Here's the previous post.
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1. The fall of my third year at Asbury featured Foundations of Old Testament Hermeneutics with John Oswalt. Oswalt was a very good teacher and, I would say, took a scientific approach to issues and critical questions.
This was the late 80s. Postmodernism was not yet in full swing. Whether you were traditional or mainstream, you still played the game. You gathered evidence. You examined competing hypotheses. You chose the one that seemed to best account for most of the evidence in the most economical way.
Of course, this is often a game. For Wang or Oswalt, you always knew where they would come out on a critical issue. If it was an issue where they were allowed to think freely, they were/are tremendous scholars--far more capable than me at cataloging the evidence and history of interpretation.
But there is an electric fence around many issues in some circles, and they would never go near it. They're not allowed. Their positions on such issues are totally predictable. The only creativity is in how they get there. I'm not saying they didn't believe what they taught. I'm hypothesizing that they didn't ultimately think inductively on such issues. There were hidden variables.
2. Oswalt's main claim to fame is of course his commentary on Isaiah. For chapters 40-66, he sees Isaiah having a vision of Israel 150 years after his time. This is a way for him to see Isaiah as the direct author of these chapters with them still being about the late 500s BC.
By this point, however, Asbury had reoriented me around inductive Bible study. What is the most likely conclusion based on what the text says? Let the text drive the car, not tradition.
Consider that Isaiah is never mentioned in chapters 40-66. They never say he was the author of that portion. (For perspective, I think it's also worth noting that we have Isaiah in a book, where it is all in one place. In ancient times, Isaiah was probably on multiple scrolls.)
The context of Isaiah 40-66 is clearly the late 500s BC. It mentions Cyrus, king of Persia, for example (45:1). It does not speak of him or its context as a matter of the far off future. That is, it is not in the form of a prophecy about the distant future. It is worded about the present or near future. "Comfort my people... make straight in the desert a highway for our God" (40:1, 3). Inductively, it reads like something going on in present time.
The bottom line is that, if we let the text drive our conclusions, Isaiah 40-66 doesn't want to be read as a text directly written by Isaiah. It wants to be read as a text celebrating the return of Israel from captivity around the year 538BC. It is easily read as a text in the tradition of Isaiah. The mainstream view is that authorship was not as limited in ancient times as we think of authorship. Documents associated with a figure could be collected under his name.
3. So when Oswalt goes with a different conclusion, IMO, it is not because he's listening to the text. It's because he feels compelled to argue for the tradition. And, of course, he is ingenious. Sometimes I felt like I just wasn't smart enough to argue for some of these things that seem to go against the obvious evidence.
It didn't occur to me that, if refugee descendants of king David had resettled in Galilee, they might have named their village after the branch of Isaiah 11:1, and that might explain why Matthew might think Jesus settling in Nazareth was a fulfillment of prophecy. My mind just isn't that beautiful.
I didn't feel the pain at the time, but the reason the authorship of Isaiah 40-66 is a big deal is because the New Testament thinks of this material as coming from Isaiah. For that matter, Josephus thinks of this material coming from Isaiah. It was the traditional understanding at the time of the New Testament.
I am at peace with God revealing himself to the New Testament authors within their framework of understanding. It goes back to the distinction between the message and the envelope in which it comes. I'll talk a little more about this at the end. In any case, I would come to lean toward those who side with what the text seems to imply rather than what tradition says.
4. Of course, this opens a can of worms--listening to the text. I was so happy to pursue New Testament studies because there are so many landmines in Old Testament studies. In evangelical circles, I was so happy not to have to teach the Old Testament. I also was glad to stay away from teaching Daniel and Revelation or the Pastoral Epistles. Leave them to Steve Lennox and Dave Smith. It's not that I don't love those books. It's just that I don't like getting shocked by electric fences.
Inductively speaking, Moses is never mentioned in Genesis. He is always spoken of in the third person from Exodus to his death in Deuteronomy. That is to say, inductively speaking, you would not conclude that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. He did this. He did that. He went up on a mountain and died. It's not the way you write when you are the he.
There are psalms that inductively do not seem to be written by David. The titles, after all, were added later. One of the most striking instances is Psalm 51, which talks about building the walls of Jerusalem. It seems to me that this fits the late 500s better than David's day. I've mentioned Psalm 110, which doesn't seem to be by David but rather a tribute about an unspecified king.
These conclusions are easy to reach if we are allowed to follow the text rather than tradition. But, for most Christians, traditions about the text drive the ship, not the text itself. In New Testament times, these traditions were assumptions, so the New Testament operates on the assumption of Mosaic and Davidic authorship. Was that part of the inspired point or the clothing in which the inspired point came?
4. Like Wang, Oswalt had a way of pushing me toward the opposite positions of those he argued for. It's because I could see my earlier self in them--not using the evidence to identify the most likely conclusions but using their intellect to argue for traditional conclusions. I suppose trying to be objective and questioning my own biases is now such second nature to me that I can't see how hard it is for others.
In this current political moment, the most likely interpretation seems so obvious to me. But I have to remember that, IMO, evangelicals are not wired to follow the evidence to its most likely conclusions. They are wired to play an evidence game with hidden variables. IMO, they tend to configure evidence to support their existing frameworks and traditions. They don't approach evidence in search of the truth. And many are wired to mock opposing interpretations with the confidence of someone who thinks they speak for God.
So Oswalt went through all the usual suspects. I learned about JEDP and all the critical issues in the Old Testament. By the way, in my first semester teaching at IWU, I made a document in which I put all the verses from the Flood story that used Yahweh on one side and all the verses that used Elohim on the other. It's easy to do.
What do you know? The result is basically two different tellings of the same story with some variations. One has 7 of every clean animal, for example; the other 2 of every kind. One has a raven; the other has a dove. I don't know why someone would splice two versions of the same story together, but I went from mocking the theory to realizing why someone came up with the theory.
In fact, once you see it, it's hard to unsee it. There are these "doublets" all over Genesis and the early part of Exodus. One version uses Yahweh. The other uses Elohim. Some of it would make perfect sense as oral tradition--the three stories between a patriarch, his wife, and a person who thinks the wife is a sister. So many of these "off limit" theories make so much sense if my brain is allowed to think rather than go on lock down.
5. During my first decade teaching at IWU, I had the opportunity to adjunct for Notre Dame. It was a precious experience, although quite tiring. I would teach a 7:50 at IWU. Drive to South Bend and teach back to back Foundations of Theology classes. Then I would drive back to teach an evening class at IWU. It was good money for a new family, and I was still relatively young.
They used Stephen Harris' Understanding the Bible as a text. Wow. I had never used a mainstream book like this, especially on the Old Testament. I've always felt a little guilty that, in England, I did not have to take comps. If I had earned my doctorate in the States, I would have had two years of course work and comps before starting my dissertation. In England, you start writing from Day 1.
So I was not as well-versed in critical scholarship of the Old Testament going into teaching. In that regard, even though Harris was an introductory text, it was an eye-opener to me on some issues. It made me a better Bible teacher because there was now a lot more under the surface. If I have appeared smart from time to time, much of it may have to do with this part of the iceberg beneath the surface.
6. It was in the 90s that I really had the paradigm shift to realize that meaning always takes place in my head or in your head. When I read a text, it's my head that understands a meaning. The "pre-modern" or better, the "pre-reflective" reader thinks the meaning is in the text. And yes, a text is someone's attempt to capture, to some extent, the meaning in their head.
But when it comes to me, the construction of meaning always and inevitably is mine. You can help try to direct it. If I'm open and able, I can take that into the meaning in my head.
But the buck stops with my head. In that sense, the most critical moment of inspiration must inevitably take place inside of me. Practically speaking, it doesn't matter how inspired the Bible was originally if the meaning that gets in my head right now isn't. My head is the delimiting factor, the limiting agent.
In my circles, we worry a lot about original inspiration. But you can see that none of that matters in the slightest if the meaning in my head isn't right or isn't what God wants me to see.
This insight eventually led me not to worry so much if the New Testament was reading the Old Testament in context. The meaning God inspired them to see can be true just the same.
The same goes for the meaning you or I see in the text. It can be a truth even when I am not reading the text correctly. And, since few of us are scholars, it almost has to be that way if God is to speak to us. This changes the locus of hermeneutical, inspirational concern to the moment of reading, not the moment of writing. And you can see it really undermines our culture wars on these issues.
7. I'll end with an illustration. My paternal grandfather used to preach the highway of holiness passage in Isaiah 35:8 like this -- you don't have to be smart to be entirely sanctified. It says in the KJV that "men, though fools, will not err therein."
A fool was not a stupid person in this context. A fool was a wicked person. And to err in older English meant to wander. And of course Isaiah wouldn't have a clue what you meant by entire sanctification. The text is probably saying that there will be no wicked people on that journey of Israel back to Jerusalem from captivity.
But the point of my grandfather's sermon wasn't wrong. You don't have to be smart to follow Christ. That was the meaning in his head. That was the meaning in his congregation's heads. It was a true meaning. Perhaps it was truly what God wanted them to hear, so that's ok.
It just wasn't what Isaiah was thinking.
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