Tag Archive - hermeneutics

The Story of Christ… Really…

November 15, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 4 Comments

I’ve found myself indirectly thinking about what it means to read the Bible as Christians. By “indirectly” I mean that these thoughts have gnawed around the edges of my thinking while I’ve been working on other things: teaching the Gospels and Acts, writing a paper on wisdom literature in the Coen Brothers’ movies, listening to sermons on the deadly sins, reading books on what the Bible is and we’re supposed to do with it.

By “reading the Bible as Christians” I don’t just mean reading it like we’re supposed to learn from it. There are lots of ways to read the Bible so as to learn from it. But those among whom I number myself approach the Bible as Christians–not as Jews, not as Mormons, not to mention that we don’t approach it as atheists or pantheists or deists.

Reading the Bible as Christians means that we not only read it with a ready disposition to hear it as God’s word, as the story of salvation, it means to read the story with the conviction that the narrative comes to its surprising climax in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

You have to do this on purpose, if you want to do it.

Pick up the book of Deuteronomy, and you’ll come away with a strong sense that they way God will fully restore his people is through their faithful obedience to Torah. Jesus is a surprise.

Pick up the law or the prophets, and you’ll come away with the strong sense that God’s ultimate plan is for a nation to be located in the geophysical land of Israel. The explosion of the promise of land to a promise of the world and indeed of new creation is a surprise.

Pick up the Proverbs, and the next thing you know you’ll be looking for your diligence to overflow in wealth and peace. The call to embody the death of Jesus in all quarters of our world is a surprise.

To read the Bible as the story of Jesus is to decide that nothing in the OT comes to us directly. It all comes to us mediated through Jesus. This means both that it is mediated through Jesus and that it all comes to us. Some is transformed in him, some is fulfilled and left behind. And some comes as a word reiterated now for a people reconfigured around Christ rather than Torah.

The vitality, and validity, of our reading the OT as Christians hinges on our willingness to read it in light of what we know to be more ultimately true: the Christ who is the end of the Law, the Christ to whom the Law, Prophets, and Psalms bear witness.

Speak in Time

October 24, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

I’m doing a good bit of reading on the issue of the “Abba, Father” prayer in preparation for SBL.

The history of the prayer’s interpretation over the early to late 20th century is a fascinating study. There were at least two major driving factors at work in how it was read.

First, German scholarship was heavily influenced by Rudolf Bultmann, and he by the larger cultural ethos, who was deeply committed to existentialist philosophy as the framework for making sense of the NT. In a manner not all dissimilar from American conversionist preaching, Bultmann suggested that the core of Christianity is an experience of God, an in-breaking of the divine into the heart of the believer.

So what makes Christianity unique? It’s this immediate experience of God.

The other significant factor was the idea that the significance of Christianity is, in fact, to be found in its uniqueness. Yes, Jesus had to find his way through the Jewish world, but all the really great stuff was to be found in how Jesus was different from Judaism. Again, with Germany at the center of NT scholarship in the early-mid 20th century, its cultural ethos was significant. Think Hitler. Think World War II. Got it?

So what does all this have to do with reading the “Abba, Father” prayer?

These two factors came together in an exposition of the phrase that declared that this prayer gives evidence of an unparalleled intimacy between Jesus (and then, subsequently, the believer), and God.

“Unparalleled intimacy.”

Unparalleled: much ado was made about the alleged lack of parallel material in which God is addressed as “father” in prayer. But this is tied to the “intimacy” thing: prayers in which the Jewish community as a whole would address God as father were excluded.

Intimacy: the idea was tentatively put forward by Joachim Jeremias that ‘abba was baby talk, parallel to daddy. That sort of intimate family language was seen as expressing the heart of the believer’s existence in the family of God.

The latter claim is also easy to debunk. For one thing, every time it appears in the NT, the word abba is followed by the Greek [ho] pater: a form that is clearly NOT the baby-talk word for “daddy” in Greek.

The amazing thing about this claim about unique intimacy is that it became the central thrust of a whole strand of NT scholarship, bearing fruit even in whole New Testament theologies that centered on the idea of the intimate fatherhood of God to the believer.

In a circular process of cause and effect, this reading that derived from an existentialist, anti-Jewish environment resonated with those who occupied that same environment, and became the obvious reading of not only three verses in the NT, but of the whole NT itself.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You think that the point is going to be, “Therefore, be careful about how your environment shapes your readings.”

Well, that’s important. But I was actually thinking something along the opposite lines.

Say what you need to say for your own time and place, realize that the people who came before you said what they needed to say for their own time and place, and don’t worry about saying something that will be viewed as correct for the next five centuries of Christian faith and practice.

For all that the existentialist reading of the “Abba, Father” prayer seems to me to be driven by dubious assumptions, it resonated with a people and declared to them that Jesus was the Messiah sent from God. If my idiosyncratic readings, that nobody will agree with in 100 years (I hope someone will agree with them for the next 25 or so…) put that same conviction into the hearts of my readers / listeners, then I’ve done what I can for the time and place which is given to me.

On Reading the Bible

October 16, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 5 Comments

Barth finishes ch. 3 of the Dogmatics with a section on reading the Bible. As we have been noting through the review of Christian Smith’s work, reading the Bible is not as straightforward as one might guess.

There is a historical sense to be had–or at least, to be approximated and approached.

But articulating what the apostles and prophets said is not the same as understanding what those words entail, and it is not the same as being transformed in our whole way of life by them.

Barth insists that the act of biblical interpretation must, then, not only be a practice of articulating what the text meant, but of actively engaging that text as witness to the Word of God. We have not “read” if we have not been changed, made obedient, transformed in mind and heart.

What about the theologies and philosophies we bring with us? Barth recognizes that we all bring a philosophy of our own day and time with us. Somewhat surprisingly, but quite realistically, he does not demand the (futile) attempt to set these aside.

Instead, we should recognize that each philosophy has the ability to be taken hold of by the grace of God and made an instrument for communicating the word; and, each philosophy has the ability to become an idolatrous substitute, determining in advance what the word must conform to.

And when we say, “philosophy” here, we also mean “theological system.”

The church is free under the word so long as it reads and listens to that word, listening in the sense of being taken hold of by it and willing to have its prior understandings transformed by the voice of God speaking in scripture.

The ideas Barth hits on here continue to be important: is historical critical reading of the Bible sufficient? what about praxis in response to what we’ve read? do we bring a strong paradigm that controls what the scriptures can say?

Biblical scholarship (and, indeed, the church at large) has not yet embodied a viable solution to these questions. And we might anticipate that there will not be one final solution–because this itself would, no doubt, turn into yet another version of that controlling idol that attempts to constrain the voice of God speaking through scripture.

Bible Made Impossible: Final Reflections

October 14, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews with 8 Comments

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been offering my engagements with Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture.

You can find the first four installments here (pt 1), here (pt 2), here (pt 3), and here (pt 4).

My enthusiasm for Smith’s assessment and proposal continues in this final installment. He has put his finger on the problematic treatment of the Bible in evangelical circles, calling out the ways in which its understanding of scripture is insufficiently biblical, and insufficiently defined by the gospel.

Chapter 6, “Accepting Complexity and Ambiguity,” is bookended by two fantastic paragraphs that clearly articulate the problems with “evangelical biblicism”:

Ironcially, while biblicists claim to take the Bible with utmost seriousness for what it obviously teaches, their theory about the Bible drives them to try to make it something that it evidently is not. (127)

And then this:

The Anglican divine Richard Hooker put this well when he said about the Bible, “We must… take great heed, lest, in attributing unto scripture more than it can have, the incredibility of that do cause even those things which indeed it hath most abundantly, to be less reverently esteemed.” In other words, the more we try to make the Bible say allegedly important things that are in fact subsidiary, nonbinding, or perhaps not even clearly taught, the more we risk detracting form the crucial, central message of the Bible about God reconciling the world to himself in Jesus Christ. (148)

Biblicism, by insisting on the equality of every chapter and verse, creates a world in which everything we believe takes on equal significance. Deny the necessity of homeschooling and you’ve rejected the gospel. The importance of the Christological hermeneutic is that it allows back seat issues to stay in the back seat.

A final chapter from Smith works hard to articulate a third way between the conservative posture of biblicism and the strategies of liberalism or full-blown postmodernism. It is important for readers to appreciate that critical realism is, in fact, a true third way. No doubt it will be described as opening the back door for liberalism by many who hold to the position Smith wishes to advance. But that is plain wrong.

This final contribution is an accessible crash-course in hermeneutics and has the power to destabalize how we think about the Bible as an authoritative text. How do we, in fact, condemn slavery as morally reprehensible when the biblical writers seem so accepting of it? There are good reasons for our difference–and these are instructive for us when we think about what the Bible is and what we should be doing with it.

Smith’s book comes on the scene at an opportune time. As the evangelical right tightens its grip on evangelicalism more broadly, an tremendous number of believers are slipping through their fingers. Whether the conservative resurgence shows itself to be less-than-biblical because of a particular issue (e.g., the earth’s being 6,000 years old) or because of a holistic and yet inconsistent way of attempting to apply the Bible as an equally authoritative voice to all of life, those who leave biblicist worlds behind are reconfiguring what it means to confess that the Bible is the word of God.

So even though Smith will not doubt become another point at which the biblicist world points to encroaching liberalism and thereby solidifies anew its identity over against “them,” it also provides an invaluable tool to those who know that the biblicist Bible is, in fact, impossible–but who continue to believe that the Bible we have is, in fact, the word of God given to bear witness to the Word of God.

Stop With the Impossible Bible, Already! (pt. 2)

October 8, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews with 8 Comments

In this, our second installment in review of Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible, I wish to begin by underscoring that he is not dealing with “strawmen,” as has been suggested in the comments to installment one. He does not insist that all 10 of his descriptions of evangelical biblicism are present in any one person’s thinking; he does, however, demonstrate that these are the kinds of assumptions driving not only popular but also scholarly engagements with Christian issues.

On the level of popular slogans, we have everything from “God said it, I believe it, that settles it!” to “Vote Responsibly–Vote the Bible!” to “Confused? Read the Directions! [picture of the Bible]” Evangelical biblicism is reflected throughout its kitsch culture (pp. 7-8).

Of course, it is elaborated at greater length in books: Bible Answers for Almost All Your Questions, Biblical Principles for Starting and Operating a Business, How to Make Choices you Won’t Regret, Esther’s Secrets of Womanhood (pp. 8-10). The point: we treat the Bbile like it’s about everything–a handbook that answers all our questions. We treat the Bible like it’s a clear, direct word from God to us about how to live our lives. These assumptions are upheld by others such as, “If we read the Bible aright, it can perform this function for us.”

In the more technical theological realm, the idea of scripture’s unity and internal consistency are the points that come more to the fore, but still in ways that lead one to think that the Bible should be able to be heard with relative clarity on all that it speaks of. In particular, biblical statements about the Bible deny contradiction in scripture (which must all be consistent because it is God’s word, after all), or state that anything we need to know is either laid down in scripture or may be deduced by good and necessary consequence.

In fact, the more theological sophisticated versions make the Bible less a practical handbook for daily living and more a box of puzzle pieces to be rightly ordered into a system of doctrine. Both, however, depend on the same way of understanding the Bible as the word of God.

So what’s the problem with all this?

The single greatest problem Smith sees is proliferating interpretive pluaralism. In other words: people don’t agree with each other on what the Bible says. Not only this, they don’t agree about what the Bible says about significant, defining issues of faith and practice. This is because the Bible is not, in fact, univocal on important issues.

Here again, Smith points to publishing. You know all those awesome and helpful “Four Views” or “Three Views” books? Their very existence is an exhibition of the irreducible interpretive pluralism that will always beset the church so long as it thinks that “just believing the Bible” is what is required for faith and practice.

Note how important the topics covered are: Atonement, Baptism, the Doctrine of God (!), Hell, Divorce and Remarriage, The Lord’s Supper, Historical Jesus, War, Women in Ministry, Predestination, Christ (!).

So besides, Jesus, God, and how the cross works, we agree on all the “important” stuff?!

Smith insists, and he is correct, that at the root of this is a way of seeing and understanding what the Bible is, which is demonstrated to be false because we who read the Bible with honesty and integrity cannot agree on what it says. The theory is rendered false by the results it has produced.

Next time, we’ll look at how a theory that is falsified daily manages to keep such a strong hold on the church and also survey some of the other problems with evangelical biblicism.

You Have to Read the Bible

October 7, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 2 Comments

Yesterday we started a review of Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible, today we return to Barth’s exposition of reading and applying the Bible in the church. Whereas Smith’s contention is that certain evangelical ways of thinking about the Bible make such a Bible, literally, impossible, Barth maintains that God himself has made communication with people possible, and that it is through our taking up the task of reading and interpreting the Scriptures that such a possibility becomes actualized.

In other words, this is Barth’s “The Bible Made Possible” chapter. I have a hunch that it will be more than a little related to Smith’s proposed solution to evangelical biblicism, but only time will tell.

As usual, Barth sets his sights in two different directions and asks his readers to follow him in insisting that the way forward is not a “happy medium,” but instead a robust affirmation of both. Thus, there is a freedom in God’s grace of revelation that must meet with a freedom in human response.

Moreover, this whole bit about our freedom to respond gets worked from both angles. Keeping our engagement with scripture always within the framework of salvation by grace, Barth demands that we neither over-estimate the natural quality of the person who hears and receives the word of God nor underestimate the reality of this experience.

We don’t receive because we are better, nor because we are worse; we are not to take pride in the reception, nor to grow cynical at someone else’s story.

Throughout, the freedom for the word calls us to take seriously that freedom for the word is freedom for the Word who is Jesus Christ, the revelation of God.

At one point I was wondering if Barth was buying into some of the evangelical biblicism that Smith confronts in his book. But after speaking of the clarity and perspicuity of the word of God, Barth then goes on to say, Of course, this perfectly clear word of God is communicated by means of the words of men.

There is always mediation. There is always, therefore, the need to try to understand what was said, and how that saying of then and there must be said now and here if it is to be understood, and if the word of God to which it bears witness can be made known.

We have a job to do: we must participate in the interpretation of the word which is scripture in order that the word which is Jesus might be made known and obeyed. And we must exercise our freedom, under the word of God, to respond in faithful obedience. This response of faithfulness is inseparable from the practice of exegesis.

And, perhaps most importantly, it is not simply that we are free and that we believe. It is faith in Christ that drives and makes possible all appropriation of the biblical text. I might say here that the faith of Christ makes all this possible. Barth draws us back to Golgotha as the place where each of us comes to our own experience of God’s salvation.

As an aside, I’m pretty sure that everyone wrestling with critical scholarship, theological appropriation of the text, and related issues as a Christian should read both volumes of CD 1.

Christ or Trinity?

September 12, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 30 Comments

Since the Colloquium on Theological Interpretation last month (see here, and here) I have been mulling the question of Christian hermeneutics. In particular: is there a difference between a Christological hermeneutic and a Trinitarian hermeneutic? And if so, why do I advocate Christological readings rather than Trinitarian?

The answer to the first question is decidedly yes: there is a difference between Christological and Trinitarian hermeneutics. The former, readings that explore the ramifications of scripture for the story of the crucified and risen Christ, points us to the ministry of Jesus, in particular his death, resurrection, and exalted Lordship. The latter points us to the divinity of Christ.

The clearest example I have seen of the important difference between these is the reading of Lukan intertextuality provided by Richard Hays at SBL last year. He cited Jesus’ words at the end of Luke, that Jesus opened the minds of the travelers to hear all the things written about him in the scriptures.

Hays then proceeded to engage with a far-reaching reading of how Luke was applying the OT texts that referred to YHWH to Jesus instead. The upshot of Hays’ reading was that Luke is showing us that the OT’s YHWH is none other than the Jesus of the Gospel.

Even though this reading focuses on Jesus, it is a Trinitarian reading inasmuch as the working assumption that makes the reading possible is the idea of an eternal Son coequal with and in some way identical to the God of the OT.

Luke, however, intends a very different interpretation of the OT as a witness to Jesus.

Luke does not simply say, the OT is about Jesus no go find out how I’ve shown this. He tells us precisely how the OT speaks of Jesus the Messiah. First, in Luke 24:26-27 he says, “‘Wasn’t it necessary for the Messiah to suffer these things and enter into his glory?’ Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets he interpreted to them the things written about himself in all the scriptures.”

The thing written about Jesus in the scriptures are not that Jesus is YHWH, but that Jesus, as Messiah, had to suffer and enter his glory.

This is even more clearly stated later in the same chapter:

Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds so they could understand the scriptures,and said to them, “Thus it stands written that the Christ would suffer and would rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.(NET Bible)

To read scripture aright is not to read it as a witness to the eternal Trinity, but to read it as witness to the suffering and glory of the Messiah.

The presupposition needed for the Christological reading that Luke directs us to is not that Christ is preexistent or in any sort of ontological way identifiable with YHWH of the OT.

The presupposition required for a Christological, narratival hermeneutics is that Jesus who died was, in fact, the Messiah, that that God raise this Jesus from the dead and enthroned him over all things.

There is a difference, and Luke invites us to Christological narrative rather than divine onotology as the way to correctly read scripture in light of the Christ event.

The narrative of Jesus, not divine identity as it is often construed today, is the way to correctly read the whole Bible in light of Jesus as Messiah, according to Luke (and Paul and John and Matthew and Mark and Peter and Hebrews and Revelation). This means that our hermeneutics will be driven by the story of Jesus rather than the Trinity. It also means that when we chose to use the Rule of Faith as our hermeneutical grid, we have taken a significant step away from the Christian reading of scripture that is commended to us in the NT.

Bounded or Centered? (Pt. 1)

August 17, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 18 Comments

As I have been in my grudge match to the death with the Rule of Faith as a “rule,” one critique I regularly find myself bringing is that it creates a bounded set. My instinct has been that so conceptualizing the Christian faith is not only a category mistake but ethically disastrous.

In short, once we have defined Christianity as a set of beliefs that must be maintained in order to be faithful Christians, then Christian ethics boils down to maintaining “the faith” that is so delineated.

What should Christians do? Defend the borders.

I have recently stumbled upon the work of Paul Hiebert. Here is what he says about bounded sets:

  1. The category is created by listing essential characteristics something must posses in order to belong to the set
  2. The category is defined by a clear boundary
  3. The objects form a homogeneous group
  4. “Bounded sets are essentially static sets”
  5. Within Western conceptual categories, bounded sets tend to be ontological sets, reflecting an absolute, unchanging nature of reality.

Two things strike me here: the quote, point 4, is the one that I most often rail against here. Christian theology is not a static set, but something dynamically in process in the ongoing story of the church. See yesterday’s post: The church has to grow up to the fact that things are not simply givens, so we cannot take an 1800 year old statement as the defining marker of who we are and what we should do.

But here’s the other problem, as Hiebert lays it out. On point 2, the category is formed by a clear boundary.

What does this mean in practice? He says:

Most of the effort in defining the category is spent defining and maintaining the boundary. Not only must we say what an apple is, we must also clearly differentiate it from oranges, pears, and similar objects that belong to the same domain but are not apples. The central question, therefore, is whether an object is inside or outside the category.

The ethic entailed in a bounded-set system is defining and maintaining the boundary.

When we envision Christianity as a bounded-set, we are consigning ourselves to a lifetime of boundary guarding. Absent from all this, of course, are other measures of Christian fidelity–such as embodying the self-giving love of Christ or even walking in accordance with the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount.

Christianity bounded the “Rule of Faith” becomes, throughout Church History, a self-referential religion, concerned with keeping itself together, and keeping out the heterodox.

This is not to say, of course, that it is without biblical precedent.There were, after all, the disciples who bravely fended off the would-be intruders upon their bounded world: “Lord, we saw a man casting out demons in your name, but he was not with us, so we forbid him!”

So what is a centered set? Stay tuned…

Bounded, Centered, Christ

August 9, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 12 Comments

Yesterday’s post about the Rule of Faith is part of a larger project I’m working on (a life project, really) on how we think about our identity as Christians and how this impacts our understanding of Christian ethics.

At a conceptual level, a Rule of Faith or statement of faith as an identity marker has a bounded-set feel.

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The idea of a “bounded set” is this: if you are within the bounds, you are officially and “insider,” if you are beyond the bounds, you are officially an “outsider.”

Yesterday’s question was, “Is the Rule of Faith / adherence to the Creeds of the church necessary and sufficient for salvation?” That was asking whether the Creeds provide the boundaries around the set of humanity that is or will be saved.

A common alternative to bounded set thinking is centered set thinking.

Image: chrisroll / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In a centered set, the ideal is in the middle, but no one, in all likelihood, actually exists there. We are either closer or farther away. And, we are usually moving closer or farther from the middle.

I think that the centered set idea is closer to how things work in practice, but still wonder if the idea of the “center” in the “centered set” is too static. Is there one core of doctrines or beliefs we are moving toward or away from? Perhaps. Perhaps we could call it something like “Christianity,” but what would we put there?

I prefer a metaphor in which the whole continues to move. For a long time I used the metaphor of rays or trajectories. If two rays start off half a degree separate from each other (i.e., there is some theological diversity from the very beginning in Christianity) then if they continue on their trajectories they will get farther and farther apart. The result? An increasingly large space between the vectors that constitutes Christianity within the tradition; i.e., an increasingly theologically and culturally diverse Christianity that all can lay claim to orthodoxy.

If that doesn’t work for you, perhaps the metaphor of a river.

Image: prozac1 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net


This one I stole from Joel Green. The idea is that a river flows between banks. It is a dynamic thing. It probably gets wider and wider the farther downstream it goes. It is always moving toward its end. Moving together.

It’s that sense of unified motion I like: even as it gets wider, the whole is still in motion in the same direction–toward the eschaton.

Or perhaps there’s a little of all of this. Perhaps there is a “center,” and that would be the Christ in whom we all live, and this Christ is not standing still or defined by or bounded by the creeds of the church, but continuing to march through history, gaining followers, and manifesting all the while an ever richer embodiment of the diversity of God’s creation.

Absence of Exegetical Prejudice?

August 3, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts, Humor with 6 Comments

From Church Dogmatics 1.2, §19:

There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting and indeed the normal disposition for true exegesis, because it guarantees a complete absence of prejudice. For a short time, around 1910, this idea threatened to achieve almost canonical status in Protestant theology. But now we can quite calmly describe it as merely comical.

I laughed. I cried. That was brilliant, brother Karl!

Of course, Barth also maintains that biblical hermeneutics set the stage for all human communication. I wonder if he’d be willing to say that “objectivity” is a false goal when speaking and listening to our fellow non-scripture-writing humans as well?

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