Tag Archive - theological interpretation

History, Theology, and Jesus

November 21, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews, SBL with 9 Comments

Today there was a wonderfully stimulating session in the Theological Interpretation of Christian Scripture group, as a panel of reviewers critically assessed and compared Darrell Bock and Robert Webb (eds.), Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus with Richard B. Hays and Beverly R. Gaventa (eds.), Seeking the Identity of Jesus: A Pilgrimage.

The conversation on the panel swirled around the questions of what it means to read the Bible as Christians; or, how to do greatest justice to the historical narratives contained in the gospels.

In this, I was much more sympathetic to the Hays and Gaventa volume. Their volume strives to cultivate reading strategies for the canonical gospels that witnesses to Jesus. The Bock and Webb volume strives to establish, and explain the coherence of, a dozen key moments in the life of the historical Jesus.

Bock and Webb, along with Michael Bird, spoke of historical Jesus research as a necessary prolegomenon to New Testament Christology and other such study.

No, I don’t think so.

The church has not canonized the historical Jesus, it has canonized four Gospels. We can cultivate a rich theology for the church based on these interpretations, without digging behind them to the “real Jesus” back there in history. In such a practice, inevitably we tell a new story, construct a fifth quite theologically conditioned Jesus of our own. Our fifth Gospel is not the “starting point” for studying the four.

But for all my wariness about the historical project as such, I am not ready to rush into the arms of some versions of an already theologized Jesus, either.

And here I come back (again!) to the challenges posed by those who think that we should be reading the Jesus stories toward Chalcedon. In a line that was quoted a couple of times, Rob Wall spoke of scripture as something along the lines of spirit sanctioned witnesses to Jesus as incarnate Christ. I’m butchering the first and beautiful part of the sentence, in which Wall draws us to give the four canonical gospels their rightful place as starting-point for our Jesus deliberations.

But in articulating that to which they witness in the terms of the divine christology of the later church, the bible has lost the place he seems to be claiming for it, and now Chalcedon has come to take its place.

And so I once again walk away appreciative of both history and theology, but wanting to reiterate what I see as a better theological method: not beginning with the history behind the text, nor beginning with the theology placed in front of the text to refract our vision, but beginning with the stories of Jesus themselves.

Listening Teachers

November 11, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 1 Comment

The church’s task is, above all, to listen. The task of the church’s dogmatics is to stand under the word of God in giving stage direction to the church’s drama. And if it stands under the Word, it must continually listen to that word afresh, or else risk falling into the inevitable reality of straying from God’s word.

That’s my summary of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics §23.1.

Barth takes hold of the grace and promise of God, that God has not only spoken in the Word that is Jesus and the Word that is the Bible,

Image: David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

but will continue to speak the Word in the church. Those three dynamics of God’s speech are believed, clung to, passionately asserted.

This means that true Dogmatics is possible.

And and the same time, Barth stands with open eyes among people who can only speak and act aright because they are recipients of the grace of God. We receive grace, even the grace of truth, and mix our conceit, our love of the dogma more than the God about whom it speaks, and what was pure, if for a minute, becomes impure in our hands and in fresh need of the grace of God.

This means that a true Dogmatics will never become a possession that the church can cling to.

Barth’s recounting of how the church does theology calls it to keep listening, to be ready to hear from its dogmatics that everything it is doing demands repentance. It demands that we continue to be the church whose foundational calling is to speak not what had to be said to the church of times past, but to the church and place and time in which we find ourselves summoned to speak.

Because God has promised to speak, our “only resource is to seize the weapon of continually listening.”

Yes.

I continue to harbor my concern that dogmatics as speaking correctly about God takes too central a role in Barth’s understanding of the church’s calling. In the face of various heresies that the church has faced, stood against in the hope of God’s promise to speak in the church, Barth claims, “the existence of an orderly Church dogmatics is the unfailingly effective and only possible instrument of peace in the church” (807).

As much I like what Barth is calling us to in our theological articulations, I continue to worry that “Word” has taken too central a place, and that “deed” takes too secondary a role in establishing the church’s faithfulness, identity, and peace.

Then & There, Here & Now

October 11, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 22 Comments

A friend recently gave me the heads up on an article in the Harvard Theological Review by Paul E. Capetz entitled, “Theology and the Historical-Critical Study of the Bible” (HTR 104 (2011): 459-88). It is a lengthy engagement with three advocates of Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Brevard Childs, Christopher Seitz, and Dale Martin.

Capetz writes from the standpoint of an avowedly liberal theological tradition, and asks why it is that otherwise critically-engaged scholars insist on setting aside critical scholarship when it comes to moving into theology for the church.

He contends that the move from critical to theological exegesis is arbitrary and muddy–and that it does not in fact honor the tradition of the church which it seeks to uphold. For instance: is it really honoring the “orthodox” forebears of the Christian tradition if we simultaneously say, “Yes, they were right that God is Triune” but then in the next breath say, “But no, Paul isn’t a Trinitarian–in fact, he’s a subordinationist” (478-79)?

Are we really honoring the tradition when we, on historical-critical grounds, affirm the exegesis of the heretics while simultaneously affirming the theological conclusions of the proponents of orthodoxy?

These are the very real questions that beset historical-critical study of the Bible. These are the types of issues that have left many snubbing biblical scholarship as useless for the church’s faith, and has led others to conclude that there is no faith worth finding in the Bible.

To my mind, all of this brings us back around to the question Christian Smith is rightly pressing in his book: what does the reality of the struggles entailed in reading the Bible tell us about what the Bible is and thus what we should be doing with it?

Not so incidentally, this is why I also have chosen a narrative model for making sense of both scripture and Christian theology. We need a model for thinking about who we are, and what our book is, that makes room for development, change, and even contradiction.

I find myself drawn in both directions in this debate that Capetz articulates. On the one hand, I agree that one of the most significant things that historical-critical scholarship helps us to is a better reading of the texts. Unlike Capetz, I agree that these texts are the normative rule of faith and life for the church.

Thus, the historical-critical study provides one piece of evidence, one point on the line of the developing narrative that the church continues to live in today.

But historical criticism will not frame its work within a self-consciously Christian narrative. And that is where we must allow it to claim to be an end in itself. Or, better, we must not allow the constraints of segmented OT and NT disciplines to segment the implications of NT historical-critical work. In the latter we discover a practice of rereading the OT in light of the fulfillment of Israel’s story in Christ–a fulfillment that negates many alternative would-be endings to the story than a first OT audience might have anticipated.

So where does that leave us? I want to keep trying to hold the two together as two different players in the same drama of biblical interpretation: the historical critic tells us what the text might have meant to an early, historically contextualized audience, the Christian commitment summons us to contextualize, realize, and sometimes relativize the on-going significance of that text in light of the later, decisive moment of the story and our own continuing participation in it.

Theological Interpretation Article in Christianity Today

September 29, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Media with 6 Comments

I’ve had a thing or two to say about theological interpretation on ye’ old blog over the past couple of years. I am a theological interpreter of scripture, and strive to be a Christian reader of scripture, at that. So in general I resonate with, and am happy for, a movement that strives to carve out respectable space for so engaging the Bible in both the academy and the church.

This month’s Christianity Today has a cover story on theological interpretation by J. Todd Billings. It is not yet available online, but read it when you can if you would like a nice overview of what theological interpretation is up to.

The article echoes commonly stated needs of the church: to have a Bible that speaks to it as a word for people who are devoted to loving and following the Lord and God about whom the text speaks.

It also indicates that one of the more important ways forward is to read using the rule of faith.

As usual, I find the former element more important and compelling than the latter, as I continue to find myself scratching my head about what someone committed to the Rule of Faith is supposed to “do,” what kind of identity it forms, and why Christological readings should be transformed into Trinitarian readings. But then again, you’ve heard all that from me before!

This article really is a judicious piece, a welcome and accessible introduction to what is happening in the world of theological interpretation of scripture and provides some sense of why it is important.

Not the Rule of Faith: Why I Care

September 14, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 26 Comments

On this blog I am frequently doing my best to drive a wedge between the Bible (and good biblical interpretation) and systematic theology, the rule of faith, and the like. Several times I have revisited the question of why the story of Jesus, rather than the church’s doctrine of the Trinity, should be our interpretive grid–and what defines our identity as Christians.

Why do I care?

There are a number of ways to approach that question, but part of it has to do with a combination of personality and past experience.

Personality

Do you know the Enneagram?

I regret to inform you that I am an Eight. In brief, this means that I’m a controlling jerk. Well, that’s the worst of it.

Eights tend to be passionate about truth and justice. Of course, we’re always right, so this can be self-serving, but the redemptive edge of this passion is that we care about those who don’t have power. We care about the injustice and control that can dominate people’s lives when the wrong people use their power in the wrong ways.

The redemptive moves for 8 include becoming agents of mercy and justice, and inspiring others to follow along this path.

Experience

I have experienced that the theology of the church is a way to control people, and that this control often comes at the expense of honest readings of the Bible and honest articulations of what people actually believe.

I was in a denomination that had an 85+ page Confession of Faith, and any ordination candidate had to delineate every place he disagreed with it. And the list of disagreements had better be close to zero.

I discovered that this sort of Confessional magisterium (ask me to sing my “paperback pope” song for you sometime): (1) created disingenuous theologians, who affirmed things they disagreed with; (2) controlled biblical interpretation in ways that were distracting and just plain bad; and (3) served as a strong means for controlling the “insiders club” for the good ol’ boys (and they were all boys, no girls allowed) who had the power and only wanted to share it with those who were happy to help them build what was theirs.

Theology as the defining marker of the church creates systems of control that look nothing like the Jesus who said, “Come to me, all who are weary and heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.”

The Rule of Faith, while quantitatively shorter, is qualitatively the same if it is functioning as rule. Trinitarian theology, similarly, can play this role of church control. It requires us to frame our reading, our gospel, our understanding of Jesus, in a way that binds us to the church rather than freeing us to follow Jesus–though going through that guarded church door might lead us into the company of Jesus as well.

But I rebel against the Creedal control because I don’t want you to think you have to experience what I did: that the only way into the fullness of participation in the body of Christ is through strange and foreign structures that often have little to do with the Bible through which God has chosen to make the Word of life known to the world.

But does it have the power, the authority to demand that we read in accordance with its traditions, its creeds? No, I’m too Reformed to say yes. And, I believe enough in the fidelity of what the creeds say that is true to demand that they control our reading of scripture: if they are right, then a good reading of scripture will generate these affirmations without those affirmations being the prerequisite assumption for reading the Bible rightly.

I want you to be free to discover that the Creeds are right. And, perhaps once every few hundred years, where they aren’t. Don’t let anyone take that away from you.

ed note: I realize after posting this that it leaves unanswered about half a million questions about the place of the church in our christian practice. Please stay tuned for my next Church Dogmatics post for more theologically and ecclesially developed musings

ed. note 2: I think this post is a dud. I need to work on how I actually want to delineate the tensions I feel in different hermeneutics and their relationships to power, freedom, and the Christian story. I might have inadvertently gone Quito (Mtn Goats reference) in true 8 fashion

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.

Word of God and Theological Interpretation

August 25, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 8 Comments

Yesterday’s post probed a bit of Karl Barth’s doctrine of scripture. Today I want to think a bit about what such a view of the Bible as the Word of God might mean for how we conceptualize theological interpretation of the Bible.

The conference I attended in New Zealand last week was on theological interpretation. In short, the movement is designed to muster Christians to read the Bible as Christians, and not as ostensibly detached historians.

Scholarship has been mired by the idea that our goal is to use scripture to find a history behind the text that is the actual history we are concerned with. In general, scholarship has worked to assess the human hands’ work in inscribing the Bible, setting God entirely to the side.

So what does it look like for Christian scholars to embrace our conviction that this scripture is the means God has chosen to speak to the world in order to reveal, ultimately, the redemption offered in Jesus Christ?

I typically approach this question with a hermeneutical type answer: we read the Bible Christianly when we read it as a witness to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. A christological reading strategy keeps our readings focused rightly on Christ and on the fact that our calling is to live faithfully after him and in him.

An interesting question that was raised at the Colloquium last week, however, had to do with the fact that many of us spoke as though theological interpretation is an ecclesial practice. What does it mean to read the Bible as something written in, with, and for the church?

Many of us used such language in our presentations. But all of us were academics. Ok, there were one or two folks who were also ordained ministers. But we were engaging in a decidedly academic task.

All of this (Barth plus the Colloquium) got me wondering: if theological interpretation is predicated on the notion that the Bible is the word of God, is it viable to think that we can read the Bible theologically in the academy at all? If the Bible as the word of God depends on the fact that God chooses to take quite humans words and make himself known afresh through them, does that make academic study of the Bible, by definition, the wrong kind of practice for hearing the Bible as the word of God?

I think academic study of the Bible is crucial. And my seminary classroom regularly becomes a place where that academic study confronts the church with a demand for more faithful practice.

Moreover, rigorous scholarship opens our eyes to the thought world within which the scriptures made a certain kind of sense and bore various connotations that are too often lost on current day readers. So academic study of the Bible is crucial for hearing what was said. And, such study should help us see more clearly how, in fact, the Bible speaks about God.

But after we’ve said all that, can we expect that the Bible, studied in the academy, will be the Bible as word of God? Or will that experience of scripture depend upon participating in the hearing of scripture with a body gathered to hear it–or at least, listening to it as proclamation?

Or, to put things differently, might we expect that a group that has gathered to study the human hands at work, the human history as such, will be inherently less likely to be confronted with those human hands as “word of God” than a group gathered to hear (and listen!) to and for the word of God?

These really are questions, and I’d value your feedback. At root what I’m trying to figure out is whether Barth doesn’t offer us a doctrine of scripture that offers a helpful way forward in doing historical biblical scholarship without growing anxious that it does not immediately address us as word of God.

Given that the word is spoken in such historically contextualized modes, and that these are what God has chosen to speak through, might the process of shaping understanding of what the scriptures “meant” be the best way forward for Christian academics?

Colloquium on Theological Interpretation: Reflections

August 20, 2011 in Academia, Bible Thoughts, SBL with 19 Comments

After the second day and closing ceremonies of the Colloquium on Theological Interpretation at Laidlaw college, I have a few overall thoughts about the enterprise of theological interpretation.

One of my thoughts is about theological interpretation as a discipline unfolding in the biblical studies academy. In short, I realize that I perceive the academy differently from my senior colleagues who feel the need to fight for space for theological interpretation, because I see them as the academy.

In conversations with several senior colleagues I’ve seen that the academy that they see themselves needing to try to survive in is the world you catch a glimpse of whenever someone writes a letter to the editor at SBL and decries the presence of people who think the Bible is scripture.

For me, the academy is the place that has always had a Pauline Theology group. It’s the place where the Richard Hayses and Michael Gormans and Joel Greens and Tom Wrights and Stephen Fowls and AKMAs and Jimmy Dunns are presenting papers that have significant theological weight to them.

In other words, I’m spoiled, and I tend to take for granted that the biblical studies academy is a place where I can do the kind of work I want to do–whether that be the boring stuff of Pauline chronology (I’ve got a riveting paper on my hard drive) or the more theologically engaged discussion of the beauties of the hermeneutics of Christological revisionism.

So: thank you to the generation of senior scholars who have created this space in the biblical studies world, especially in Pauline studies.

The second reflection is more about the substance and practice of theological interpretation.

In general, a wide gulf continues to exist between biblically generated theology and the theology of theologians, and this gulf will continue to stymie the vision of bringing together the fields of biblical studies and theology.

There were only a couple of hints at this over the weekend, where in general the conversations seemed to be unfolding on the same playing field.

But there were hints. One paper that was reflecting on T. F. Torrance’s reading of scripture talked about Torrance’s assertion that Mark indicated a virgin birth, for instance. In the Q & A afterward, this presenter talked about the annoyance of students coming from their intro to the Pentateuch course into his theology course and not having anything significant to say, theologically, about Gen 1-3. The “throat clearing” has taken place, but they’ve not yet spoken.

I began to wonder if the problem wasn’t with what the students were reading in Genesis, but that theology, in general, has not yet learned to listen to the theology of scripture, how ancient pre-Patristic texts theologize; or, even more importantly, that the texts simply do not speak of, support, or presuppose the theology that the theologian demands of them.

In a side conversation with one of the presenters (whose paper I very much appreciated and whose overall position on theological interpretation I find quite congenial), I made a brief case for why Christian hermeneutics should be Christological rather than Trinitarian.

He sees these working together. And I get that. But in trying to situate my point I asked, “Was Paul a Trinitarian?” He said, “Yes.” End of conversation.

That’s a small picture of where a biblical scholar can’t say what a theologian presumes, and why scholarship’s Bible will continue to be an enigma to the church. Beyond whether scholars are approaching their exegetical task as Christians, theologians (and church people) often want the Bible to say what it does not say, to support what it does not speak to.

I do wonder if the church’s theology will need to learn to hear what it takes for throat clearing as the song of the Spirit before the chasm will bridged between theology and the Bible.

Colloquium on Theological Interpretation, Day 1

August 19, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Culture with 2 Comments

I am currently in Auckland, NZ, attending the Colloquium on Theological Interpretation at Laidlaw College.

The environment at the conference is excellent, as have been almost all of the papers.

I won’t bore you with an extended recap of the 8ish papers I heard today, but there have been some common threads that ran through several of the things I heard–common concerns that I take as very good signs for the practice of theological interpretation.

Two of the papers today from OT scholars touched on issues of theodicy–and anti-theodicy. One was focusing on Lamentations and exploring the polyphonic nature of the text–there is dire complaint, there is defending of God, there is a repentant man a complaining woman, a narrator.

The questions the paper was exploring pertained to the ramifications of allowing each voice to stand, without resolving any one perspective into the perspective of another. The paper was pressing the question of what it might mean for communal praxis to embody the type of point, counterpoint; theodicy, anti-theodicy that we find in Lamentations. Similarly, a second OT paper wrestled with the viability of OT theodicy from another angle.

Then, three of the papers that focused on the NT were exploring some aspect of the crucified Christ and/or love as a driving force in our readings of scripture. I was angling for the story of Christ crucified as the controlling identity marker, hermeneutic, and ethic; another presenter used the category of love from John 14 as the essential component to the hermeneutic that leads us into all truth; and a third presenter discussed the Spirit in Galatians as the Spirit of the crucified Christ who, as this Christ-Spirit, leads Jesus’ followers into the life of new creation.

The common thread in all this is that the papers demonstrated a common drive toward a praxis that is both theologically and exegetically viable.

Much of what I’ve heard today represents, to me, the best of what theological interpretation can be. It is not a strong-arming of difficult texts so that they fit preconceived ideas of Christian theology. That caricature of Christian readings of scripture was nowhere to be found today.

Instead, it was a series of demonstrations that what these ancient texts say can be, and should be, life-giving for the communities that receive them as scripture. Faithful exegesis, even when it is somewhat destabilizing of our preconceptions about “how things are” or how they should be, perhaps especially when destabilizing, has the power to draw us to not merely saying the right things about God but acting more faithfully as the people of God.

The Church’s Jesus: On Not Overdoing It

May 10, 2011 in Academia, Bible Thoughts with 2 Comments

Over the next few days I will likely be saying a bit more about the church’s Jesus, as I began doing yesterday.

But before I get deeper into this, I want to speak a word of balance. Yesterday I made some claims about the church’s Jesus being a Jesus that in some ways the academy could never affirm. The church must always stand in the place of rehearsing Jesus not merely as a historical figure but as one who demands that we follow.

And so, in this sense, what the church does with and says about Jesus will always bear a similarity to the Gospels’ original purpose that the “purely academic” study of the Bible cannot, and does not with to, incur.

But…

Where the church’s readings can start to lose their moorings is precisely the place where academic study not only camps out, but even excels and thereby often surpassed the church’s readings.

In a couple of the proposals for theological interpretation I have read, the church’s ideal stance of “obedience” has been held forth as something that places the church closer to the posture of an “ideal reader” of the text than the historical academic readings. But to my mind this concedes too much to the potential response and too little to the historical context.

The first readers of the Bible were not merely worshipers of YHWH or followers of Jesus. They were not merely people who, ideally, would respond to the exhortations or shape their lives in accordance with the narratives.

They were all these things of course.

But they were also Jews living in exile under Babylonian rule. They were also Jews restored to their land in the Persian period and attempting to eke out a living there. They were also caught up in the currents of Roman rule of the Mediterranean world.

To reconstruct the hearing and response of an ideal reader of the text, taking into consideration that such a reader wishes to faithfully respond to God is a necessary component. But it is insufficient. The ideal reader of the text is also situated in a particular historical and cultural context within which the cues, clues, and commands means certain things, carry particular connotations, and aim for faithful response in that historical and cultural context.

The church needs an academy because the academy is always asking what we too often take for granted: “What was this text really trying to say, what response was it truly attempting to elicit?”

For this, we need more than faith. We need history. And for history, we often discover that those without the constraints of prior answers (i.e., an academy that, as such, has no constraint based on an agreed upon a priori right answer) often provide greater illumination than than those for whom history is not the main thing.

So for all that I said, and meant, yesterday about the church needing to say what the academy (as such) cannot, I will not say that people who do not share the church’s faith cannot read the Bible aright. Often, the academy does better with one of the necessary components (a historically viable reading of the text), even while the church’s posture of obedience allows it to affirm another necessary component.

While we in the church say, “God was at work in this history,” we often have to listen to those outside the church to learn better what “this history” is.

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