggesting that the same person can't both consult and theologically appropriate. I'm arguing for maintaining the firm distinction rather than blurring it in the manner of contemporary theological hermeneutics.

Theological Hermeneutics Versus Inductive Bible Study

I was reflecting this morning on the difference between inductive Bible study and the latest craze, "theological hermeutics." I'm not at the office to grab some books off the shelf but I associate this movement with names like Kevin Vanhoozer, Joel Green, and Anthony Thiselton, each in their own way.

Vanhoozer has put together The Dictionary for the Theological Interpretation of the Bible. Green has started the Two Horizons commentary series with its launching volume, Between Two Horizons, and his own book, Seized by Truth. I am sure those who are further ensconched in this literature could add other books. Mike, if you're out there, I'll go ahead and mention Jeannine Brown's, Scripture as Communication.

I had three thoughts today on the contrast between the theological approach to interpretation and the inductive approach I learned at Asbury Seminary and that is the stuff of the historical critical method. Here they are in brief:

1. Its fundamental method is deductive rather than inductive.
A deductive method primarily proceeds from certain assumptions and then plays out the likely consequences of those assumptions. Certainly theological hermeneutics interacts significantly with the vast data of the biblical text. Yes, certainly there is no "inductive" method to be found that does not proceed from certain assumptions as well--all thinking does.

However, the assumptions from which theological hermeneutics often proceeds are quite large and debatable from an evidentiary perspective (this of course fits the postmodern Zeitgeist and fits with the theological work of James Smith and Nicholas Wolterstorff).

2. It does not aim at the most likely interpretation given the evidence but on the interpretation that best fits with its presuppositions.
In other words, theological hermeneutics does not operate in the same way that ordinary truth pursuit does. It does not gather evidence and generate hypotheses to explain that evidence, hypotheses that are then evaluated on their simplicity, clarity, and ability to account for as much data as possible.

Its logical process is more akin to prejudice, bias, and any -centrism whose primary operating principle derives from unexamined and unprovable assumptions rather than from the most probable reading of the data.

I have given concrete examples of this logic before. From an inductive standpoint, one would not infer that Moses wrote the Pentateuch in its current form. Genesis never mentions him. He is always discussed in the third person rather than the first person throughout the Pentateuch, including the narration of his death. No one following an inductive method would infer that Moses was its author.

However, the traditional and often hotly affirmed Mosaic authorship functions on the basis of theological assumptions derived from a certain reading of the New Testament.

3. Theological hermeneutics is a species of reader response criticism.
The final implication of what we have observed above is that theological hermeneutics is in fact a species of reader response criticism. In the case of Vanhoozer, this is ironic, since he himself puts great impetus on the meaning of Scripture in its original speech-act. He rejects drastically the validity of reader response approaches.

I do not, nor do I think does Joel Green. However, I would strongly affirm that inductive study remains valid and a significant element in the theological process. Most of all, I contend that theological hermeneutics should not be confused with inductive Bible study. Further, while theological hermeneutics may be a more appropriate Christian reading of the biblical texts, we should be clear that it is not the reading likely to tell you what Paul or any biblical author was actually trying to say.

Vanhoozer's method is confused when it tries to equate the meaning of the original speech act of any portion of Scripture with some divine speech act in the whole of Scripture. The first is the stuff of inductive Bible study and the original meaning. The second is valid but it is a reader response approach to the biblical text. Vanhoozer confuses the two.