I can't stop saying "ontological"

I posted this comment on Facebook and a friend asked me what "ontological" means. My answer turned into a short essay  outlining not only what it means for me but also why I can't stop saying it. Here's my answer:

It literally means "the study of being,” but I’m using it in a particular way. When I say something "is" something, and emphasise that by saying that something "is ontologically" something, it means that I am making a fundamental statement about its "nature." 

It's a vague concept, I know. I'm not actually interested in proposing a general theory of the nature of reality - I don't think human language and concepts can even do this as we are part of what we're trying to describe and we can't stand outside "it" in order to analyse it. Rather, I'm interested in the question of how we should read the Bible. This entails asking what it "is." The answer to this involves saying things like: it's a composite product of an ancient Israelite culture produced over a long time span. 

There is also another element, however, of what the Bible "is," for one finds all over the Bible statements that its purpose - regardless of its human particularity - consists in communicating the will and the identity of God to those who want to know it. It says that this purpose is something that God himself wills, that it is in fact the primary reason for the Bible's existence in the first place, and that God himself makes sure that this purpose is fulfilled within the lives of those who read it. So, if you take this self-depiction seriously, then according to the Bible the answer to the question of what it "is" is that it is a vehicle of divine revelation and salvation. In other words, the Bible sees itself as part of a broader context, a context even broader than the human one, namely the context of a history of salvation in which the eternal God is constantly revealing himself to humanity through this book. 

Yet, there is one further step: the Bible also says that what God himself decides to do in our created space and time is ultimately an expression of something that he himself eternally "is." God himself has a "being" but this being is dynamic, not static. The church calls this the "ontological Trinity," because it believes that God "is" an eternally loving relationship of three distinct persons, who we call the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (this, by the way, is what Christians mean when they say God "is" love; this is an ontological statement; God's being "is" the love of the Father and the Son in the Spirit). It therefore follows that the answer to the question of what the Bible "is" is ultimately related to the question of who God "is." Eternally, the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father and the bond that unites them is the Spirit. Temporally, i.e. in our created time, this eternal relationship "unfolds" to allow us to participate in the relationship. The Son became flesh and through his work of salvation for mankind by conquering the power of death on the cross he "brings" us into the eternal relationship that exists between him and his father. 

This process of "bringing in", however is, from our perspective not yet complete. In other words, those who now in our time put their faith in the Son receive a "foretaste" of a fuller relationship that is to come. This is why Christians are people who are "waiting" for the fulfilment of time, the "kingdom of God" on earth in which humanity can finally enter into the eternal relationship that God is. In the "meantime," that moment between the Son's historical redemption of humankind (around 33 A.D) and his return, humankind itself is to grow in that relationship that has been started but not consummated. And it does this by reading the Bible. The Bible "is" the place where this relationship grows. God already knows us. The Bible "is" the place where he makes himself known to us “in the meantime”, so that we can respond to him in worship and adoration in anticipation of the day when we can finally “come home,” which is into his arms as a son into the arms of his father. 

This has consequences for question for how I should read the Bible, which I won’t go into now as I’ve already written a ridiculously long comment! My point is just this: when most people ask themselves what the Bible “is,” and therefor how they should read it, they often just stop at the human bit and so end up reading it partially. Their decision to do this, however, is not only inadequate to the nature of the Bible, it is based on a prior assumption about what “ultimate reality” really is. Whatever that reality is, it doesn’t look like the one I just described above. They are commited to a different "ontology" than the one the Bible witnesses to. This is why the category of “ontology” is so important for reading the Bible. It helps us think about what the Bible “is” in a way that does justice to what it claims for itself.

What is the "reality" of the Bible?

In response to my post on the need for ontological categories in biblical exegesis, Douglas Dobbins of en christo has asked an important question: how does one know when one has identified the reality to which the Bible points?

My aim today isn't to answer this question, only to sharpen its point. If exegesis is to wrestle with the the reality to which Scripture points (according to its genre as kerygmatic witness), then how does one access it and then verify whether one has identified it? This is an issue that is often simply ignored by those who like to imagine themselves as doing "objective" research. As Childs says,

“Seldom has the issue of the substance of the witness, that is, its reality, been dealt with above board and clearly, but rather some sort of assumed hermeneutic has been silently approved" (Biblical Theology, 80ff.).

Here are the examples he provides us to help make his point:

(1) G. von Rad's form of Heilsgeschichte as a history of continual actualization of tradition assumes that there is a reality lying behind the various witnesses which emerges in ever greater clarity at the end of the process, but which can also at times be anticipated through typological adumbration. Yet the reader is given only vague hints of what is theologically involved. In his final chapter (Old Testament Theology, II, 319ff.) von Rad is forced to fall back to several traditional, but often conflicting, schemata (Law/Gospel, prophecy/fulfilment, letter/spirit) in order to relate the Old Testament's substance to his christological model (cf. Oeming, Gesamtbiblische Theologien, 58ff).

(2) R. Bultmann's search for the reality behind the New Testament's witness assumes it to be a mode of authentic existence which is described by means of modern existentialist categories. Only those New Testament writers who appear compatible to this move provide vehicles for an authentic voice (Paul, John) while many other New Testament authors are rendered largely mute by means of critical deconstruction (Luke, Pastorals, II Peter, Revelation).

(3) P. Tillich speaks freely of the reality of the New Being which conquers existential estrangement and makes faith possible. Jesus as the Christ is the symbolic expression of this New Being, and the biblical portrait of this symbol mediates a knowledge of God. Participation, not historical argument, guarantees the event on which faith is grounded as a sign of the continuing transforming power of this reality once encountered by Jesus' disciples. That the Old Testament plays a minor role here is apparently taken for granted.

(4)Again, many modern 'narrative theologies' seek to avoid all dogmatic issues in the study of the Bible and seek 'to render reality' only by means of retelling the story. (Hence the agreement of both liberals and conservatives regarding the centrality of narrative, but who disagree concerning the nature of the 'old, old story'.) The move has recently become popular of inviting the reader to enter the fictive world of the biblical text, a realm of symbolic language, which evokes new imagery for its hearers. Clearly an assumption is being made regarding the nature and function of the Bible which privileges the genre of story over against those other biblical forms of psalmody, law and wisdom.

(5)Finally, many modern biblical scholars have been attracted by a hermeneutical theory such as that proposed by David Kelsey (JAAR, 585ff.) who defends the position that the Bible's authority does not rest on any specific content or property of the text, but lies in the function to which biblical patterns have been assigned by the 'imaginative construals' of a community of faith. One cannot rightly attack the consistency of the theory, but the theological issue turns on whether one can do justice to the function of scripture when it is so loosely related to its subject matter, that is, to its reality.

I hope to give my own thoughts soon.

I also hope this begins to highlight the naivety of the outdated categories of liberal/conservative recently employed by N.T. Wrong in his attempt to "figure out" his colleagues. For more on this, see Paul Minear's work.

Barth and Bultmann on Romans: Who's the better exegete?

In commemoration of Rudolf Bultmann's birthday, the question was posed on the Bibical Studies List as to who was a better exegete: Bultmann or his life-long antagonist Karl Barth?

The following responses represent a typical understanding of Barth's exegesis:

Barth was a horrible exegete. His Romans commentary is Paul Lite. 99% Barth, 1% Paul. Barth was a theologian much more than an exegete.

One thing about Bultmann is that he was very honest, ... . He clearly makes distinctions between what he believes as a "modern" reader of Scripture, and what the writer of the text believed. With Barth, you get his ideas and theology, and these can be brilliant, but there is often a disconnect with the text if you are looking for anything resembling exegesis.

Here's my response:

My minor point:

if theology is based on false exegesis, then how can it be brilliant?

My main point:

I'm not sure the difference between Bultmann's exegesis and Barth's is a matter of honesty or dogmatic overlay. What is at stake are two fundamentally different ways of conceiving the nature of the text and the discipline of exegesis.

Childs compares Barth's and Bultmann's exegesis of Romans 5.12ff in his chapter on “Humanity: Old and New” in his Biblical Theology (p.588ff) and concluded that whereas “Bultmann follows the usual norms of historical critical exegesis,” Barth “is not only focussing on the verbal sense of Paul's original argument,” he is seeking “to pursue Paul's witness beyond the text itself to reflect theologically on the substance (res) which called forth the witness.” (589). Though Bultmann's exegesis has the strength of staying close to the literary structure of Paul's argument, Barth went beyond what Paul was saying to the issue itself: “the substance of true humanity revealed in Jesus Christ.” Barth was fully aware of the contrast that Bultmann pointed out, but unlike Bultmann, Barth wasn't content to stay at the “literal sense” (my term). His exegesis was an exercise in Biblical Theology, which may explain why Bultmann didn't understand what Barth was doing exegetically.

To repeat: the issue has less to do with honesty or capability and more do with a conception of the nature of the text and the function of exegesis.

I should add that I think Bultmann's use of the word Sache (see my recent post on Bultmann here) parallels Childs' use of the word res. It's the goal of exegesis, except that for Bultmann the text's true subject matter was authentic existence, whereas for Childs and Barth it is God in Jesus Christ.

I have also recently posted on the relation between Bultmann, exegesis, and ideology.

Some thoughts on Bultmann's birthday

OK, it was a few days ago, as Jim has reminded us on the Biblical Studies List. Nevertheless, I belatedly share the following thoughts I jotted down while reading through Hermann Diem's most excellent Dogmatics a while ago in order to commemorate his memory, and of course be corrected by those who know infinitely better.

According to H. Diem, Bultmann's program of de-mythologization was a theological response to the challenge of historical criticism to theology. His answer to Lessing's questions of how (1) a specific historical event can have decisive significance for faith, and (2) how the historical gulf is to be overcome so that this event can affect us now, is that the two have nothing to do with each other. This then frees the historical critic to conclude what he likes about the historical reality behind the text and the theologian to construct relevant theology despite these results. How does Bultmann achieve what for the rest of Christendom was an impossibility?

He has a good hard think, reads a bunch of books, chats with his friend Heidegger and concludes that what's really bothering “modern man” is the problem of his “historicity.” It is the existential question of how I can have “meaning” in the present despite the fact that I am influenced by my past and responsible for my future. Bultmann, drawing on the hermeneutical principle of “pre-understanding,” turns to the Bible and discovers that happily there is indeed a solution to this particular problem, at least in nascent form, in Paul and John, though admittedly prepared by Jesus and the OT. That is, what really matters, what these texts really want to communicate to us, is that the grace of God allows us to be set free from our past, to existentially step outside of history, and so be able to realize ourselves.

Decisive to the validity of Bultmann's theological proposal is that this is what the NT writers themselves actually intended. Though the authors considered that the historical events were important to salvation, this was only accidental to their true motive which was existential. In the minds of these authors faith as the means of assimilating salvation was *existential* in character and as such is fundamentally separable from the assertions concerning the factuality of certain events. For us “modern men,” then, if we really want to understand the true “substance” (Sache) of the NT, need to read the texts for what they have to say about existence. Eliminating the need to believe that these events are factual actually helps us to achieve this.
What is interesting to me (if this analysis is correct) is that Heidegger's essentialist philosophy helps Bultmann to see what is there, it opens his eyes, so to speak; it helps him get to what the Bible “is really all about.” Without this broader philosophical understanding, we would be blinded by the fact that the “primitive” thought of the NT actually believed that God interacts in history. Our more developed, modern world-view would “get in the way,” and so existentialist analysis of being helps us discern what Jesus and the disciples were all about.

This approach to exegesis is bolstered theologically by the claim that it is the true meaning of “justification by faith alone.” Regardless of the correctness of this interpretation of dogma, or of Heidegger's philosophy, is it not the case that Bultmann is as dependent on his ideology for exegesis as any other human, whether secular interpreter or Southern Baptist fundamentalist?

The solution to good exegesis is not to try and “stop being ideological” but rather to develop a good, healthy ideology.

P.S. For a guy who claims to have discovered authentic existence, he certainly looks grumpy!

The intertextual reader-writer

The following is a quote taken from Beth LaNeel-Tanner's helpful The Book of Psalms through the Lens of Intertextuality (2001). It represents her own understanding of how exegesis of the Bible should proceed if one wishes to plumb its possibilities. Her phrase "reader-writer" references the fact that all our reading is also a form of metaphorical writing, as the text is brought into dialogue with our own personal history, and thus a meaning unique to us - in a sense "authored" by us - is created:

The intertextual reader-writer does not always look for a fixed meaning of a word or phrase, but for a more fluid possibility. The intertextual reader-writer is always looking for how a text refers to other "texts," sometimes as a simile, sometimes as a parody, sometimes as a presupposition. The intertextual reader-writer uses other texts to say more than is apparent in the printed text - words and even worlds hidden between the lines, and meanings are formed from a variety of spheres of reference.

At some point in the future I intend to engage these more postmodern approaches from canonical perspective.

For further pontifications on the subject, see my post A chat with my wife on the meaning of a story.

And in case you think post-modernism is about creating your own reality, see my post Postmodernists believe in object reality too!

And finally, concerning the question of the significance of authorial intentionality, I had a bash at it in my post Authorial intentionality and the final form.

Two testaments, four gospels: the hermeneutical significance of juxtaposition

I indicated in my post on the relation of the New Testament to the Old that a primary characteristic of the Christian two-testamental Bible is that these two testaments are simply juxtaposed to each other. There are no attempts to redactionally link them together, as we find in individual books such as Isaiah, or attempts to update the text of the Old Testament so that it speaks of Jesus more unambiguously (by inserting Jesus' name in Isaiah 53, for example).

In short, this juxtaposition of the two testaments is of a different order than the canonical shaping that gave us the individual books in the first place. According to Childs, this type of "canonical shaping" is comparable to the composition of the fourfold Gospel collection. Just like the two testaments, the Gospels were also simply juxtaposed without an attempt to make the individual books conform to a single redactional pattern. This has hermeneutical significance in that it is the resulting effect of the juxtaposition, rather than in a single editorial intentionality, that should guide theological interpretation. (This also demonstrates, I should point out, that canonical exegesis is commited to reckoning with various types of intentionality when dealing with the totality of Scripture.)

In contrast to the two-testamental canon, however, there is no cross-referencing within the fourfold Gospel collection amongst the individual Gospels. Each of the individual Gospels, however, makes constant and explicit reference to the Old Testament – albeit in different ways. Indeed, the use of the Old Testament plays a major role in the canonical shaping of each of the Gospels and many of the New Testament letters as well. Childs draws the following implication from this observation:

the influence of the Old Testament on the individual shaping of the Gospels belongs to the level of the New Testament’s compositional history and cannot be directly related to the formation of the Christian Bible qua collection. This means that the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament, either by direct citation or allusion, cannot provide a central category for Biblical Theology because this cross-referencing operates on a different level. There is no literary or theological warrant for assuming that the forces which shaped the New Testament can be simply extended to the level of Biblical Theology involving theological reflection on both testaments (Biblical Theology, 76).

Jewish and Christian appropriation of the Law of Moses

A friend wrote me an e-mail today with a question on the differences between Jewish and Christian appropriations of the Law of Moses. As anyone mildly acquainted with this blog will know, I can't do anything other than think in Childsian categories, so I post the spontaneous answer I wrote with the hope that if I'm wrong some kind soul on the Internet will point this out:

This is a complex area, Jewish and Christian hermeneutics. I think B.S. Childs had the best insights, but his views are hard to understand and not particularly systematically worked out in one place (they presume a knowledge of other works, such as Barth and Hägglund, which I'm still trying to get through). His point is that regardless of the hermeneutic we use to interpret the Bible, it is always undergirded by a specific theology. Christianity inherited the Old Testament as Holy Scripture, just like the Jews, but how it functioned within the community was different. This is seen in the fact that for Jews midrash was the primary mode for appropriating Scripture, whereas for Christians it was allegory. For the Jews, with their focus on Torah as the centre of Scripture, there was a strong emphasis on making the various parts fit into an interconnected whole which could then be put into practice. The boundaries of the canon, the order of the books, the language of the text, where all firmly fixed so that the text could be "applied" as strictly as possible. The church however, confessed that the centre of Scripture is Christ. The text was seen to point beyond itself to another reality, which was not necessarily to be identified with the literal meaning of the text but which as the same time could only be accessed via it. Hence the development of "allegory" as a means of moving beyond the literal and on to the spiritual sense.

This has implications for how the church appropriates the law. Along with the rest of Scripture, it can't be taken literally - read "legalistically," - as to do so runs the danger of missing the real point. The law is connected with God's eschatological will for His people and makes ultimate sense within that framework. Reading it in the light of Christ, then, provides the church with the angle of reading that can open up what the text "is really all about," what its true kerygmatic function is within the overall economy of God.

This doesn't give you a concrete answer, but I think it shows a starting point. I think the hermeneutical implication is that for the Christian the narrative framework relativizes the legal content by placing it within its utlimate eschatological framework (e.g. Genesis 12.1-3). I don't know how a Jew relates law and narrative in this sense. A great way of seeing these two different theological hermeneutics at work is to look at the history of interpretation. Childs' 1974 commentary on Exodus does this helpfully. I strongly recommend you get hold of it and read the section on the Ten Commandments. He outlines the history of thought and looks for general trends, differences and similarities between the two traditions.

Childs on intentionality and reader-response

Childs struggled throughout his career with the relationship between authorial or editorial intentionality and the effect a particular constellation of texts had on a reader, regardless of whether this constellation was intended or fortuitous. The latter category takes him into the realm of reader-response, the former keeps him within the realm of traditional historical-criticism. Childs wanted both, though he still felt that in some sense an awareness of intentionality should play some kind of role in evaluating reader-response interpretation. The trick is how to correlate them. In his final commentary (Isaiah), one can see him trying to coordinate these two categories, especially in his treatment of intertextuality in third Isaiah.

I'm currently writing an essay on Childs' exegesis, so I hope to be able to post more articulately on this issue in the future. For now, an earlier quote on the topic, taken from Childs' response to critiques of his Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture.

At times there is clear evidence for an intentional redactional move being made, e.g. the positioning of Isa. 36-39. At other times, no conscious intentionality can be discerned in the joining of sources or traditions. Moreover, there is considerable evidence to show the effect of accidental and fortuitous factors in the shaping of the material. it is certainly possible, even likely, that chs. 21-14 of II Samuel received their present literary function late in the process. But the crucial point to make is that regardless of the exact nature of a text's prehistory, a new dynamic was unleashed for its interpretation when it was collected with other material and assigned a religious role as sacred literature. Whether or not one can determine the motivation for joining Gen. 1 with Gen. 2, the present juxtaposition within a larger literary context affects the semantic level on which ch. 2 is read.

B.S. Childs, "Response to Reviewers" (JSOT 16; 1980: 52 - 60), 54.

Heaven and Historiography

I've just finished one of the most fascinating books I've read in a long time. Paul Minear traces the divergences in perspective between the modern historian and New Testament authors. He isn't so much concerned to argue for the superiority of the New Testament's views on eschatology, ontology, and cosmology (how could one do that anyway?) as to show the methodological implications for the historian if he or she were to actually hold this worldview. Faith and the academy are not as easy to separate as some would like to think.

I've read the book far too quickly to give an adequate introduction so I'll just post his overview of one of my favouriate chapters: "Biblical Ontology and Ecclesiology" (doesn't that title just send a shiver down your spine?).

These apostolic and prophetic attitudes toward time become the central concern in the fourth chapter, where I analyze the challenges presented to the historian by specific texts in the book of Revelation. The category of history does not appear in these texts and it becomes quite misleading when the texts are forced into conformity to the modern category. By contrast the category of the heavens, so absent from modern historical discussion, is assumed to be the ultimate reality. Historians are primarily concerned with placing all events within earthly time and the temporal process; biblical writers are essentially concerned with the eternal purposes and time-transcending activity of the creator of the heavens and the earth. Moreover, in sharp contrast to modern thought, which tends to reduce the heavens and the earth to spatial measurement, biblical writers assume the basic and continual interpenetration of the two realms, with the heavens providing the creative source, the daily sustenance, and the final goal of everything earthly. Because the categories of space and time are no longer of use in measuring heavenly realities, biblical thought makes dubious the modern scholar's reliance on those categories (23).

The Drama of Doctrine, free online.

I just accidentally came across this fascinating looking book by K. Vanhoozer while searching for something else. His comments on some of the complexities of Childs' approach are interesting and informed and his comment on situating the canonical process within in a "theo-dramatic context, that is, the context of God's own speech and action" (218) has caught my attention. I'm doubtful about his comments on the similarities between Childs and S. Fish ... but this is all the result of 5 minutes reading. I certainly intend to look at this book in more detail.

What are the Gospels About and How?

In my last post I wrote of the subtlety of Hans Frei's position on the question of narrative referentiality. It's not as if “realistic narratives” do nothing more than create their own aesthetic worlds, with no intention to point beyond themselves to the “real” world outside the text. It is possible for a narrator to refer to reality by means of a story. The question is how we are to understand the nature of this referencing and the nature of the referent. This is an issue that touches the heart of traditional Christian theology, which claims that a historical resurrection in time and space is the corner-stone of its faith.

One cannot talk of the nature of a referent without a concrete text in mind, so let's look at Frei's handling of the gospels. According to Frei, these texts are ultimately “witnesses” to the Word of God. But what is the Word of God? Is it identifiable with the concrete history of Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish carpenter cum rabbi who was crucified in Jerusalem? Frei sees this Word as being more than (but not less than!) the “historical Jesus.” It is God incarnate, the inauguration of the kingdom, transcendence on earth, resurrection, and as such, is a reality that explodes any human categories for understanding it. How is it that any text can adequately communicate the reality of God in Christ, given the limitations of human thought and language? As Frei says,

we ... are able to think, only by way of the language in which we think. Our referencing, especially in cases where empirical objects are not involved, like God ... is language-bound. God is perhaps like us, but we also know that He is very much unlike us. Our referencing then and there is simply not ordinary referencing. (1993: 209)

So if the referent of the Gospels is one which cannot be adequately expressed by any human language, yet it is important, indeed vital, that we understand this referent, what is to be done?

Here we come to two things: the grace of God and “textuality.”

The grace of God is that the stories of the gospels are “sufficient” for our knowledge of their referent. They don't exhaust it, but they are enough for what we need, which is more than a satisfied curiosity (discipleship comes to mind). The “textuality” of the gospels, however, is the means by which that profundity is sufficiently mediated to us. Narrative is that mode of communication in which character and circumstance are intimately connected, so that if they are separated the meaning of the story is lost. The character of Jesus in the gospels is part and parcel of the narrative world of which he is a part and which contributes to the construction of his identity. Jesus, not as historical datum but as incarnate Word, is witnessed to by the narrative shape of the gospels, so that when the text references Him, it references him not just historically (e.g. using ostensive reference) but also textually (e.g. using self-reference).

This is how Frei puts it:

There is often a historical reference and often there is a textual reference; that is, the text is witness to the Word of God, whether it is historical or not. And when I say witness to the Word of God, I'm not at all sure that I can make the distinction between “witness” to the Word of God, and Word of God written. That is to say, the text is sufficient for our reference, both when it refers historically and when it refers to its divine original only by itself, textually. (ibid.)

Referencing in the gospels (and in the Bible as a whole) is no simple thing. But given the nature of the referent this should not be surprising. However we speak of God, he has chosen that we must start from the text:

that is the language pattern, the meaning-and-reference pattern to which we are bound, and which is sufficient for us.

Hans Frei on Textual Referentiality

It's been said that Frei rejects the idea of textual referentiality, that the meaning of a story is the story itself and that questions of any reality outside of the text are irrelevant to interpretation.

In reality his understanding of the issue was far more subtle. In his essay "Conflicts in Interpretation," he points out the necessity of textual referentiality for Christian faith. His chief concern, however, is an over-easy rush to the referent which overlooks the nature of the text doing the referencing, as well as a proper understanding of the relationship between text and referent. Here's what he has to say:

Christians do have to speak of the referent of the text. They have to speak historically and ontologically, but in each case, it must be the notion of truth, or reference, that is re-shaped extravagantly, not the reading of the literal text. Any notion of truth that disallows the condescension of truth to the depiction in the text, to its own self-identification, with, let us say, the four-fold story of Jesus of Nazareth taken as an ordinary story, has itself to be viewed with profound skepticism by a Christian interpreter. The textual world, as witness, is not identical to the Word of God and, yet, by the Spirit's grace, it is "sufficient" for the witnessing. Perhaps I hammer this theme too vigorously. If I do so, the reason is that in much modern theology the primacy of the subject-matter, the referent or the truth, over the text has usually meant that the text is adequate to the task by virtue of pointing to the subject-matter, that is to say, what is hidden within or implied by the text, and not by virtue of the literal sense. My own understanding of the matter, then, is that those who want to preserve Luther's fine, tense balance between Scripture as witness and as literal sense today may well be giving up one side of it. In modernity or, as they like to say in Chicago, "post-modernity," the temporary condition of the balance is to stress the sufficiency of the literal sense, without, of course, the "fundamentalist" correspondence between the literal and its ostensive reference. (1992: 355).

...

I plead, then, for the primacy of the literal sense and its puzzling but firm relationship to a truth towards which we cannot thrust. The modus significandi will never allow us to say what the res significata is. Nonetheless, we can affirm that, in the Christian confession of divine grace, the truth is such that the text is sufficient. There is a fit due to the mystery of grace between truth and text. But that, of course, is a very delicate and very constant operation to find that fit between textuality and truth. (356)

Tomorrow I'll post Frei's thoughts on this in relation to the "historicity" of the gospels.

The Relation Between the "Spiritual" and "Literal" Senses

I argued here that Christian exegesis requires a distinction between the text's literal and spiritual sense. As Childs argues, the question of the existence of a “spiritual” dimension to the text goes back to the New Testament (cf. John 3:14; Matt. 16:4; 1 Cor. 9:9; Romans 3:31ff; etc.[2004: 302]). The issue for the Church has not been the existence of a spiritual sense, but rather the nature of the relationship between the literal and spiritual dimensions.

Childs' own proposal draws on the logic of “faith seeking knowledge.” In other words, the desire to understand the divine reality requires a starting point from within a position of faith: Christians confess “Christ [while] struggling to understand the nature and will of the One who has already been revealed as Lord”(1992: 86). This entails what in general hermeneutics is called the “hermeneutical circle.” Childs also draws on Dilthey's distinction between erklären (explanation) and verstehen (understanding) in order to help him explain the dialectical move from the particular (the literal sense) to the general (the spiritual sense) and back again. In other words, one

“comes to exegesis already with certain theological [i.e. 'spiritual'] assumptions and the task of good exegesis is to penetrate so deeply into the biblical text [i.e. in its literal sense] that even these assumptions are called into question, are tested and revised by the subject matter itself” (1997: 60).

In more theological terms, the basic thrust of Christian exegesis can be described as a move from

“the partial grasp of fragmentary reality found in both testaments to the full reality which the Christian church confesses to have found in Jesus Christ, in the combined witness of the two testaments.”(1992: 85)

Reading in a Revised Frame of Reference

In his brilliant essay "Christ in All the Scriptures?", R.W.L. Moberly asks, "What should a Christian be trying to do with the OT at this moment in history?" He is thinking of our postmodern context, a context which "does not wish to dispense with science or technology as such ... but that is rethinking their significance within the overall scheme of things" (91). Here are his suggestions for reading in a revised frame of reference:

1) Being a good historian should no longer be a prime requirement of biblical study but should should merely be one important ingredient among others needed in the pot to produce nourashing fare. This is not least because the content of Scripture has to do with moral and spiritual realities, which require moral and spiritual literacy if they are to be handled well. As Stephen Fowl and Gregory Jones have put it, in a groundbreaking study, "the interpretation of Scripture is a difficult task not because of the technical demands of biblical scholarship but because of the importance of character for wise readings." [*] The rationality that one needs is informed not just by the technical mastery of intellectual skills but also by the moral and spiritual disciplines of the church.

2) Christ must be not only the light to which we look but also the light by which we see. Israel's texts that speak of divine sovereignty and grace, human sin and repentence, and the calling of israel to covenant faithfulness should be come more luminous, for Jesus embodies (in various ways) that of which the texts speak. Faith in Christ can give believers conceptual and existential resources for truer understanding.

3) Biblical interpretation needs to be seen as revolving around context. This involves recognising that biblical texts have many contexts. There is a difference, for example, between the originating context and the literary context of preservation. When Gen. 1 is read in its historical context, it may well be the product of "priestly" Jews in Babylon responding to the disintegration of their kingdom. When Gen 1 is read as part of a canonical collection that includes the account of personified wisdom, present with God at creation, in Prov 8, a further set of intertextual resonances and possibilities is set up. When Ge 1 is read as part of the Christian Bible, with the retelling of creation in relation to God's Logos/Word, then further resonances are set up. When one adds to this the Pauline account of Jesus as the image of the invisible God, and then the broader context of extended Christian engagement with the meaning of creation and humanity in the light of Scripture as a whole, then the question of context for the opening verses of the Bible is rich indeed.

[*] Reading in Communion: Scripture and Ethics in Christian Life (London: SPCK, 1991), 49.

Luke 24:13-35 and the Dogmatics/Exegesis Relation

A while back I made the point that posing a dogmatics/exegesis dichotomy is not only impossible to implement in reality (i.e. we always assume a theology before we read; see also Ben Myers on this here), it is also theologically undesirable. This is because the object of theological interpretation is not ultimately the text but the reality to which it points: Jesus Christ. The Gospel of Jesus Christ cannot be found in any one text of the Bible, but rather represents the totality of the witness of Scripture, both Old and New Testaments. To turn the Bible itself into the Word of God is biblicism.

A certain Michael has asked me how this relates to the Emmaus road story (Luke 24:13-35). I'm glad for the question as thinking about it has helped confirm for me the truth that theological interpretation is and should always be a dialectic between dogmatics and exegesis, rather than a one-way street in either direction.

"Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures."

Moberly [*] points out that the logic of Jesus' expounding the Scriptures to his puzzled disciples is that these Scriptures provide a context and a content for making sense of Jesus, when all that the disciples know about him already somehow has not "clicked"; Israel's Scriptures help one make sense of Jesus. This represents the move from exegesis to dogmatics. Yet these disciples are Jews who are already thoroughly familiar with these Scriptures, many of which they would know by heart. So, Moberly concludes, "presumably a further part of the logic of Jesus' exposition is that the disciples need to be able to read these Scriptures in a new way, in the light of all that had happened surrounding Jesus, so that they can see in these Scriptures what they had not seen before; Jesus helps one make sense of Israel's Scriptures. Thus a two-way dialectic between Jesus and Israel's Scriptures is envisaged, both being necessary for Christian understanding of the crucified and risen Lord" (80).

The key point here is that it is the risen Jesus himself, an extra-textual reality, who positions us to be able to understand the texts that at the same time point to him. How do we get to know the Jesus who interprets the Bible for us? There are many ways, but central is the community of the church, who has preserved the Gospel for us and communicates it to us in summary forms such as in creeds and theological summa. One can't, on theological grounds, remove dogmatics from the activity of exegesis.

[*] R. W. L. Moberly, "Christ in All the Scriptures? The Challenge of Reading the Old Testament as Christian Scripture" Journal of Theological Interpretation I.I (2007) 79-100.

Liturgy and Exegesis

Halden from Inhabitatio Dei has written an interesting post entitled Reclaiming Christ's Time, in which he looks at the significance of practising the church's liturgical calendar for Christian ethical living, mission, and identity-formation. He claims that

The Christian liturgical year embodies a way of ordering time which is distinctively shaped by the Christian narrative. ... Through a narrative-Christological ordering the celebrations and festivities of its people, the church constructed a powerful mode of ecclesial formation that orients its members toward an explicitly theological and ecclesial understanding of their identity and the practice of everyday life.

This idea of situating ourselves in God's time has implications for how we should read our Bibles. I am once again brought back to that incredible theological exegete Christopher Seitz. In the preface to his book Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture, he makes the following comments:

"The loss of figural reading is not the loss of an exegetical technique. It is the loss of location in time under God. Certain forms of allegorical reading, it has been claimed, are ahistorical and must be cast out of the church's academic (or ecclesial) reading of the Bible. Ironically, however, those readings most interested in historical reference are the same ones that cannot make any accounting of the church's place in time and so resort to homiletical analogies of the most spiritualizing and moralizing sort in order to let the Bible have some sort of say after all the historical heavy lifting is over. And one might well question whether all spiritual reading was as temporally disinterested as modern historically minded folk have thought. At issue is likely a different order of temporality, not a spiritual-versus-historical frame of reference. ...

... My only prayer is that Christ's body will be "figured in" to his glorious body and that the scriptures would illumine him in his threefold mystery and give the church a place in time again."

(2001: viii)

Figural Interpretation and Temporal Succession

Following on from my Barth quote concerning the "unity of the manifold," another beautiful quote on the complex yet powerfully relevant question of figurative reading, biblical referentiality and the theological unity of the Christian scriptures, this time by E. Auerbach. This is an area that fascinates me most at the moment. For those interested in this topic, I highly recommend Hans Frei's brilliant opening chapter from his Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.

"Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first. The two poles of a figure are separated in time, but both, being real events or persons, are within temporality. They are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the comprehension, the intellectus spiritualis, of the interdependence is a spiritual act.

In this conception, an occurrence on earth signifies not only itself but at the same time another, which it predicts or confirms, without prejudice to the power of its concrete reality here and now. The connection between occurrences is not regarded as primarily a chronological or causal development but as a oneness within the divine plan, of which all occurrences are parts and reflections. Their direct earthly connection is of secondary imortance, and often their interpretation can altogether dispense with any knowledge of it."

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), 73, 555. Cited in Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (London: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), 28, 29.

God Hates Fags?

I was genuinely blown away when I accidentally came across the website of Westboro Baptist Church the other day. It really is amazing, it depicts in the most blunt and explicit terms how totally depraved interpretations of God and his Gospel can be extracted from the Bible. It's as if the Bible is a beach of different coloured stones, and it's up to the interpreter to pick them up and rearrange them in what ever fashion he wants. The criteria for arrangement may well say as much about him and his culture as about the Bible itself.

So what is their central message? God hates you! Isn't that amazing? They actually consider it their God-given duty to tour America with placards, picketing military funerals and other symbolic events with the message that everyone (but them) are going to burn for an eternity in the lake of fire, where "their worm shall not die", in the most exquisite agony, in full display of the elect in heaven.

Not only is the message shocking and bemusing, but so is the professionalism of the website. Whoever did this is not an unintelligent red neck whose education consists in stacking shelves at Walmart.

The congregation is led by Fred Phelps, who defends his "profound theological statement" that "God hates fags" in a video clip here. You can watch clips of other members of his congregation (most of whom are relatives of his) defending the various placards they carry here. Here are some of the slogans they carry: "Thank God for 9/11", "God hates fags," "AIDS cures fags," and "Fags die, God laughs (or mocks)", "priests rape boys".

A full documentary of the man has been made here.

A great clip from a church sermon plus interview with Louis Theroux can be found here.

A new generation? Phelp's scary granddaughers are interviewed here.

What does this say about theological exegesis? One thing it does for me is emphasise the importance of 'ecclesial tradition' as a mediator of the gospel. From earliest times, Christian reading of the Bible was understood to be a 'ruled reading', in which a specific theological framework was already presupposed, the regula fidei or 'rule of faith'. This rule of faith, or the 'Gospel', was not understood to be an alien structure imposed onto the Bible, but a faithful summation of the content of the Bible, or perhaps better, the reality to which the Bible witnesses (its 'substance', as Childs puts it). The starting point of all our thinking is not an abstract commitment to a book, but our relationship with the resurrected Son of God. Through his eyes we turn to Scripture as his primary witness, and there starts the dialectical dance as wrestle with God (Israel=Yisra-'el) in hope and faith.

Fred Phelp's primary problem is not his biblical interpretation, it's the God he worships.

Historical Criticism and the Reading of Scripture

In my post The Writing of Scripture I outlined the diachronic dimension the text as consisting of a 'canonical process', a theological process in which the various traditions and texts were shaped to provide a normative criticism for the ongoing life of the people of God. It's now time to look at a concrete example: the Pentateuch.

Writing in 1972*, Childs is more or less in agreement with the main insights of historical criticism regarding the makeup of the Pentateuch. Both Mosaic authorship and the simple historicity of its account are rejected in favour of the view that the Pentateuch reflected a long history of development through an oral and literary stage, parts of which history can be recovered through critical research.

Childs does not reject the conclusions of historical criticism. His distinctive claim, however, is that this historical approach to the literature is a distinct and different enterprise from studying the Pentateuch as the Scriptures of the church. Such a move is to read the text outside the perspective of the tradition, which is the perspective of faith. To replace the study of the canonical shape of the Pentateuch with a reconstruction of the literature's historical development is to confuse the historical with the theological task. Rather, as he says, "the present shape of the Pentateuch offers a particular interpretation - indeed confession - as to how the tradition was to be understood by the community of faith." (1972: 715). Therefore, as far as theology is concerned, it is important to describe the actual characteristics of the canonical shape and secondly to determine the theological significance of this shape.

My next post will look at Childs' description of the canonical shaping of the Pentateuch.

* "The Old Testament as Scripture of the Church" Concordia Theological Monthly 43 D (1972) 709-22

"In Accordance with the Scriptures" #5: The Problem with the Jesus Seminar

Here I finally continue my thread focusing on Seitz's essay, "In Accordance with the Scriptures" (1998). My purpose is to demonstrate that the Old Testament is an indispensable witness to Jesus Christ, and thus forms the matrix within which he is to be comprehended. In order, the previous posts can be found here, here, here and here.

The problem with the "Jesus Seminar" is that is resists the force of the scriptures, as Paul and the creed mean that, on our understanding of Jesus, and consequently, it does not take seriously Jesus' relationship to God as imprinted by scripture's prior word and guided by that word's according potential. In order to understand the one who came to do the Father's will, we should assume that he took significant bearings from the scriptures of Israel, in exactly the public form we can now read them.

Historical investigation into Jesus is in itself not 'wrong'.One has every right to observe the root system of a tree. To do so, however, involves uprooting the tree itself. If, furthermore, one begins to insist that the tree is not as it should be, given the underground investigation, that the mature growth is a misunderstanding in need of correction by experts, or, more enticingly, that the underground tree is the tree itself, is the "historical tree", is that which should occupy our attention, that we have had things upside-down - then, Seitz claims, we are beginning to approach the logic of the Jesus Seminar.

The element of Jesus as requiring unveiling and discovery is not wrong, but has been translated and domesticated by the Jesus seminar and much historical-critical endeavour. It is not that Jesus is hidden behind the words about him, which must then be sifted to get at the "historical Jesus." It is, rather, that the words that tell about him simultaneously convey their inadequacy, in formal terms, because of the subject matter they are trying to reach. The very fourfoldness of the gospel record is a witness to the majestic difficulty of the endeavor of presenting Jesus as a character of time and space, fully man, fully God. But this is not an inadequacy that can be remedied through historical-critical heavy lifting, because it inheres with the subject matter itself, which is God in Christ - who exposes our inadequacy in trying to speak of him, and yet simultaneously remedies this through the work of the Holy Spirit in the church, allowing the frail testimony of human minds to be the lens on the glory of God, a touching of the ark of the covenant.