Tag Archive - theological interpretation

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…

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.

Gap Between Lectern and Pulpit

April 11, 2011 in Academia, Bible Thoughts, Church with 22 Comments

Over at Akma’s Random Thoughts, Akma has posted a few thoughts on the gap between academy and church in how we read the Bible. I resonate with much of what Akma says there. If you’re a Christian or an academic of biblical studies then you live in the strange world where those who have devoted most of their lives studying the book are not the ones preaching from Sunday to Sunday or listening to that text in the pew.

A gap will always exist between academy in church due to the fact that professors, for all our complaints about how much our administrative tasks take us away from our research, spend our lives learning the text and the things around the text that will, if all goes well, make us better readers of it.

But there’s another factor as well. Akma writes:

Perhaps the minister and congregation exemplify the sort of theological inquirer who wants not so much to learn about the Bible and theology as to find authority figures who will reaffirm the congregation’s predispositions.

Do you experience this gap? How do you handle it?

To my mind this is actually the most significant presenting problem, though I wouldn’t put the matter in quite this way. The way it’s stated, this sounds like there’s a peculiar “sort” of inquirer, a minority perhaps, who comes with only the demand that the text will reaffirm the congregation, church, etc.

But it seems to me that the two issues of time researching the text and its environment, on the one hand, and the church’s theology, on the other, come together in almost all churches as invisible constraints that perpetuate the finding of the church’s theology in the text whether or not it is intentionally “the sort of theological inquirer” who “wants” to find it there.

I think that Akma and I are actually largely in agreement here, but I want to take it in my own direction for a bit.

I’ve recently had opportunity to sit in a church context other than my house church. As I sat and listened to the teaching going on around me, I recognized a couple of things. One was that the persuasiveness of the teaching depended on a prior agreement with the point of view of the speaker, together with a general lack of knowledge about the details and issues being discussed. This is not a condemnation of any particular brand of Christianity–it’s what we find in most congregations of every stripe. Lay people aren’t experts in the Bible or its history, and they tend to be found in largely like-minded congregations whether those are liberal or conservative or somewhere in between (or beyond!).

But the other thing that troubled me, as an academic, as I sat listening was the realization that any student who came Fuller from that church (or went to any number of respectable seminaries around the state or country) would not be able to take what they’d learned in our classroom and bring it directly to this people without either (a) getting fired; or (b) splitting the church.

So I’m troubled afresh by the gap between academia and the church, between lectern and pulpit. I have a couple more thoughts about this, including what I’m not willing to do about it, and what I am. Perhaps more on this tomorrow.

But as I get into this, I remind you what I said last week: the solution is not to stop listening to the church and just to listen to the academy. Though the academy is my primary vocational location, I don’t think that the answer is to create an alternative, academic service of worship.

In the mean time: What do you think? Do you experience this gap? How do you handle it?

History & the Bible (Part 2 of 2)

September 21, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 47 Comments

What, then, is this Bible that many of us, on a broad spectrum of Christian belief, want to treat as the word of God, the rule for Christian faith and practice? In particular, what are we looking at when we read the historical narratives? How much should we expect them to resemble the “facts of history”?

The stakes are pretty high when we come to the Gospels, so let’s step back into some books that no one ever reads: the books of Chronicles. (Incidentally, Pete Enns has a three part series on Biologos dealing with this very issue that wrapped up today.)

There are a couple of things we need to keep in mind as we read Chronicles. One of the most important is that Chronicles uses Samuel/Kings; the writer might even be able to assume that some of his readers would know those old stories; and, he freely reconstructs the narratives to comport with his own theology.

One theological given in Chronicles is that sin is punished on earth while righteousness is rewarded. This can be a problem.

Manasseh Repented--And We Even Got This Picture of It!

For example: what if the guy with [one of] the longest reign (55 years) in the whole book, Manasseh,is the one who according to Kings is single-handedly responsible for Judah going into Babylonian exile? How do you explain the long reign for the most evil of kings? Easy: tell a story of repentance! Even better, make it a story that embodies Israel’s own story of exile in Babylon and restoration to the land. Manasseh becomes a model–for how Israel should turn faithfully to YHWH after the exile.

Such alterations happen regularly in Chronicles: the point is not to hand down the history but to preach the theology. We know that the Chronicler changed the story for his theological purposes, and it seems a lot of his early audience would have known it as well. Because of what he did with his source text, it would be a mistake to think that what we’re supposed to do with his text and Samuel/Kings is to attempt to lace together a coherent, non-contradictory narrative.

This is the kind of history that we have in the Bible–not one that is written for the purpose of preserving a given account of events, but one told for the purpose of proclamation.

We have evidence of the same sort of freedom being employed in the NT with the Synoptic Gospels. Luke tells us that he did his research; we can guess that he probably used Mark, and I think he probably used Matthew as well. But even if he only used Mark, we discover the exact same freedom at work as we saw in the case of Chronicles: he is not interested in telling us the accurate historical picture as we would define and look for historical factuality; he intentionally changes the story he has at his disposal such that his own theology is communicated and the history itself reads differently.

For me, the question of “inerrancy” versus not, or the question of how “historical” the Gospels are, or the question of whether or not we should harmonize different passages pushes in this direction: When we push for inerrancy, harmonizations, and historicity, we show that we have a fundamentally different desire for what these texts might give us than the biblical writers themselves had when they composed them.

Matthew: "See? Told you there were two!" Mark: "Bah. You used Photoshop."

If the purpose of the Gospels was to give us the historically identifiable account of the anointing of Jesus, then Luke would not have changed the location, host, time frame, and body part on which Jesus was anointed. If the purpose

of a Gospel is to give a full, historical account, then Matthew would not go around introducing second things such as a second Gerasene demoniac or second donkey that Jesus simultaneously rode into Jerusalem with the other.

The point is that at various points both Matthew and Luke have decided to tell versions of the story that are in ways major or minor different from the story of Mark–and that in trying to smash them all back together into a coherent unity we show that our own desire for the text is antithetical to the impulse that gave us the texts we actually have.

What the Gospel writers have separated, let no man put together.

And this begins to form my response to Adam’s comment on yesterday’s post about where my view ever moves from the messy details to the “high” acknowledgment that this is God’s word for the church, not just a human doing. My response to that is that it is precisely these humans doings that are God’s word to the church. God’s word to the church is Matthew’s post-Torah Jewish Christianity, and Mark’s apocalyptic and surprising messiah, and Luke’s seamless-salvation-history-Davidic-King, and even John’s pre-existent heavenly but now incarnate Son of God.

Honoring them as the word of God means receiving them not only as they are actually given to us, but trusting that God gave us the kind of books he wanted us to have in order to find the salvation that God has on offer in Christ. In other words, it’s precisely by not turning these into history books that I honor them as the word that God has given to guide us into the life that is only found in Jesus the Son.

Adam Is Israel

March 2, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 12 Comments

Over on Biologos Pete Enns has a post arguing that Adam is Israel.

YES.

More on the Reformed Traditions in Campbell

March 2, 2010 in Book Reviews, Uncategorized with 4 Comments

[The following is part of an ongoing series in which I blog my thoughts to Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul.]

In my previous post, most excellent Theophilos, I wrote of all that Deliverance of God began to do and teach with respect to the Reformed Tradition and its combination of justification with a more elective understanding of salvation. Today I want to follow up with some more concerns about the presence of both strands in this tradition. Mostly, I want to suggest that in holding onto both strands the Reformers might be imitating Paul, Judaism, and the Old Testament.

I’ll pass quickly by the possibility that justification and election are mutually informing in Paul, because I’m sure that we’ll get to this in the exegetical sections. But in the back of my mind I’m thinking, “Those whom he foreknew he also predestined to become conformed to the image of his son; and whom he foreknew these he also called, whom he called these he also justified; whom he justified these he also glorified.” In Romans 8, not only do predestination and justification come together, they come together in an eschatological (already/not yet) context entirely conditioned both by union with the dead and resurrected Jesus and the coming final judgment in which justification will be realized. We might similarly ask about Gal 3 where reception of the Spirit and justification by faith are mutually inclusive rather than representative of divergent soteriologies.

But as I said, I’ll hold back judgment on these Pauline matters for the time being, assuming they’ll be covered in due course.

The second issue that keeps springing to mind in this regard, however, is that of early Judaism.

Now I know that on many of these issues you don’t think Ed Sanders has gotten things as straight as needs be. Fair enough. But one thing he said around the seminar table has stuck with me and resonated as true to much of early Jewish literature: “Paul believed both in predestination and free will, and so did the other Jews of the first century. Do you know what the Qumran community called themselves? The elect. You know what else they called themselves? The volunteers!”

It seems more than a little likely to me that what we consider theological contradiction a first century Jew might consider paradox or mystery. This is one reason I’m less than eager to base my assessment of Paul on an idealized reconstruction of theories. I’m not persuaded that our only other option is to relegate Paul to the realm of contradiction and confusion.

Both/and might be an alternative to either/or.

I was already pondering these things in my heart when I stumbled across the following from Walter Brueggemann. He discusses the OT, delving into YHWH’s identity as it is tied to the people of Israel. When talking about the covenants, he bids us not press the distinction between “conditional” and “unconditional” covenants.

On the whole, however, in my judgment it is futile and misleading to sort out unconditional and conditional aspects of YHWH’s covenant with Israel. The futility and misleading quality of such an enterprise can be stated on two quite different grounds. First, even the covenant with the ancestors of Genesis includes and imperative dimension…Second, if this relationship is indeed one of passionate commitment, as it surely is, it is undoubtedly the case that every serious, intense, primary relationship has within its dimensions of conditionality and unconditionality that play in different ways in different circumstances. The attempt to factor out conditional and unconditional aspects of the covenant is an attempt to dissect and analyze the inscrutable mystery of an intimate, intense relation that, by definition, defies all such disclosure. (An Unsettling God, 24)

Much of the argument depends on the inherent incompatibility between what are assessed as two ways of thinking. I’m wrestling with this idea, now, from a couple of different angles: (1) are these ways of thinking inherently incompatible as claimed? (2) is there any reason to think Paul would have thought so–or are there good reasons to think he might not have? and (3) what about the actual theories that have held the two elements together? where do they fall apart?

The weight of the coming argument about Romans is going to rest, in large measure, on the power of the division. Am I asking for more prolegomena?! Maybe just different…

Being Handed Over, Being a Child, Being Exclusive

February 24, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 12 Comments

I confess: it takes a lot sometimes for me to see what Luke’s up to in the way he strings together the Jesus stories. But today I’ve been pondering a possible thread through three pericopes: Jesus’ passion prediction, the disciples subsequent arguing over greatness, and their confession about stopping a guy from exorcising (all in ch. 9).

First, in a striking juxtaposition, Luke tells us that Jesus responds to everyone being astounded at all the things he was doing by saying to his disciples, “Listen carefully to these words, ‘For the son of man is about to be given over into the hands of people.’” Greatness is going to be turned on its head. The mighty, powerful one will be handed over to sinners.

It’s worth pondering whether Jesus said, “Listen to these words” prospectively (“what I’m about to tell you,” NIV) or retrospectively, (“Listen to what these people are saying, and hold it together with the next part of the story.”). The latter, incidentally, is how Peter preaches Jesus in Acts 2.

But in any event, Jesus’ falling into the hands of sinners is set in striking juxtaposition with people’s glorification of him. And, the disciples’ deafness to the calamity is put on display by their own visions of glory.

The disciples get into a dispute about greatness. Interesting, isn’t it, that division arises when people are pursuing greatness? There’s a connection here between unity and humility. A call to oneness will only be successful when that oneness is predicated on the gospel narrative that turns the world on its head: the narrative of the handed-over Messiah as God’s agent who embraces the world.

<aside> Incidentally, this is why I’m quite sure that a narrative hermeneutic is more fundamentally Christian than a Trinitarian hermeneutic. A Trinitarian hermeneutic, or even one that simply reads the stories as telling us about “God” does not contain the inherently self-emptying dimension of the cruciform narrative of Jesus. If you want to say that this is exactly the kind of God who exists as 3 in 1, I’ll not fight with you on that, but only point out that such a claim entails a cruciform, narrative hermeneutic to interpret God. The narrative is the thing, the description trails behind. But a Trinitarian hermeneutic, could very well leave the disciples’ quest in place as inherently legitimate, a questing after the sort of greatness that God has put on display in his acts of creation and providence. </aside>

Jesus takes a child and puts it in their midst, telling them that to receive such a one in Christ’s name is to receive not only the child but Christ and the Father as well. The “name of Christ” will recur in the next story as well. The question for me is why is receiving such a child a sign of greatness and a creator of unity with God?

My initial thought is that this is, itself, an enactment of the reception God brings to us in the gospel of Christ. It is a reenactment of the narrative. Note how it turns the expectations of the disciples on their heads. They are, rather Corinthian-like, thinking about their own greatness in the kingdom. The child is a reminder of the opposite. Moreover, to accept the child is to associate with the child, spurning the pursuit of greatness and the halls of power. It is to become the least by embracing the least. This is the way to greatness.

Ok, Jesus, so we can be like you, receive people in your name, and then we’ll be great. Got it. So, just checking here, this still means folks have to be with us, right? I mean, we’re the center of blessing and everything, so we still control the boundaries, right? So, like, this guy we saw casting out demons in your name, we were right to put a stop to that since he’s not following with us, right?

*sigh*

No. Wrong again. Part of the point of this whole thing is that Jesus, not the disciples, is the set-binder. To act in his name is to be on the mission of God. To act in his name by receiving a child, or to act in his name by casting out a demon. Unity is found in the gospel narrative which places Jesus at the center of kingdom of God.

As the intramural oneness was undone by hoping that, as an individual, the disciple is greater than the next guy (thereby failing to live into the narrative of the humble messiah), the inter-group oneness was undone by hoping that, as a group, the disciples were greater than the next guys (thereby failing to live into the narrative of an all-determining Jesus). The former is failure of the individuals to live into the gospel story, the latter is the failure of the group.

Indeed, the surprising turn of phrase that caught me off guard in 9:50 was when Jesus said not “whoever is not against us is for us,” but instead, “whoever is not against you is for you.” Your good is assessed, Jesus indicates, by seeing how my work is being done in the world–whether by your hands or not.

And, we’d all better hope, there seems to be a lot of “or not” going around.

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.

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