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Law in Romans: For Sin

April 21, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 19 Comments

Paul says things about the Law that seem to stand in stark opposition to each other. Some would say that Paul contradicts himself about the Law and its place in the story of Israel. If this were an easy question it would be no fun to discuss and, more importantly, scholars would have nothing left to write about.

When I want to explore Paul’s arguments, however, I hold off on asserting “contradiction” until every other explanation has been exhausted. So here as well. Somehow, I want to see how the things he says about the negative place of the Law in the story of Israel coincide with the praise of the Law as holy, righteous, and good.

Yesterday we outlined the promissory function of the Law, as Paul speaks of it in Romans. Then I put up some thoughts from N. T. Wright on the role of the law, where he attempts to give an account for the apparently negative things Paul says about the Law’s function–and how those are resolved in the Christ event.

Today we need to visit that negative thread.

As I see it, here is what we need to hold together: (1) the Law is holy, righteous, and good. But to ascribe such goodness to the Law is not to say either (a) what its purpose is; or (b) what its effect is when it comes to a world ruled by sin and death.

This is where I see the conversation in the comments butting up against each other. I have been focusing on questions (a) and (b), and the things Paul says about the effect and purpose of the Law, as Law, in Israel’s story seem to stand in tension with the goodness of the law. But our task is to figure out how and why this good law can come as an instrument of death, as something that causes the trespass to increase so that the power of sin is magnified.

I see the problem with some of the conversation as this: rather than explaining how both are true, a number of folks are clinging to the “Law is good” part in order to deny what Paul says about its function in the story. But this is precisely why he says the good stuff: because he has to give an account of how a good law can play a role other than life-giver and grace-bringer for Israel.

Paul’s starting point is the Christ event. And this is why he can say that if life comes through the Law, if the grace of God is revealed through the law, if righteousness comes through the Law then Christ died needlessly. So if it didn’t bring righteousness and life, what did it do?

In Romans 2, Paul doesn’t deal with the Law’s purpose per se, but he does chide Israel as Law breakers: “You who boast in the Law, through your breaking the Law do you dishonor God?” Again, this is not about purpose, but an assertion about reality as Paul sees it.

In Romans 3, Paul says that having the oracles of God (including Torah, no doubt), is an advantage to the Jews–but one they did not take advantage of. In fact, it is not God’s response to Israel’s fidelity that puts God’s righteousness on display; instead, it is God’s faithfulness in the face of Israel’s unfaithfulness. Here the paradox of Israel’s failure in God’s redemptive story begins to peek through.

As the chapter goes on, Paul draws closer to giving a negative purpose of the Law. He quotes a whole bunch of OT texts about the sinfulness of humanity. And here is his surprise: these texts, many of which bad-mouthed Gentiles, are not written to condemn Gentiles, but to shut the mouth of Israel: “Whatever the Law says it speaks to those under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped”–not just the mouths of those Gentile bad guys–”and all the world may become accountable to God.” The Law renders culpable those who are under it.

As in the beginning of ch. 3, though, so here also, Israel’s culpability under the Law provides a pointer to a new, decisive intervention by God in order for people to be holy and righteous: “But now, without Law, the righteousness of God has been manifested… through the faith of Jesus Christ.” Our unrighteousness puts on display the righteousness of God, Paul had said, and this is where.

As Paul explains how it is that God enters to act where Israel failed, he gives an indication that Israel’s culpability under the Law does not make it especially liable to judgment, despite its transgression: “in the forbearance of God he passed over the sins previously committed.” This is an important moment in the argument: while much of what Paul does is aimed at showing how Jews are equally guilty, the added guilt itself becomes an occasion for grace, as God passes over in light of the time when righteousness will be brought about by the Christ event.

Tomorrow we will at last get to that troubling verse in ch. 5 where Paul says that the purpose of the Law is for increase of trespasses. But here already the pattern has been set: the saving righteousness of God comes where Israel’s unrighteousness precedes it.

And this is our hint toward how the negative and positive things hold together: the purpose of the Law can, in one sense, be seen as the increase of transgression–but this is because the Law is only penultimate in the purposes of God. The ultimate plan of God is to bring about saving righteousness in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Side Notes on Law in Romans

April 20, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 10 Comments

There are a couple of loose ends from earlier comment threads that I haven’t been able to wrap up. One has to do with Wright’s claim about the law’s purpose being to focalize sin upon Israel, the other with what Paul means by Law.

In Paul’s summary… the law functions to intensify the sin of Adam… (“the law came in on the side in order that the trespass might increase,” 5:20)… Torah, instead of lifting up Israel to a level above the rest of the human race, simply throws a bright spotlight on the fact that Israel, too, is “in Adam,” is “fleshly,” is “sold under sin.”…

“In the very place where sin abounded, grace also abounded.” Here is the rhetorical argument of the letter in a nutshell. Yes, the Torah simply intensifies the sin of Adam in the people of Israel. No, this does not lead to Marcionism… (“Romans and the Theology of Paul, 46-47)

Wright sees ch. 7, where Paul defends the Torah, as being the point where Paul works things out a bit more fully (pp. 52-53 of the same essay):

  1. Covenant was put in place to deal with the sin of the world. This is, thus, Torah’s ultimate purpose.
  2. Torah came in order that sin might abound (Rom 5:20)–”That is, the divine purpose in the giving of Torah was in order to draw Adam’s trespass to its full height precisely in Israel.”
  3. This is repeated in 7:13: “in order that sin might become exceedingly sinful”
  4. God draws all this sin on Israel in order to pass it on to Israel’s Messiah and there deal with sin once and for all: “‘Sin’ is lured into doing its worst in Israel, in order that it may exhaust itself in the killing of the representative Messiah, after which there is nothing more it can do.”
  5. Thus, the apparently negative force of Torah (to draw in and focus sin over Israel’s head) has as its ultimate purpose God’s final dealing with sin, once and for all
  6. “Israel’s ‘failure,’ therefore, was part of the strange covenant plan of the creator god whereby this god intended to deal with the world’s sin.”

What I have liked about this articulation of things is that it places the dying of Christ within the story of Israel. Moreover, it takes seriously the idea that for Paul nomos in Romans often refers quite specifically to the Torah, the Law given to Israel as such.

This leads to the second point.

Yes, in Paul, Torah comes to play a part in the cosmic story of the powers that govern the earth.

But no, it is not inclusive of the cosmic powers that govern the sun, moon, stars, and Gentile morality. At least, not in Romans.

When Paul enters his complex discussion of Law in chs. 5-8, he begins by telling us that Adam trespassed, and that the thing called “law” comes in with Moses. He has specific events in mind, specific Torah given by a specific God to a specific people–and not to others. Without this piece in place, it becomes impossible to make sense of how Paul’s articulation of the gospel is, in fact, for the Jew first–and even through Israel, which was entrusted with the very words of God.

Put differently, it is not the “law” of the planets in orbit that bears witness to the crucified and risen Christ, but the Pentateuch.

Law in Romans: Promissory

April 20, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 4 Comments

I apologize for taking so long to get here. But when we talk about “Law,” we have to be clear what we’re saying (and not saying). What Paul says about the Law is a subset of what he says about, and how he reads, the rest of the scriptures of Israel. I take these to be his presuppositions:

  1. The death and resurrection of Jesus is the good news
  2. This good news is brought about by Israel’s God
  3. God promised to bring such good news to Israel
  4. These promises are found in Israel’s scriptures

This is little more than a restating of Romans 1:1-7. So, in brief reply to people’s vociferous reactions from earlier this week: No, what I’m about to lay out is not a supersessionist, replacement theology. It is a surprising redefinition of what it means to be faithful to the Law and scriptures of Israel.

There are problems with claiming that Jesus is the fulfillment of Israel’s scriptures and the way of salvation–especially when ethnic Israel, by and large, is not receiving Jesus as God’s promised good news. But these are the problems Romans was written to answer.

The first thing to say is this: the purpose of the Law is to witness beyond itself to the coming Messiah. This means that the purpose of the Law was not ultimately either (a) to define the people of God; (b) provide the righteousness requisite for being acquitted as one of God’s faithful people; or (c) tell people what to do for all times and places.

The first indication of this is in the opening verses, where Paul says that the gospel concerning God’s son was prepromised in the scriptures. The stage is set, here, for scriptural references to be read as promissory.

This vein is worked out in several places of the letter:

In Rom 3, after stating the law will not justify any flesh, Paul situates the law with respect to his gospel: “But now, without law, the righteousness of God has been revealed, being witnessed to by the law and the prophets–the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ.”

The law and prophets witness to something beyond themselves: to the coming Christ as the revelation of God’s righteousness.

Similarly, Paul introduces Rom 4 with a statement that he establishes the law. He then goes on to depict the Abraham narrative as anticipating the Christ event in two crucial ways: as Jesus’ death provides for the justification of the ungodly, so too Abraham believed in the God who justifies the ungodly (4:5). And, in the second half of the chapter, the birth of Isaac is depicted as a resurrection–so that Abraham believes in the God who gives life to the dead. This anticipates our own justification as we believe in him who raised Jesus from the dead (4:22-25).

The Abraham narrative shows that the gospel of Christ establishes the Law because it depicts the promises to Abraham, and his justification, as anticipations of the work this same God does now, through Paul’s gospel.

This becomes Paul’s focus as he wrestles with the problem of Israel’s unbelief in chs. 9-10 as well.

At the end of chapter 9, the difference between Israel’s non-attainment of righteousness and the Gentile’s attainment of it has to do with Israel’s failure to read the Law as witness to Christ: “Not by faith, but as though by works–they stumbled over the stumbling stone, just as it is written, ‘Behold! I lay in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, and however believes in him shall not be disappointed.’”

Wrong use of the Law is failing to see it as an anticipation of the coming Christ.

Similarly, in the beginning of ch. 10, the problem with Israel’s pursuit of righteousness is that it did not use the law so as to arrive at Christ. They strove to attain their own righteousness rather than recognizing God’s righteousness which comes through Christ: “For Christ is the telos of the law, unto righteousness for all who believe” (10:4).

In a third pass at the same argument, Paul contrasts the self-referential idea of “doing” the Torah with the Christo-referential idea of the law as witness to the coming Christ.

Law-righteousness, he claims, says, “Whoever does these things will live by them.” Faith righteousness, however, sees in Torah a witness to the Christ event: “Do not say in your heart who will ascend into heaven–that is, to bring down the Messiah. Nor, who will descend into the abyss–that is, to raise the Messiah from the dead. What does it say? The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart; that is, the word of faith that we proclaim. That if you confess Jesus is Lord with your mouth and believe in your heart that God raised him from among the dead, you will be saved.”

In this, Paul rewrites Deut 30. No longer do those verses testify to the gift of the Law as the means of salvation, but to Christ as that means.

This is the first line of argument about the Law in Romans: that the purpose of the whole Torah is to bear witness to something beyond itself. It is a diachronic purpose. The law, correctly understood, has a centrifugal rather than centripetal force: it throws you outside of itself to the coming Christ.

Tomorrow we will take up a second line of argument: that the Law comes in in order to ensure that Israel, like everyone else, is recognizably sinful.

Law in OT and New

April 19, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 15 Comments

I was quite encouraged by the conversation that ensued after yesterday’s post on the Law, and reading from solution to plight. Mostly I was encouraged because after articulating how Paul thinks about the law, I was bombarded by all sorts of objections–most of which are the objections of the rhetorical interlocutor who clearly misunderstands Paul in Romans. This leads me to think that I’m on the right track with articulating a Pauline theology of the Law!

Before diving into the details, let’s orient ourselves a bit. I had a professor once upon a time who used to say that every controversy the church had to face for the first several hundred (2,000?!) years of its existence hinged on the question of continuity and discontinuity between the OT and the NT. And it’s not just about whether there is continuity or discontinuity, the question is where, exactly, the continuity lies and where exactly the discontinuity lies.

One of the problems with most of the objections that have arisen here over the past few days is that people are concluding that a surprising function of the Law, as that function is asserted by NT writers, entails a wholesale discontinuity between the God of Israel / Law and the God of the church / the gospel. Again, not to get too cheeky–this is precisely the misunderstanding about his own theology that drives Romans.

Paul proclaims a Torah free gospel, especially for Gentiles. And now he has to deal with the question of both what this sort of message means about the God of Israel and Israel’s scriptures and what it means that the Gentiles are the predominant members of this new would-be Jewish movement. The point is that we have to be patient with the developing of how continuity works between OT and NT, not assuming that discontinuity–or surprise–at one important point means throwing out the whole OT, Israel, God, etc.

At this point it’s important to highlight two other important aspects of this conversation: (1) The general perspective I’m advocating here, that how OT has value for Christians is only with reference to and/or through Christ, is not just Paul’s theology. In John, Jesus tells the people, You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have life–but it is these that testify to me! The life-giving value of the Torah is not to be found in itself, but as it bears witness to something beyond itself–to the coming Christ. This is Paul’s point in Romans 3 as well.

(2) When we are talking about the place of “the Law,” as that conversation was spurred by Romans 5, the entity we are talking about was the Law given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. One of the biggest problems with making sense of the law in the NT is when we start equivocating, by calling all sorts of things “Law” that might very well be denoted by the word but carry different connotations. The Law, in Paul’s parlance, is what was given “430 years later” than Abraham. It comes at a particular point in time for some particular purposes.

The surprise that Paul has in store is that, because the Law came into a world where sin and death were in power, its life-giving purpose could not be realized, “and this commandment, which was supposed to result in life resulted in death for me; for sin, taking opportunity through the commandment deceived me, and through it, killed me.”

Throughout the NT, the purpose of the Law is, in some sense, Christo-referential. While one can say that this is because Christ is what God was up to all along (as NT Wright does repeatedly, and surely he’s correct), such a statement is actually a confession of faith that can only be made by those who believe beforehand that Christ is what God was up to all along–it is not something that can be read “straight” off the pages of the Law.

Or, put differently, life in Christ rather than life in Torah is the telos of the Law.

Tomorrow: more on Law in Romans. I promise.

Law, Contradictions, and Irrelevancies

April 18, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 32 Comments

Saturday’s post about Romans created quite a bit of conversation. Unfortunately, between teaching all day Saturday and otherwise being kept from exciting theological conversation over the weekend, I was unable to engage that conversation in much depth.

The point that drew the sharpest engagement was when I said:

It also seems to me, that as much as I want to avoid it, I keep coming around again to N. T. Wright’s claim that the purpose of the law is to exacerbate sin and death within Israel per se, so that God could disarm them where they were strongest

The barrages came from all angles, so let me start with the most important: what the Bible in general might say about the Law, and what we as Christians have to say about it.

In short, as troubling as this is, Christians say what we say about the Law, and what we must say about the Law, only because we come to the Law with the prior conviction that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are God’s means of salvation. Not law-keeping.

Once we have said this much, we have claimed that we cannot listen to the Law’s own voice about salvation, but must recontexualize the place of the law within redemptive history based on the later voice of salvation in Christ.

This is what Paul did.

In the words of Herman Ridderbos:

… the function the law occupies in Paul’s proclamation must be seen in the light that for him has dawned in Christ on the law and its works. What makes Paul’s pronouncements on the law so deeply moving and powerful, what causes him to attribute this peculiar, not infrequently paradoxical significance to the law, is not to be accounted for from polemical zeal against Judaism, nor from reading the Old Testament, nor even from the words of Jesus transmitted to him, but it is the light that has burst on him concerning Christ’s death and resurrection, the absolutely new situation that has begun with them and which has regard to the relationship in which every man stands to God in the most existential sense of the world. Only then does the nature of man outside Christ become apparent, does his “own righteousness” on the ground of the works of the law emerge at once in all its wretchedness and self-conceit into the light of day, then too does the insufficiency of the law as a means of salvation first become fully manifest…

When in the light of Christ’s death and resurrection Paul came to the conviction that the law cannot be the means of life and the ground of man’s righteousness before God, this is not a dogmatical-theoretical premise or conclusion, but it rests on the redeeming significance of Christ’ death and resurrection themselves, or, as Paul himself expresses it, on the revelation of the righteousness of God in them, by faith and without works of the law…

It is clearly evident [in Phil 3:4f.] that Paul’s repudiation of the law and its works as means of salvation in the Jewish sense of the word is neither a theoretical dogma, nor rests on subjective experience, but is grounded on that which God has revealed and bestowed of righteousness and life in the death and resurrection of Christ. (Herman Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology, 137-138)

This is an accurate assessment of Paul, one that E. P. Sanders later popularized with his argument that Paul’s thinking and argument work “from solution to plight”: It is in light of the God’s solution in Christ that Paul assesses not only the plight in which humanity finds itself, but the entire preceding narrative of Israel–and the place of the Law in particular.

Tomorrow I will take up some of the particulars for how this works out, and what Paul actually says about the law when he reassesses its place in the story, based on his convictions about Jesus’ death and resurrection.

But for now, here’s the implication for how I will argue and what I will say: a “straight” reading of the OT is of secondary importance for a Christian understanding (or articulating Paul’s view) of the Law. For Christian theology, Deuteronomy or Jeremiah will never have the last, or controlling word, for what role the Law plays in the story of God’s reconciling and rescuing the world.

The OT says that righteousness and life and, ultimately, salvation, come when the people of God faithfully keep the law.

The NT enters with a surprising twist in the story. Life and salvation come through the faithful king, dying on the cross and being raised from the dead.

This changes everything.

Including our understanding of the place of the Law in the story of salvation.

So what is this “new understanding” (and, for that matter, the old one)? Stay tuned…

The Death of Jesus–some wonderings

April 16, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 24 Comments

In Rom 3, Paul says that God publicly displayed Jesus as a hilasterion.

Some of our Bibles translate this “sacrifice of atonement,” some “a propitiation.”

The other option is that this word is being used as it was employed in the Greek Old Testament (LXX): a place where sacrifice is made. The point would be here that God’s patience and passing over of earlier sins comes to an end when he publicly displays Jesus as the place where humanity is reconciled with God, the mercy seat.

This reading has the advantage of fitting into the argument Paul has been making for 2.5 chapters and will make for another full chapter afterward: God is not only the God of Jews. God did not make final atonement in a hidden, secret inner room of the Temple. He made it in public, on the cross. Or, as Paul says in Gal 3: “Before your eyes Jesus was publicly placarded as crucified.”

Hmmm….

The other wondering I had was tied into questions of law, sin, and atonement. As it is laid out in some of its renditions, the penal substitution idea begins with the twin premises that God is holy and we are unholy–the latter being more clearly articulated as, “we are law-breakers.”

But Paul doesn’t seem to think that the appellation “law breaker” applies to all of us.

Just Jewish people.

In Rom 5, the one place where the notion of sin being “imputed” to someone is spoken of, what we hear is that sin is not imputed where there is no law. The points are that (a) Adam did break a rule from God; (b) death still reigned even over people who had not broken any kind of law; and (c) there is still a sense of all people sinning–despite not having a law to break.

So it seems to me that Penal Substitution, and a number of Christian theologies in general, have some work to do in reframing how it is that all people are guilty. It’s not by breaking some law–that’s what happens to Adam, what happens in Israel, but not to everyone.

It also seems to me, that as much as I want to avoid it, I keep coming around again to N. T. Wright’s claim that the purpose of the law is to exacerbate sin and death within Israel per se, so that God could disarm them where they were strongest. Sin is not reckoned where there is no law, and that is why God gives a law–so that through Israel’s faithlessness God’s faithfulness might abound (3:1ff.), so that within a world that manifests God’s wrath God’s righteousness might be made known (1:16-19).

Jesus, God, and Theologial Meandering

April 15, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 7 Comments

I love Jesus.

I even love singing Holy, Holy, Holy on Trinity Sunday.

And sometimes you’ll even catch me reflecting seriously on Colossians, and the Son’s involvement in creation–the preexistent One, through whom all things were made. And I’ll think it’s really, really cool.

But the more I listen to theologians work out issues of Christology, the more convinced I am that the profit to be had in studying Jesus is to be found in figuring out what it means that he was human, not trying to explain how it is that he is God.

I’ve had a couple of encounters with theological Christology this week. One was in listening to the most recent Homebrewed Christianity Podcast. This was a phenomenal overview of recent guests, many of whom are working on Christology as progressive theologians. The worst thing about that podcast was that it added about 8 books to my reading list! I recommend listening to it for an orientation in contemporary Christological study, if nothing else.

But like so many studies of Christology, I was struck, perhaps a bit surprised, by the way that Jesus as God somehow sits front and center in all of their work–even as progressive theologians. Perhaps the reason it made such an impression was in part due to the vast number of things we can then say about Jesus, God, and Christianity. In a sense, the game is much more open when Jesus is God than when Jesus was a first century Jewish Galilean.

And in reading Barth on the eternal Son (§1.11), I again found myself slogging through material where the most compelling thing he seemed able to say was, “Well, the church said this, so even though it’s not really right, we all have to say it.”

The reason why I found the section so disheartening was that the obsession about how to articulate the son’s deity not only relegated Jesus’ humanness to the background, it also caused Barth to say some things about Jesus as redeemer that were wrong, and to misread any number of biblical passages.

When we’re convinced that the most basic thing there is to say about Jesus is that Jesus Christ is God, we render ourselves incapable of reading much of the New Testament (not to mention OT!), where this divine identity is neither argued for, nor indicated, nor assumed.

The history of Christological debate has framed the question like this: why does Jesus have to be God in order to redeem us? Or, what is the significance of Jesus’ deity for our salvation? The alternatives have been positions where Jesus’ heavenly status is not truly divine or the like.

Missing in all this is the absolutely crucial biblical notion that in order for God’s intentions for humanity, the earth, and the cosmos to be realized, all had to be done by a human entrusted by God to rule the world on God’s behalf.

The redeemer has to be Adam.

The redeemer has to be Israel.

The redeemer has to be David.

The redeemer has to be the son of man, the Human One.

Ignoring this prior necessity, we find ourselves saying foolish things such as, “To be lord, one must be none other than The Lord–the God worshiped by God’s people.” No, to be lord is to be entrusted by God to rule the world on behalf of The Lord: The Lord YHWH speaks to my lord the king saying, You are my son.”

Or, we find ourselves thinking someone is being profound, rather than abusing the text, when they say, “‘Today I have begotten you’ means an eternal generation where every day is today.” No, Psalm 2 means that the king becomes, at coronation, what he was not before–just like the human Jesus becomes at the resurrection ‘son of God’ in a sense that he was not before; i.e., as king of Israel.

In the podcast I listened to last night, one of the theologians they described was working on rearticulating what we need to say about Jesus if we want to say in the 21st century that Jesus is God. That route, it seems to me, is a better way to participate in the Nicene-Chalcedonian tradition than to say as Barth does, “Well, they used this word, nobody liked it then, we don’t know what it means now, but surely they were right in saying this!”

Barth is at his best when he is allowing the biblical narrative to infuse his theology with new life. That wasn’t what I read in his outworking of Jesus Christ (not only Christ, but Jesus!) as eternal son.

But then again, that’s my axe. How did you guys find this section?

Reading the Bible with Academy and Church

April 14, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 1 Comment

As I’ve been meandering through my thoughts on being an academic who is preparing students for ministry in places that read the Bible very differently from the academy, the issue of biblical precedent for reading the Bible has come up.

In particular: doesn’t adherence to a historical-critical methodology already put us over-against the Bible, since the NT writers (for example) did not practice this sort of historical reading strategy?

The point is well made. If there’s one thing that historical readings of the Bible show us it’s that the biblical writers weren’t reading the Bible to find out what it meant to an imagined first audience. They were reading it as a word to them. Like normal people still do today.

I have two responses to this. The first is that I don’t think historical critical readings get the last word. More on this in a second.

The second is that most people today think they’re giving historical readings, even when they read it as word to themselves. The person who gets all excited about how the passage spoke to them or grabbed them during their quiet time is typically not saying, in my experience, simply that God told them something through these words. Readers, teachers, and preachers speak of these words spoken to them as though they are the words spoken as intended by Jesus himself, by Paul himself, by God who inspired them.

That is, people assume that there is a continuity between their experience with the text and its historically rooted significance. This is why historical criticism is so devastating to so many freshman in NT Intro–because we assume that we’re reading the Bible in accordance with what it actually is and says. If we didn’t care about the historical issue, then the realization that we have the history wrong would not disturb so many people’s faith–or call forth such vociferous defense from those who continue to adhere to the traditional idea.

But back to my first point: I don’t think historical criticism is the end of the interpretation story. I see it as more of a first step in a process of giving multiple readings to the same text.

One of the implications of the conviction that the Bible has a fundamentally narratival character, and that the life of the church continues this narrative and we as particular people play its various roles, is that later scenes in the story have the potential to transform the meaning of earlier scenes.

As characters in the story, we might expect that a certain chain of events will transpire. We arrive at a place where we are convinced that the end of our journey has come, but not in the manner we predicted. Looking back, we see that what we hoped for did come to pass, but differently from how we had anticipated, and even the hope itself is transformed.

This is the situation of the church reading the prophecies of Israel’s salvation–which have much less to do with a coming Messiah in particular than with full restoration from exile and geo-political freedom and/or hegemony more generally.

Historical critical exegesis tells us that 2d Isaiah was looking for restoration from exile. Historical-critical exegesis shows us that Mark picked up the theme of Isaiah’s second exodus / restoration from exile and interpreted it in a non-historical manner. And, as people who look to Christ for salvation we are right to take up that hermeneutic and reinterpret the OT in light of what God actually has done to save and restore God’s people.

And we continue to use these narratives of restoration as we look to the future: a time of both individual and corporate salvation and the restoration of the cosmos as a whole. Moreover, I anticipate that when that final salvation comes we will be as surprised at its particulars as the Bible-adherent Jews were at the particulars of what God was doing in Jesus.

We read in light of a later point in the story: the post-Jesus side of the narrative.

For many of us, this narrative has continued through a church tradition that includes various creeds and confessions–various battles fought that have defined in the identity of the people of God in various ways. Those earlier moments in the story continue to define how we read the Bible as a word spoken to us, whether as assumptions, as points we consciously read into the text, or points that we fight against in the text, convinced that other things are going on than the church tradition has affirmed. In each case, the way we read is determined by our point in the story which comes now with 2,000 years of interpretive tradition.

The trick for the church, as I see it here in the second decade of the 21st century, is to figure out how historical critical reading strategies–a perspective on what the Bible is that in part defines us as in our contemporary context–can also become a part of the theological storehouse of people of faith.

Can this historical approach to scripture feed the church’s faith? Can it provide theological riches for the people of God?

I do think so–but the process of moving from history to theology has been a slow one, with too few practitioners helping make the translations and transitions. The fault here lies largely with those of us employed in the academy, who have as a whole taken far too long to start doing the work of developing our historical findings theologically.

The academic world is changing. It is developing space for theologically interested readings of scripture of all types. The question is whether this will be a boon to the church or further stifle its ability to hear scripture afresh. The stifling can occur not only as the academy talks about the Bible in ways that the church won’t accept or can’t hear, it can also happen as the academy attempts to put its academic content into ecclessial containers that simply cannot contain it.

Church and Academy Need Each Other

April 13, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 5 Comments

Over the past couple of days I have been talking about the divide between the church and the academy–a divide that sometimes plays itself out in a more general “theological” versus “historical” readings of the Bible battle. But it doesn’t necessarily do so. (Part 1: Gap Between Lectern and Pulpit; Part 2: The Bible Reader Divide.)

But it has been drawn to my attention that I have been somewhat hard on the church the past couple of days. I apologize for that. It wasn’t what I set out to do. I was mostly walking through my own process of being reminded of the gap between what we take for granted in the academy and what we take for granted in the pew.

Actually, I think that the church and the academy need each other–and we sometimes reflect this interdependence in ways that we are unaware of.

First, since I’ve been hard on the church the past couple of days, let me say why the academy needs the church.

The church always remembers what the academy too often forgets: the Bible was written for real people. We academics get so caught up in the “real people” back then for whom it was written that we lose touch with the fact that this is still the Christian canon, still the word of God that people in churches today open up in order to hear God’s voice speaking to us.

If a church is thriving, one reason is likely because it has understood that part of its business is contextualization–whether it has realized this self-consciously or not. It is speaking the words of scripture into the lives of its actual people.

It is somewhat surprising that biblical scholars, who spend all our time thinking about the Bible’s own indications of its own contextualization find it seemingly impossible to recontextualize its message into a new framework. But we struggle here. And need the church’s help.

And the church needs the academy as well.

The most important reason that the church needs the academy, in my estimation, is because the church actually thinks it is giving historical readings of the Bible, good readings of what the Bible meant, when it tells you what the Bible says and means today.

Christians sitting down with their Bibles and applying it to their lives are not conscious, in general, of transforming the meaning and application of a text from the scripture to themselves. There is something important in this honoring and apply of the text. And it happens, in large part, because folks think that they are hearing and doing what the Bible actually says.

The church needs the academy to help it hear better what the Bible is saying, to help it read better–not because we are introducing an alien reading strategy, but because this is what Christians actually think they’re doing, anyway, when they read the Bible.

Most Christians, for example, read Jesus’ engagements with the Pharisees and can tell you what the Pharisees were like and what they believed. They might be 60% right, or dealing with impressionistic pictures, but they will tell you that Jesus is doing and saying what he’s doing and saying, in part, because Pharisees were a certain way and believed certain things. So when a NT scholar says, “Actually, if you study early Pharisees, they were more like x than y,” we are affirming the reading strategy while providing different data and helping the church come to better readings.

The academy is, in general, doing what the church thinks it’s doing as well.

One other point to consider is that the church’s assumed readings of today are yesterday’s academic cutting edge. Why do Protestants read the Bible and find rampant affirmations of “justification by faith,” despite its only being articulated in 2 or 3 books in the NT? Because the academic elites of our early tradition–the Luthers and the Calvins, told us that this was how we were supposed to read the Bible.

Arguments for the importance of the academy are not necessarily indicative of an academy vs. church divide, but arguments that the church which has been deeply influenced by certain times and trajectories of the academy continue to hear what the academy has to offer.

In the comments yesterday a reader said that academic readings of the Bible eliminate the readings of Jesus and Paul. That raises its own set of important issues, and I’ll tackle it tomorrow.

The Bible Reader Divide

April 12, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 16 Comments

The gap between academy and church confronts me every day as a NT scholar.

Much of what I wrestle with here on the pages of Storied Theology is an attempt to reframe biblical passages and Christian theology in light of what I take to be better historical readings of NT passages than the ones most of us carry around in our heads.

In the classroom, much of the challenge that faces the students, besides getting through my reading list, comes from the slow realization that I’m building an entirely different framework for understanding what the Bible says and how we can know it. My goal, however, is not to establish a new priesthood of the academic, but to empower the people to read their Bibles again for the first time. This is why I blog–to create space for real people and to intersect with academic theology.

I do believe in the work of the church, and want to reiterate that I think it extremely important that we who are in academia continue to listen to and learn from the church.

Having said all this, I must now say that I do think there are dead-ends along certain paths. And one of those dead-ends is to take the stance of allowing our churches’ theology to determine our readings of scripture. Whether we think of that guiding theology as some small framework such as the Apostles Creed, or an extensive elaboration of doctrine such as the Westminster Confession of Faith, reading our Bibles to discover the theology of the church will inevitably take us far afield from the historical meaning of the text.

A couple points of elaboration.

First, this is not a condemnation of the later theology of the church. It had to say what it needed to say in its own later days and times, just like the biblical writers had to say what they needed to say in their own. To say that the church’s theology is a poor guide to what the NT or OT writers themselves thought is no greater word of condemnation than to say that Matthew’s theology is a poor guide to Mark or that Chronicles’ theology is a poor guide to Samuel-Kings.

Second, we tend to lose sight of the fact, because it is so natural to our world, that articulating a theology as such is not a necessary outcome of having a Bible. The Jewish people have never defined themselves based on Creeds. They do biblical interpretation of stories and law–and that is their defining characteristic. It’s not a statement of faith per se.

The church has defined itself by extensive statements of faith, but the biblical “definitions” of God are much more dynamic. We have different ways of thinking about and talking about God than Paul or Jesus or John the seer did. This means that we have to learn afresh if we want to hear scripture in its historical context. And, this is why I don’t think that the church as such should be given the last word in this academy-church divide.

The church will always read the Bible as affirming its tradition. The academy will always read the Bible as challenging the church’s tradition. And somehow the two together will, in the best of circumstances, create a synergy that leads to faithful narration of the Christian story in our own time and place.

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