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.

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).

"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.

"In Accordance with the Scriptures" #4: Jewish Scripture and the Meaning of the Messiah's Resurrection

In my last post in this series, I quoted Seitz as saying that Paul's understanding of the resurrection was part of a "broader skein of convictions". I now hope to demonstrate this.

Within in the larger context of 1 Corinthians 15 we see that Christ's resurrection is precisely not significant because it is a singular event. Others had already been raised from the dead (Lazarus), or were believed to be resurrected (Elijah, John the Baptist). The phrase "in accordance with the Scriptures" stipulates how we are to understand this specific raising.

In vv. 12 - 28 Paul focuses on the fact of Jesus' resurrection - not as a fact unto itself - but as a fact inextricably related to the general resurrection of those united to his death and rising in baptism. This is of supreme relevance to his Corinthian addressees, who believed in his resurrection but felt it was of no relevance to them. Paul turns to the scriptures as the place where the answers can be found about what God is presently doing in Jesus and in those baptized into his death. If, "according to the scriptures" all died in Adam, then the reverse would equally be true and in accord with scripture: that Jesus Christ was the new Adam in whom all would be made alive. Christ's rising was not an isolated harvest, but the firstfruits of a much broader harvest, to which those in him would belong. Furthermore, Jesus' death and resurrection "in accordance with the scriptures" means that those in Christ are presently living between two times: the time of Christ as firstfruits, and the final time, when those who belong to Christ will be united with him at his coming again.

So what happens during this meantime? In order to understand what Jesus' resurrection entails, Paul searches scripture for clues. He discovers a 'meantime scenario': The meantime is a time when God puts all things in subjection to Christ. Then at the end Christ will hand the kingdom over to God the Father. For Paul, "in accordance with the scriptures" means that Christ's death and resurrection have implications whose lineaments can be seen in scripture. This is most clear in the motif of God's subjecting all things to Christ, with the exception of God himself. Here Paul explicitly takes his bearings from scripture (v.27):

But when it says [citing Ps. 8.6] "All things are put in subjection," it is plain that this does not include the one one who put all things in subjection under him"

Then, in v. 28, Paul explains the final significance of Christ's rising:

"When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all.

To say that Christ rose again in "accordance with the scriptures" is at its heart a statement about God's long-range plans, with Christ, on our behalf, as this has been set forth in scripture. To quote Seitz:

"It is not that a straight line moves from the Old Testament to Christ in some mechanical fashion. Rather, we comprehend what God is doing in Christ right now and to eternity by returning to the Old Testament and seeking to find within its manifold testamony accordance with what we are coming to know about God in Christ. Once again we are brought up against the reality that the Old Testament, as Christian scripture, is not just before Jesus, but after him as well. It is both B.C and A.D., because Jesus lives in relationship to the Father, to Israel, and to the world; and the Father has set forth his broader plans for the world in his word to Israel, plans at whose center stands Christ. For an understanding of Christ's present rule and relationship to God, from the moment of God's raising him from the dead to that final point when God is all in all, it was necessary to search a first testament to learn about last things." (Seitz, 1998: 57)

H. Bloom on iTunes

Due to the length of the discussion in response to yesterday's post I only have time for a quick post.

Vox Stefani has posted on the use of iTunes by academic institutions to podcast lectures and even courses. One fascinating lecture is by Harold Bloom at Yale University on the reading of poetry (go here and then look under the Humanites section once you're in iTunes). Bloom is relevant for biblical interpreters because of his 'Oedipus-complex' interpretation of intertetxtuality. The lecture may not teach you much about his theory, but it offers a great three-dimensional view of the man who is otherwise only known through his books.

Here's a short paragraph from Wikipedia:

"Bloom's theory of poetic influence regards the development of Western literature as a process of borrowing and misreading. Writers find their creative inspiration in previous writers and begin by imitating those writers; in order to develop a poetic voice of their own, however, they must make their own work different from that of their precursors. As a result, Bloom argues, authors of real power must inevitably 'misread' their precursors' works in order to make room for fresh imaginings."