Bauckham as canonical interpreter?

Here is a quote from New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham, which nicely parallels my comments concerning Seitz and the Old Testament in my post Tradition-history: a two-way movement.

In one of the few Markan narratives that John also tells, John, like Mark, has Jesus saying, “It is I” (i.e., “I am” [εγώ ειμι]; Mark 6:50; John 6:20). In John this becomes the second of the Gospel's theologically potent series of seven absolute “I am” sayings (4:26; 6:20; 8:24, 28, 58; 13:19; 18:5, 6, 8). For readers/hearers of Mark, this series would not only develop the christological significance of the “I am” sayings they already knew in Mark 6:50 but also inform their understanding of the “I am” saying in Mark 14:62. In ways such as this, it would be possible to argue that John provides readers/hearers who already know Mark with a much fuller and more developed christological and soteriological interpretation of the Gospel story, but one which had clear continuity with the Markan Christology and soteriology they already knew. They would not perceive John's interpretation of Jesus as correcting or invalidating Mark's, but as extending and deepening it. … With the benefit of John's explicit interpretations of the few “signs” of the Jesus which he has carefully chosen for his highly selective Gospel narrative, they could also read with fresh perception the “many other signs” (John 20:30) that Mark records. While the fourth evangelist surely meant to lead his readers further and deeper into the significance of Jesus and his story than Mark's Gospel had done, he need not have intended them henceforth to leave Mark aside and to read only his own Gospel. He did not aim to replace Mark, but to write a different kind of Gospel: one which, by selecting far fewer traditions, left space for the reflective interpretation that is the distinctive characteristic of the Fourth Gospel. [*]

That, quite simply, rocks!

[*] R. Bauckham, “John for Readers of Mark,” in The Gospel for all Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (ed. Richard Bauckham; Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1998), 169-170; cited in Seitz, Prophecy, 180-181

Christian eschatology and historical methodology: the case of John

I have been posting a lot recently on the challenge that the content of Christian faith poses to traditional historiographical methodology, inspired mostly by Paul Minear's magisterial work, The Bible and the Historian (click for SBL review). I have now summarized these posts here. It is time that I padded out the theory with some concrete examples. The following is a series of quotes in which Minear looks at the ontology of John.

“This is an area where responsible historical study of New Testament eschatology is producing the greatest strain on methodology. It has made us aware that an eschatology radically at odds with the pristine Chrsitian faith is implicit in our modern historiography. This is not an issue that affects merely the location of the outermost boundary of the historical process. It affects both the perception of each event in history and the interpretation of that event. This is perhaps most obvious in the realm of conceptions of time. We have noted how a scientific hermeneutical method operates with a clear set of attitudes toward time. Any change in these attitudes will condition the application of the method everywhere. What happens, then, when we discover in the Bible attitudes toward time which not only claim to be true, but which also commend themselves to us with increasing power? The entire hermeneutical system is placed in question.” (54)

“The conception of endless, unilinear, one-way time must be modified if we are to accept the apostolic testimony. ... If the end has actually been inaugurated, then historical time is capable of embracing simultaneously both the old age and the new. No methodology whose presuppositions on time are limited to the old age will be adequate to cope with the historcicity of the new age or with the temporal collision between the two times” (55).

"The New Testament not only confesses the manifestation of eschatological realtiy within history in the form of an event, it also proclaims this event in terms of a person. ... Implicit in this eschatological confession is the demand to adopt a throughly Christocentric exegesis." (55)

"The substance of history itself becomes eschatological, existential, and personal." (56)

“How should we speak of an ultimate reality that conjoins the divine and the human? [John used a literary device, that is] by telling one story in such a way as to embrace many stories. But this is more than a literary device. It is a way of perceiving reality. He saw each story as fully historical, and yet as fully eschatological. ... He perceived each separate place and time in terms of its content, that corporate historical action that “filled it." He discerned behind this action a transhistorical model that linked each story to the others." (61)

"This is a comprehensive rather than a disjunctive mode of seeing and thinking. It apprehends events in terms of their inner structure as responses to God's action. ... Behind this mode of viewing was a distinctive ontological stance, to which we should give more attention that we usually do.” (63)

“I have been seeking to execute an historian's task of describing the pattern of thought charactersitic of the Apocalypse. As a theologian I believe this pattern to be relevant, though not necessarily normative, for current discussion of hermeneutics, ethics, ecclesiology, and ontology. As a ,oe of communication, the Apocalypse is an example of the radical interdependence of these four apsects of biblical thought, an interdependence too often absent from current thinking. I believe that as biblical shcoalrs we have a responsibility for making this interdependence as clear as we can. This sort of investigation of the ontological viewpoint of the Apocalypse should be extended to the other genres of literauture in order to obtain a more complete idea of the ontological perspective that is in some degree paradigmatic for the entire NT.” (68-69)

"Early Christian apocalyptic has been rightly called “the mother of Christian theology” (E. Kasemann). I should also be call the mother of Christian ontology, because it viewed historical decisions and events in the light of an ultimate concern for their ultimate context in the purpose and action of God.” (70)

Inner-referentiality in the New Testament and the Scriptures as "divine vehicle"

In response to my claim that the canon of Scripture is not just a useful source for historical reconstruction but a vehicle of ongoing divine revelation, a commentator has pointed out that such a view is not found within the Bible itself.

Granted this point, how does one respond to it?

The answer is the one does not draw a doctrine of Scripture form propositional statements made within the individual texts themselves, but rather from an overall understanding of the function of these texts within the life of the community of faith that treasures them and that claims to have been formed in response to them. When one pays attention to the functional dimension of the texts, one sees that they were not only treated as a lens for perceiving the divine reality that had broken into their lives, but as an ongoing source for deeper understanding. This can be seen in the intense intertextuality that characterises the entire Bible. At both earlier and later diachronic levels of the text, one sees a constant dialectic at work in which, on the one hand, the divine reality is understood in terms of sacred tradition and yet, on the other hand, that tradition is "critically shaped" in terms of a deeper understanding the God who had thus revealed himself. Traditions are collected, juxtaposed, subordinated, streamlined etc. to form a coherent whole. At a later stage we have the literary shaping of entire blocks (e.g. torah, prophets, writings), in which the parts are constantly related to each other in order to gain a deeper impression of the whole. The theological implication is that God makes himself known in history, yet this revelation is interpreted within a larger theological framework brokered by tradition (later canonical Scripture).

One example of this intertextual activity is David Trobisch's interesting analysis of the nature of the church's search for a holistic and unified grasp of its scriptures in his The Final Redaction of the New Testament: An Investigation of the Formation of the Christian Bible (probably translated as this one). I take my summary from Childs in his article "Jesus Christ the Lord and the Scriptures of the Church" (1998):

Trobisch argues that there is evidence to show that there already was a definitive edition of hte entire New Testament by the end of the second century. One piece of evidence is the presence of a conscious inner-referentiality within the entire New Testament canon, in which the titles of authorship assigned to each of the writings - Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, James, Peter, and Jude - are consciously intertwined, thus forming a unified authoritative whole. For example, Mark is linked in Acts with both Paul and Peter and he also is greeted in the letter of 1 Peter. Luke likewise is referred to in the Gospels, Acts, and the Pauline collection, and is linked with Mark. John is named in the Fourth Gospel, the synoptics, Acts, and Revelation. Similarly, the Genereal Epistles are consciously linked through cross-referencing to James, Peter, and John. Childs concludes:

The effect is that a knowledge of the whole New Testament corpus emerges as an actual literary force in shaping once independent writings into a unified composition.

In addition to this, the conflict between Peter and Paul, referred to in the letter to the Galations, is brought to a conscious harmonious end in Acts 15. Likewise, Paul and James are joined in a shared plan in Acts 21 to unite Jewish and Gentile Christians in a common collection for Jerusalem. In fact, the major function of the book of Acts is to provide an introduction to the Catholic Epistles and the historical background for the Pauline letters. It also is not accidental that in the last letters of both Paul and Peter the public reading of Scripture within the community of faith is highly recommended.

Though at the time of writing Childs was still not sure of the full implications this work, it illustrates a fresh turn in New Testament studies of seeking to understand the nature of the Church's search for a holistic and unified grasp of its Scriptures.

No doubt Childs discusses this in his posthumous How to Read Paul.

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!

Thread Summary: Examples of "canonical exegesis"

To date, my discussion of the canonical approach on this blog has been largely theoretical and abstract (see this thread, for example). As such, I've decided to collect all my examples of concrete exegesis into one place:

1. Paul's phrase "in accordance with the scriptures"
2. Ancient typology in Genesis 22?
3. The canonical shaping of the Pentateuch, i.e. Genesis, Exodus, Leveticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, with the hermeneutical implications thereof.
4. "Immanuel" in a canonical perspective
5. God, Moses, and Scripture
6. Luke 24:13-35 and the dogmatic/exegesis relation
7. Israel and the divided church
8. "Believing" and "unbelieving" exegesis: an example
9. What was the Deuteronomist doing with the law?
10. "Canon" and the "essence" of Old Testament Prophecy
11. How to read Paul
12. Childs on Jesus and Isaiah 53
13. Canonical shaping of the prophets
14. Source criticism and the final form

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).