Tag Archive - Isaiah

“I am known by justice”: It’s Dangerous Being Story-Bound

March 4, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 9 Comments

The sub-title of my blog is “Telling the Story of the Story-Bound God”. This reflects my conviction that the identity of the God of the Bible is unknown without the story and peoples of the Bible. His identity is wrapped up with his people’s story–a dangerous proposition.

In the “Song of the Vineyard” in Isaiah 5 we read of YHWH’s expectations for the people he planted and cultivated. What grapes did he expect to find?

The vineyard of YHWH of hosts is the house of Israel,
and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting;
He expected justice, but saw bloodshed;
righteousness, but heard a cry! (NRSV, alt)

YHWH expected justice and righteousness. Why? Because the job of the vineyard is, apparently, to make known its planter, protector, and cultivator. When we read the following several verses later, we start to realize that Israel’s problems are a problem for Israel’s God:

YHWH of hosts is exalted by justice,
and the Holy God shows himself holy by righteousness. (NRSV, alt.)

The purpose of the vineyard was to exalt its maker and put its God on display before the world. Where are we to look to see who God is? Among God’s people, to whom he has bound himself for better or for worse. And often, we discover in the prophets, it’s for worse.

God’s name, his identity, is tied to the deeds–and fate–of his people. In this case, the identity of YHWH is obscured by his people’s faithlessness. In the exile itself, his identity will be obscured by their suffering.

Being a story-bound God is a dangerous proposition.

White as Snow: Promise or Ultimatum?

March 3, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 5 Comments

“…though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool” (Isa 1:18).

These words have been hymned countless times as beautiful depictions of the cleansing work of Christ. But are they a promise or an ultimatum?

In this middle section of ch. 1, Isaiah is leveling charges against Israel, disparaging their sacrificial service of worship inasmuch as it falls within a context of oppression and injustice (1:10-14, 17).

Within this prophetic denouncement, God demands that Israel change–that Israel cleanse itself: “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil” (1:16).

So when the prophet then turns and says, “Come, let us argue it out, says YHWH, though your sins are as scarlet they shall be like snow… If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land…” is YHWH making a promise or delivering an ultimatum?

The call seems as though it could be a charge to Israel to get itself together, a last word of warning before Israel would be fully and finally disciplined with exile: “…but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword; for the mouth of YHWH has spoken” (1:20).

Become white as snow… or else?

“I called, and you did not answer…”

February 24, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 1 Comment

Just a quick little “hmmm…” observation today.

A recurring theme in the OT (I’m thinking especially of psalms, with a little shake of Jonah thrown in for good measure) is “I called to you and…”

Typically, this is followed by, “You answered me.” Sometimes it’s a bit more dire: “Out of the depths I cried to you and you heard me.”

Reading Isaiah, I discovered the opposite and found it striking: “I called to you, and you did not answer” (Isa 65:12).

Of course, in this case, God is the speaker. The motif is reversed as God takes up the words typically ascribed to people in their distress. In the time of distress, again and again, we read that when “I call on YHWH, he answered me.” But when the shoe is on the other foot, who can deliver the reputation of YHWH? Who can act in faithfulness?

“I called and you did not answer; I spoke and you did not hear. You did evil in my sight and chose that in which I did not delight” (Isa 65:12).

Failure of Exile and Theological Interpretation (4)

February 23, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 2 Comments

In the first forays we took in to 1st Isaiah’s expectations of return from exile, I suggested that Isaiah proclaims an expectation that the exile itself will be purifying and atoning for the people’s sins. Moreover, I advocated reading 2d and 3d Isaiah as responses, at least in part, to the failure of these prophecies. The people was not transformed, did not get their new hearts, and come to think of it didn’t get a glorious restoration, either. There was a historical (and theological?) problem that generated creative reengagement with the prophecies. The old narrative was transformed in light of the current circumstance.

One conviction necessary for such reworking is tied to Israel’s understanding of God. It’s not simply that YHWH really is God, or that the true God will always be faithful and true, but that God’s identity is wrapped up with the people to whom he has bound his name.

God is not true in the abstract, God is true to Israel. Thus, to echo yesterday’s post, the question is not, “Why, O Lord?” but “How long, O Lord?” Or, if you’re a prophet, “Yet a little while, and I will shake the heavens and the earth, says the Lord…”

Last time, reflected on how the lingering failure of the promised restoration enables the Gospel writers to renarrate the hoped-for renewal. John’s is the voice of Isaiah 40, and Jesus the agent of God’s promised deliverance. Isaiah’s promises of transformation can only be read through that climactic episode in the story.

And yet, the church today does not look like that gloriously restored people. We claim to have the Spirit that adopts us as God’s children, and yet we do not live out the “unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” We claim to be indwelt by the Spirit who at last enables us to be transformed from the inside out–to become those heart-circumcised people who are obedience to God, and yet we do not perfectly obey God (or even, very often, show forth the sort of systematic obedience that might distinguish us from the world).

Between resurrection and return of Jesus we find ourselves in the peculiar position of having to say both that the fulfillment of Isaiah’s vision has arrived in the unexpected guise of a crucified and risen messiah; and, at the same time, that we await the fulfillment of Isaiah’s vision when the heavenly Zion comes down as the capital city of the new earth.

Christians must renarrate the story for our moment. We must reread Isaiah in light of Jesus and say that he is the means for fulfillment. And we must reread its hopes for the future in light of the New Testament’s already/not-yet eschatology.

1st Isaiah was speaking about us, but about who we’ve only begun to be and who we will fully be only in the future. And living faithfully in light of Isaiah’s vision will depend upon our willingness to serve a God whose means for bringing His story to its telos are always open to surprising turns in response to His people. It is a Christian reading only if it recognizes that the God who spoke through Isaiah speaks also in the surprising continuation of the story in Christ, in the sometimes baffling continuance of it in the church by the power of the Spirit, and who will speak its “Amen” yet sometime in the future.

The inherent paradox in a Christian hermeneutic of the OT is captured for me by Martin Buber, as I quoted yesterday in one of the comments: “To the Jew the Christian is the incomprehensibly daring man who affirms in an unredeemed world that its redemption has been accomplished.” (M. Buber, “The Two Foci of the Jewish Soul,” in Jewish Perspectives on Christianity, ed. F. Rothschild, p. 131.)

Yes, “already accomplished”–and that as the prophets foretold, whether they knew it or not.

Failure of Exile and Theological Interpretation (3)

February 22, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 5 Comments

Last week we started looking at the question of how to read Isaiah’s failed anticipations of restoration from exile as Christian scripture (part 1, part 2).

At this point in my life I remain skeptical of the value of creedal “narratives” to help us find our way, or of Trinitarian hermeneutics to do much better. In this, I recognize that I am stepping away from a broad and powerful stream of Christian biblical interpretation. So they’re probably right. You’ve been warned.

What we see happening in 2d and 3d Isaiah is a commitment to Israel’s God, and the faithfulness of Israel’s God, despite the failure of the prophetic word to materialize. Despite the fact that these are prophetic texts and not stories per se, I’d argue that the texts are engaged in a process of narratival reimagination. The telos of the story is the same (the glorification of Israel by her God), the faithfulness of the main character, God, is never called into question. But the other players and the plot itself will have to be reconfigured in light of recent developments.

There are myriad ways in which the issue of failed return from exile is picked up in the New Testament. The introduction of John the Baptist with the words of Isa 40 are an invitation to read the subsequent story of Jesus’ ministry as a fulfillment of 2d (and 3d) Isaiah’s vision of restoration from exile and/or Second Exodus.

We mustn’t miss the implications. The second and third rewritings of Isaiah’s hopes for return from exile were not the end of the narrative reimagination. Now the retelling itself is reconceived as occurring hundreds of years after the original prophecy was supposed to come to pass.

This Christian rereading of Isaiah requires both that the historical problem of non-fulfillment and the theological conviction of God’s faithfulness to his promises be fully in play. The prophecies will now be reread in light of the conviction that Jesus has brought about restoration, healing, transformation, and the restoration of the Davidic kingship.

To give a Christian reading of the Isaiah text is, in part, to refuse to stop reading it in its historical context. If we stop there and apply it to our lives we are truncating the process by which the story meets us today. It meets us through the claims of the NT writers that Jesus’ ministry is the means by which all these hopes are fulfilled.

We must reimagine the story as it comes to an unexpected turn in the first century, where the people are gathered without being drawn to Jerusalem, where the Messiah reigns without displacing the foreigners, where God provides deliverance without transferring ownership of Israel’s land.

Most of all, the story is now defined by the death of Jesus as the means for God’s great rescue operation. That narrative moment relativizes and transforms early expectations. This is, at heart, what it means to give a Christian rereading of these texts: to see how the Christ event not only fulfills, but embodies and especially transforms the expectations created by the OT telling of the story.

But the place where we started was in the realization that one of the most important expectations of the exile was that it was to be transformative. Those who returned were supposed to be newly and uniquely faithful to Israel’s God.

And for all the promises of Spirit and new creation, all the hopefulness of a transformation that breaks into the present, we don’t see the end of this yet. Why give a Christian reading if it isn’t any more ultimate than the earlier reading? What does it mean to be confronted by this text in our communities? What does it look like to apply it to our lives as, specifically, Christians?

Stay tuned.

The Failure of Exile and Theological Interpretation

February 18, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 14 Comments

True confessions: I’m a theological reader of the scripture. [A stunned silence grips the crowd.]

Ok, that comes as no surprise to anyone. But if you’re not in the biblical studies world, where “theological interpretation” is a movement gathering a full head of steam, you might be surprised to learn that I’m more than a little cautious about the movement.

What’s my hesitation? It has to do, primarily, with what sort of “theology” should form our interpretive grid.

As the title of (and every post on, it seems!) this site indicates, the sort of biblical theology I am interested in is a theology that maintains its narrative dynamic. In the history of Christian theology, I don’t think it’s too sweeping a generalization to say, “real” theology has been concerned with threshing off the narrative chaff in order to uncover an ahistorical core of universal truth. This conception of theology will never succeed in making sense of the Bible.

Attempts at doing biblical theology got off entirely on the wrong foot with J. P. Gabler‘s famous 1787 address, “On the Correct Distinction Between Dogmatic and Biblical Theology and the Right Definition of Their Goals,” in which he incorrectly distinguished between dogmatic and biblical theology and wrongly defined their goals.

Gabler envisioned biblical theologians doing what my father-in-law does in fine chemical sales: using special skills to develop chemicals and intermediaries that can be handed over to another company (say, a pharma company) to make into the specific drugs, etc. that they wish to manufacture. Only, in the case of biblical theologians the “goal” is the theological truths that are embedded in scripture and the end product is a systematic theology that orders these truths appropriately.

With this vision of the biblical theologian’s work, Gabler failed to articulate a truly biblical theology, turning biblical scholars into hunters for non-biblical theology in the pages of scripture.

This will not do.

My concerns about such a game is that systematic theology then ends up masquerading as biblical theology. A theological approach that is devoid of diachronic change, devoid of narrative dynamics, impatient of polyvalence now becomes the goal for a discipline that is inherently diachronic, narratival, and polyvalent. It simply  cannot work without transmogrifying biblical scholarship into something else entirely.

And thus my concerns with the contemporary theological interpretation movement. This is a broad umbrella, with no set theological approach. But… One indication of how it is going is last year’s SBL, at which there were probably no fewer than a dozen papers (and some whole sessions) touching on “The Rule of Faith” as a hermeneutical guide to reading the Bible.

And so we’re back at Gabler’s mistake: bringing a different kind of theology as our guide for reading scripture.

So what does all of this blah, blah, blah have to do with reading the Bible?

I’m just about to finish reading the book of Isaiah. Something that strikes me as I read through the book is that the various voices and perspectives indicate that the exile was, for all intents and purposes, a failure. The purpose of exile is purgatory and transformative: it’s supposed to not only discipline Israel, but transform her into a people who will love God with all their hearts (cf. Deuteronomy). But it doesn’t.

So here’s the question: what sort of guidance can theological interpretation give us for reading 1st Isaiah as Christian scripture? I have a couple of different answers depending on what “theological interpretation” means, and they illustrate why we need a narrative theology rather than a systematic theology as our rule of interpretation.

We’ll get to my answers tomorrow. Do you have any thoughts about how your interpretive practices might help the church read a failed expectation of exile as Christian scripture?