Laansma - Hebrews in Scholarship

1. In an attempt to crank up my reading machine, I'm trying to read every day in a rotation through a stack of books old and new I have piled on my desk. The first victim is a book that came out last year called Christology, Hermeneutics, and Hebrews: Profiles from the History of Interpretation, edited by Jon Laansma and Daniel Treier. I take it to be a venture in the theological interpretation of Hebrews.

2. Jon Laansma writes the opening chapter: "Hebrews: Yesterday, Today, and Future." That chapter is the notice of reading I'm giving today. I would say that Jon wrestles with two key concerns in this chapter. The one is the fact that Hebrews does not play on the same field of biblical theology as Jesus and Paul. It's more in something like a kiddy league. He wrestles with why this situation might be the case. The second issue he wrestles with is the appropriateness of historical method in interpretation. Is an Enlightenment approach to interpretation part of the problem in some way?

First, Laansma's awareness of Hebrews scholarship I did not know puts me to shame. (Of course it can't hurt to have Wheaton's library close at hand. If I could walk across campus and scan the shelves of a research library, I'd be in better shape. I'm not complaining about my library. We do a very good job of what we do and have a good library for what we do, which is train ministers, not research experts in theology.)

3. I might register my sense of theological interpretation, which I have done before in the forest that is this blog. For me, it is important to keep contextual exegesis and theological interpretation distinct from each other, although I consider both legitimate enterprises. On the one hand, there are theological dimensions to contextual exegesis, especially if you believe that God does indeed reveal himself and interact with the world. Believing exegesis should not be "functionally deistic" in a reductionistic sense (19).

Nevertheless, the myth of objectivity is essential in exegesis. Yes, we inevitably infect the text with ourselves. Yes, we cannot neatly separate ourselves as subjects from the object of our knowing. But it becomes a slop of free for all if we don't try. I would go so far as to say that it is helpful to do a "deistic read" of a text first before rereading with the eyes of theism. This is to keep us honest, to try our best to disentangle ourselves from the reading. We will fail, but not to try opens the gate wide for no agreed meaning at all, only agreements among tribes of readers.

The historical reading can then engage in theological appropriation, while not confusing categorically the appropriation with the interpretation.

4. On the other hand, the church fathers engaged in what I consider theological interpretation. They fully let their theology affect their interpretations. They "fiddled" with the text. Theological interpretation of this sort, in my opinion, is simply a form of reader-response criticism. I consider it legitimate, but it should be strongly distinguished from the original meaning in history.

5. Should Hebrews be a major player in biblical theology? In my reading, it should be because it provides the definitive lens through which we appropriate the sacrificial system of the Old Testament. Without Hebrews, we have no definitive word in Scripture to stop the animal sacrifices of the old covenant. We assume Paul agrees but I am finishing up some work that questions whether this is in fact the case.

On the other hand, I am not so worried about the anathema of setting up a canon within the canon. I think that it is not only appropriate but inevitable. Also, the contours of that canon within the canon may change from time to time in Christian history. In that sense, I am not bothered to try to put Hebrews on the main stage. That is not a need I have theologically, even though I think Hebrews does belong there for the reason I mention above.

6. Of course I have to like the chapter because Jon mentions me a couple times. :-) For my next victim chapter, I see that John Barclay's Paul and the Gift is on top next.

Nijay Gupta on Goldingay

Nijay Gupta has written two reviews of John Goldingay's new book, Do We Need the New Testament?

1. His first post is positive: Goldingay is right!
2. His second post pushes back: Goldingay is wrong!

I think Nijay does a great job of this. Let me say that I simply didn't grow up hearing that the OT wasn't my testament. In fact, I knew far more about the OT going into college than I did about the New Testament. I tested out of NT Survey in college at SWU and I remember thinking, wow, I know a whole lot less about the NT than the OT. I take this as a reflection of how much OT preaching I must have heard growing up and going to camp meeting.

In fact, I identify more with what I take to be the background of Fee and Stuart. I grew up with concern about "shaving the edges of your beard" (Lev. 19:27) and women "wearing that which pertaineth to a man" (in my case, slacks; Deut. 22:5). I grew up needing to hear about passages in the NT that told me not to let anyone judge me for whether I observed a sabbath (Col. 2:16). We did, however, eat pork chops.

I respect Goldingay greatly, but some of the things he says about the NT are nothing short of astounding to me (read Nijay's review).

I have been rather soft-spoken on my two-fold hermeneutic till now, believe it or not. But I think I will get more assertive in this now second phase to my career as a scholar. There are two distinct ways to read the Bible--historically and sacramentally. They need not contradict. They are both legitimate.

I am both tired of the theological interpreters who pretend history does not exist. And of course I reject the old school historians who dismiss the sacramental entirely. Goldingay, in typical evangelical fashion, tries to overlay the historical with the sacramental. Very popular right now. He skews the history to make it fit with the theological, and he pretends the sacramental is the historical.

But it basically amounts to fundamental historical incompetence. It will not stand.

Schrodinger's Doctrine

At the Theological Research Seminar at IWU yesterday, I was presenting a historical and theological response to Richard Bauckham called, "Jesus and the Identity of God." My basic conclusion was that Bauckham's theology is spot on and his readings of NT texts are appropriate Christian readings but that they seem a little too complex and convenient from a historical perspective.

But what really seemed to resonate was more a model of looking at Christian doctrine and orthodox readings of biblical texts I called "Schrodinger's Doctrine."

You may have heard of Schrodinger's cat. It is an illustration from quantum physics where we don't know if a cat in a box is alive or dead until we open the box. More profoundly, the cat in a sense is both alive and dead until it is observed. Quantum physicists call this "superposition." A particle can, for all intents and purposes, be in two different places at once until it is observed. It's position is undetermined up to that point.

So, I suggested, until the Church "opened the box" on key issues, the position of Christianity on that issue was not yet determined. In AD324, both Arius and Athanasius are in the box. In AD325, the Church opens the box and finds Athanasius.

I don't wish to suggest that Philippians 2:6-11 or 1 Corinthians 8:6 did not have an original, historical meaning prior to what would become the Christian reading of them. We can debate it if you wish. But I am suggesting that, for Christians, these texts did not have a determined meaning of sorts until they did, until the Church opened the box.

As my friend and colleague John Drury likes to say, quoting Hegel, "History is lived forward but understood backward."

One problem I see with our inquiries is that we almost seem to assume that ideology was the first order of business for the earliest believers. Rather, as Larry Hurtado has argued, practices wagged the dog.

The earliest Christians didn't stop to work out the fine nuances of monotheism or dig up some copy of Ezekiel the Tragedian. They sang. They praised. Theology came later, and what theology came later was as much rhetorical as ideological.

So did Christianity include Jesus within the identity of the one God? Yes! Did Christianity include Jesus within the eschatological monotheism of the one God? Yes! Did Christianity include Jesus within the worship of the one God? Yes! Did Christianity include Jesus within the creational monotheism of the one God? Yes!

When the box was opened, yes!

Who was Job's Redeemer? (Job 19:25-26)

1. There is a beautiful Aria in Handel's Messiah based on these verses in Job:

"I know that my redeemer lives,
     and that in the end he will stand on the earth.
And after my skin has been destroyed,
     yet in my flesh I will see God."

It is a tremendously powerful picture!  Job is suffering. In one Christian reading of these verses, he faces potential death, but he knows that Jesus is alive, shall we even say that he will rise from the dead! I know that my Redeemer, Jesus, whom the Romans put to death, has risen and that he will come again. One day he will stand on the earth. Long after Job's skin has disintegrated and he is died, he will rise again from the dead. In his flesh, he will see God.

This is a powerful theological reading of Job. Although I can't think of any place where the New Testament actually interprets this verse from Job in this way, it is a fine theological reading of the verse.

2. The question in my mind is what the verse meant when it was first written? The default reading probably goes something like this:

• "I read the verse against my world and my definitions. As a Christian, Jesus is my Redeemer. "In the end he will stand on the earth," sounds like my belief in the second coming. Skin destroyed and then returning? Sounds like resurrection to me.

The problem is when I try to read the verse against its literary context (the rest of Job) and historical-cultural context (how words were being used in the Ancient Near East at the time, roughly).

a. For example, within Job, look at these verses in the literary context of Job:

• Job 14:12 come into play: "mortals lie down and do not rise again." 
• Job 7:9-10: "those who go down to Sheol do not come up; they return no more to their houses"
• And Job 3:16-19: "why was I not buried like a stillborn child... There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest... The small and the great are there, and the slaves are free from their masters."

In other words, Job does not yet seem to have any sense yet of resurrection or of a meaningful afterlife. For this reason alone, it is unlikely that Job 19:25-26 are about resurrection. The rest of Job does not seem to think in those categories yet.

b. When we expand to the historical-cultural context, the situation doesn't seem to change. The other wisdom books, whose final form I personally would date to the same period, have similar things to say:

• Psalm 88:3-6: "My soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; I am like those who have no help, like those forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those who remember no more… in the regions dark and deep."
• Ecclesiastes 9:5: "The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost."

3. So what was Job saying originally? It seems to me that the most likely meaning is captured in the following paraphrase:

"I know that God, the one who is going to get me out of my current situation, is alive. I know that he is going to show up here in the land. My skin is rotting now with these boils. But he is going to vindicate and restore me. He is going to restore my skin to normal. In my restored flesh, I will see God."

Obviously I could be wrong. My point is merely to exercise the method one uses when the goal is what the text really meant originally. Then we are free, I believe, to hear true Holy Spirit meanings as well. For this reason, I will continue to prize the theological interpretation of Handel's Messiah! It is a Christological reading that is fully correct theologically.

My Response to Ricoeur

For a little over a month now, I have been reading through Paul Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory. I would now like to appropriate it (see what I did there).

1. First, let me mention some aspects of his enterprise that I most appreciated. The first is his sense that the approaches of philosophers of meaning like Ferdinand de Saussure and his trajectory ending with Jacques Derrida are insufficient because 1) they do not properly take into account the fact that a sentence is a different level of meaning than a mere word and 2) the fact that the sentence often involves a reference to the world outside language. There are reasonable, although not definitive, limiting factors in the proposed meaning of a text.

The second is his sense that a written text is severed from its author. It takes on a life of its own. We call this the semantic autonomy of the text. An author cannot control what a text will come to mean once he or she is no longer present. In that sense, it potentially takes on a universal audience. Once Paul dispatched his letter to the Philippians, he lost control over its potential meaning and he opened up the door that not just the Philippians would read the letter but that countless people 2000 years later would.

On metaphor, I am very good with his basic definition, which I take from Time and Narrative--a metaphor is the creation of a new semantic pertinence by the comparison of two unlike things. I agree that a metaphor is not a mere ornament but that new meaning is created in its use. Indeed, I believe metaphor, figure, poetry, and ritual tend to be far more powerful than the literal--a sign of the impoverishment of a certain strand of Protestant thinking (not Wesleyan).

2. I used to feel stupid a lot in school when I didn't understand a thinker. To be sure, there were those who were able to catch on to those thinkers from the start. But over the years I've come to have two other thoughts as well. First, sometimes those thinkers just didn't make sense. I didn't understand some of them because I expected what they were saying to make sense and they just plain didn't (Plato, Leibniz come to mind).

The second thought is really more a matter of annoyance. Some philosophers invent their own language and then call you stupid for not understanding them. I find Heidegger and Hegel the worse offenders here. I'm not sure I would entirely put Ricoeur in that category, but there were times reading this book that I wondered if he was being unnecessarily "poetic."

It's fine to engage in a discussion with peers who are already in the discussion with you. You don't have to explain Gadamer or Dilthey to a room of philosophers. Actually, in that respect Ricoeur explained a lot that he wouldn't have had to. Thanks, Paul. :-)

3. Ricoeur wrote in the hey day of structuralism, so his lingering on the text-in-itself was understandable. I thought his run through Jakobson's six factors in relation to the fixation of meaning in writing quite brilliant. Ricoeur rightly points to "ostensive" features of texts that refer to things in the real world outside of language.

However, I believe he is ultimately wrong to believe that a text has a meaning-in-itself. There is no sense inherent in a text-in-itself. There is no understanding that corresponds to the text-in-itself. There is no objectivity in the text. There is no logical or atemporal or ideological aspect of a text that is not a construct or an abstraction, a heuristic device, not truly something that inheres in the text itself. There is only a text-as-uttered and a text-as-received. A text has no fixed meaning-in-itself without a context.

The text-as-meaning does not exist in itself. It only exists as understood by a mind against a context. This is, I believe, a fundamental implication of Wittgenstein. There is no unambiguous meaning "behind" the text. The text does not point to a stable meaning beyond or behind it in itself. The text has a meaning as a function of a mind receiving it as interpreted against the language games the reader can play against the forms of life of which the reader is aware.

That meaning is a function of the language-games-situated-in-forms-of-life of the person receiving the text, including its own author. These interpretations of the text can be as varied as those who read the text. The understanding of the author is one of these interpretations, but it is not the only one. Concrete references to the outside world can be part of those language games and forms of life but they can also be fictive.

I think I'll leave it at that. It would be fun to rewrite this book and tweak it from my perspective, but no time or reason for that.

4. As relates to the Bible, we can apply these fundamental insights as I have repeatedly over the years. There was an event of meaning when these texts were fixed in writing. An expert will point out that some biblical writings were formed in multiple events of meaning, yielding at times complex layers of potential meaning in biblical texts beyond the bare polyvalence of texts in general.

These first meanings were overwhelmingly if not entirely functions of the language games and forms of life of the original authors and audiences. Even the original situation involved potential variations between the writer and audience/reader who shared the same forms of life and language games.

The language games and forms of life of those in New Testament times were already different from those of the Old Testament. Therefore, it is completely predictable and expected that the New Testament authors would interpret the OT texts in different ways than they were originally understood. The resistance of some to this notion in certain circles is intellectually perverse in the extreme.

The overwhelmingly vast sea of differing interpretations of the Bible especially in Protestantism is also entirely predictable. The "autonomous text," freed from the moorings of its original contexts, assumes the form of the countless readers throughout history reading these words in countless forms of life against the domain of possible language games within those forms of life. "Scripture alone" does not exist. Scripture-as-interpreted is all that exists.

When there is an external authority to render the "right" interpretation, the meaning of the text stabilizes.  This was the case to a great extent within Roman Catholicism and it is increasingly the case within the evangelical hegemony in the United States. But the stable meaning of the text in these cases is deceptive. What is stable is the interpretive community with its authoritative reading of the text.

The situation is complicated by the fact that we are more aware of historical meaning since the historical revolution of the 1800s. Fundamentalism was a reaction to this "attack from within." Whereas the pre-modern might simply reinterpret the words, history threatened to fix the meaning in the times and places when the texts were written. But these fixed points weren't always what traditional faith wanted them to be.

So boundaries were fixed to what you were allowed to let the text mean, and a kind of pretend historical method was used in the process. So you looked like you were playing the game of history, a game that you cannot, not play (or intentionally choose not to play), to the extent you understand it. But while the motions of historical evidence gathering were played, the game was rigged so that the right interpretation would be attained.

So fundamentalist and mainstream evangelical interpretation is a strange amalgam of old and new. We find original meaning glued to theological re-appropriations in order to create a sociologically enforced interpretation.

5. I would rather keep the hot part hot and the cold part cold. The text had a meaning-in-context. We cannot fully reconstruct the intention of the author but we can reconstruct a spectrum of more and less likely originally intended and received meanings to the biblical texts. Let them be what they are. Anything else is just dishonest and the sign of an errant hermeneutic.

But we can still allow for theologically reinterpreted readings of the text. This is a category that Spirit-oriented traditions should be open to. Cannot the Spirit speak in new ways through the same texts? The NT use of the OT would suggest so.

What is the excluded middle? The text-alone approach. The mainstream evangelical/high Protestant approach becomes the one that is more or less hermeneutically incoherent.

There is room for progressive revelation, which sees a developing and unfolding in the biblical texts, as God moves and speaks from situation to situation. There is room for an orthodox reading of the text, which takes as its Archimedian point the consensus of the Church written large but does not in pre-modern fashion pretend that these were always the original meanings. There is room for pneumatic traditions, that see the text still as an instrument of revelation by the Holy Spirit.

All these are coherent readings. Everything else is either unreflective or hermeneutically perverse.

Exegetical Research Lecture

I did this 32 minute overview of exegetical research for a class I'm teaching.  It explains the domains of literary and historical-cultural evidence as they relate to exegetical conclusions.  The first ten minutes are hermeneutical in orientation, explaining what exegesis is and how it might differ from application or even theological interpretation.

The Wane of Classic Biblical Studies

The reason why I think the herds of classic historical-critical biblical scholars will increasingly wane is because all the feeders for the traditional guild are either redirecting or waning.

1. The Ascendancy of Theology
Probably the greatest feeder of traditional biblical studies over the last half of the twentieth century was evangelicalism. You could count on a steady stream of evangelicals whose love and focus on Scripture led them to pursue the original, historic meaning of Scripture with a vengeance. Of course many of these individuals stopped being evangelicals along the way. At mainline seminaries of the seventies and eighties you might find any number of ex-fundamentalists teaching Bible, whose main goal seems to have been to knock any residual fundamentalism out of their students by confronting them with various conundrums from the biblical texts.

Now, evangelical scholars are increasingly embracing the theological nature of their biblical enterprise. The classic canons of inductive Bible study increasingly yield to theological interpretation. While the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) has its rising share of these sorts of sections, it may be that parallel groups like the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) or the Institute for Biblical Research (IBR) will better satisfy the old thirst. In either case, I predict the number of SBL groups following a more historical-critical approach will increasingly decline.

2. The Force of Populism
The rise of the teaching church, the mega-church that has the resources to create its own educational wings, will increasingly allow grass roots Christendom to avoid those elements of biblical studies it finds inconvenient. Local churches can now self-perpetuate their own particular mirror readings of the Bible, finding in Scripture whatever it is they want to find.

So if it is a Calvinist teaching church, you get a Calvinist interpretation/approach to the Bible. If it is a Baptist church, you get a Baptist approach. If it is charismatic, you get charismatic. If it is non-denominational, you get the Baptist approach. :-)  This democratization of the Bible's meaning completely by-passes the classic historical-critical hegemony and allows each interpreter to do what is right in their own eyes.

3. The Rise of the Non-Religious
I think classical biblical scholars forget that it is people with faith who have fed the interest in the Bible. Why were there so many droves of aspiring Bible scholars at SBL in the late twentieth century?  It was the growing opportunity for students with faith to study at the table. I was there among them, excited to be at my first SBL, to give my first paper.

For a very long time, classical biblical studies “bit the hand that feeds it.” It was a bait and switch.  "You love the Bible, come study with us (... so we can teach you not to love the Bible)."

But education is a business, and you can’t give consumers a product they don’t want for too long before they find another company. With the rise of non-faith, the fastest growing segment of the faith population, there will be less and less interest in biblical studies, period. This inevitably means that “Bible outlets” that don’t deal in the kinds of product the two groups above give will be reduced to antiquarianism.

So universities often have a small classics department… and with the rise of the non-religious, classic biblical studies will also become a very small element in an also smallish religious studies department.

All these factors work together to suggest that classic biblical studies, which was such a large phenomenon at one time, will increasingly wane, much to the frustration (and puzzlement) of classical biblical scholars.

Do you agree or disagree, and why?

P.S. This also means fewer jobs for PhDs in biblical studies.  And when there is demand, it will more be for theological interpreters.

Augustine on when to go non-literal

Do you agree with this comment I made somewhere?
_______________
Augustine is a good pre-modern interpreter, in my opinion. If the literal meaning of a text (as he perceived it) did not fit with his theology, he shifted into a non-literal interpretation.

Since one of the ways Protestantism argued against Roman Catholicism was by pushing the literal interpretation and since the modern era honed our skills at reading texts in their historical and literary contexts, we have found ourselves increasingly in a conundrum. Here are some of the strategies that have resulted:

• Fundamentalism--act like you're following the rules for reading in context, but find a possible way to interpret the evidence to make it come out your way. 
• Evangelicalism at its best--highlight the distinction between "that time" and "our time," so that you can let the text mean what it meant, but then adjust the application for a different context. Deal with potential issues in your theology rather than playing games with the original meaning of the text. 
• "Liberalism"--let the text say what it said and then dismiss it as wrong 
• Theological interpretation--let the text say what it said literally but reopen the door for more than literal interpretations 

McKnight 4: From Salvation to Story

I've been working through Scot McKnight's King Jesus Gospel.  The previous posts include:

Intro: Evangelism Explosion
Chap 1: The Big Question: What is the Gospel?
Chap 2: Gospel Culture vs Salvation Culture

Today it's Chap 3: From Salvation to Story

In this chapter, Scot argues that "The Plan of Salvation and the Method of Persuasion have been given so much weight they are crushing and have crushed the Story of Israel and the Story of Jesus" (43).  To put the plan of salvation in proper perspective, he argues, we have to understand it in the context of the story of God walking with Israel which culminated in the story of Jesus.

He also reveals his hand in this section, he is going to argue that "the word gospel belongs to one and only one of our four sets of terms [story of Israel, story of Jesus, plan of salvation, method of persuasion], and I will contend that it belongs to the Story of Jesus as the resolution to Israel's Story" (44).  In other words, the gospel is not the plan of salvation but the good news about Jesus.

McKnight will no doubt get to the implications.  I think we can again see the two I have already mentioned--getting it right and where we put our emphasis.

I do think that Scot, like Tom Wright, overreads the role the story of Israel played in the thinking of the NT authors.  When we draw from history, we tend to be very selective.  We use what Lyotard called petits récits.  Wright and McKnight in this chapter blur, in my opinion, into theological interpretation (rather than historical exegesis) when they import too much of a grand récit from the OT into the localized meanings of specific passages in the NT.  And they run the risk of creating too unified a grand récit of the NT use of the word "gospel" as well.

In short, creating an overarching sense of the gospel in the New Testament moves beyond exegesis into theologizing, just as drawing on some supposed unified story of Israel is neither OT exegesis nor a story presupposed in its entirety by any one NT text.  It is theologizing.  I have no problem with such theologizing, only that it so often pretends to be exegesis.

The "grand narrative" that Wright and here McKnight are building is constructed out of biblical materials but it goes well beyond the "local narratives" presupposed by individual NT texts. It blurs into theological interpretation and at that point is not exegesis.