Scripture & Theology

Where I have some evaluative comments of my own to intersperse, these shall be in bold italics.

The title of the first volume, Renewing Biblical Interpretation (2001), is fairly self-explanatory.

In trying to reintroduce typology as critically valid, Neil Macdonald’s intriguing point is that ‘events’ are bigger than author’s intentions. The truth of Genesis 3 goes further than its meaning. He takes the example of someone referring to Jones as the one who is sweeping leaves when it is in fact Smith: it is not a very big mistake to make when they look so much the same. Using Barth’s insistence that the Son of God assumed humanity (not an individual hypostasised man), ‘Adam’ is understood as common humanity who gets redefined as Christ. (But can we actually claim that what the Hebrew prophets saw was ‘Adam’? In Macdonald’s rejection of kenosis, I fear Thomasius’ view of the Incarnation is somewhat misrepresented.) As early as Irenaeus it was clear that this act of redefinition was not an event ‘thousands of years later’ but of something that was already latent behind the external ‘OT’ form. But what about other examples of biblical typology, where it is harder to think of the Hebrew bible figure as ‘really’ Christ (or some other New Testament referent)? Is it not better to see it as an example of seeing darkly, as in the case of , say, Zerubabbel? Mary Hesse’s response is disappointing and seems to come down to two points: 1 the bible taken neat is sometimes plain wrong and univocity can be a bit limiting 2. Barth’s Christology sounds unorthodox to her and she thinks that an assumptus homo Christology would be more orthodox! It seems a shame to have a less than theologically informed respondent here.

Stephen Wright deals helpfully with the question of the bible’s imperfection by arguing that the biblical text is the necessary mediation, a poiema for the Word to speak in and through. The ‘straightforward logos is refracted by location in poiema—with all its complexities and ambiguities in its character as a work of literature.’ What makes Scripture different is, of course, its message. Here an apologetic strategy of not presupposing the bible’s having a divine status is used.

It is worth quoting from at length:

Performance preaching may have the unintended consequence of familiarising oneself with the Word as Other or rather with the usual and expected effect of preaching. It may be wiser to keep a distance by careful historical (and theological?) sensitivity to how different from us the Scriptures are. To see the Bible as a creation (divine and human) is to hint at a degree of divine inspiration in other works of literature also, without in any way undermining the Bible’s uniqueness. To consider it as great literature which will repay the same kind of self-opening attention as other great works is not to belittle it, but to open it up to readers beyond the ranks of those who already believe. The transition from literary encounter to worship will be a natural one which cannot be imposed from outside (264)

Also positive is Trevor Hart’s essay on Imagination. Kant’s aesthetic is viewed as mediating reason and the senses. The self becomes more rounded through encounter. Schleiermacher was aware of the need to strike a balance between the grammatical sense of a text—what it meant in its public context (the canonical sense?) and its technical sense, what it might say to a reader here and now. But as Wolterstorff writes in his response, good exegetes need to ask: what is the illocutionary force of any locution, which does not mean ‘what did the author mean to say?’ but rather ‘what did the text perform?’ This of course requires the reader to bring herself into the interpretation, but of course understanding the historical ‘other’ (through his life and times, ideologies and Sitz im Leben) may take us part of the way. All in all this is the most successful of the ‘conversations’ in Book One.

Chris Seitz, in an essay that is less about interpretation and more about the nature of Scripture and the tragedy of Anglican biblical interpretation, seems in favour of pre-critical exegesis and also largely in sympathy with the position of Brevard Childs. Yet just what is actually lost to the cause of Christian faith by regarding Daniel as belonging to the Hasmonean period? Where in the gospels does Jesus affirm that Daniel was written in pre-exilic times? Was Pusey really justified in his rearguard action against the German critical ‘epidemic’? What is so wrong in a progressive understanding of Revelation? Is that not what typology is all about? Seitz is fond of quoting the saying of Jesus: ‘If they do not believe Moses and the prophets…’ However this needs careful exegesis! My question: Why was there no response to this paper?

Another attempt at showing the deficiencies of historical-critical method is given by Colin Greene, which is more than a little diffuse, and reads as though by someone who is very new to Lessing and Pannenberg, rather than someone at home with their thinking. I am not convinced that Eta Linnerman had the best of the argument with Rainer Riesner and others.

In his response, John Riches suggests that engaging with historical criticism might lead to a more mature form of faith and that history of interpretation should be engaged in for the Sinnpotential of texts. It is only through scholarship that the bible is set free (say of the Jewish background which gives ‘righteousness’ the nuance of ‘power’) The task of biblical scholarship is thus ‘to assist in the discernment of legitimate diversity’, presumably of which Sinne are in fact ‘possible’. Against this romantically naïve historicist optimism, one hopes for a response to the response—and something of that would come in future volumes.