hermeneutics-july-august-1999

THE TABULA RASA FALLACY | “BUT THAT’S YOUR INTERPRETATION” | PREMODERN EXEGESIS

MODERN REFORMATION

Hermeneutics Has God Really Said? x

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H E R M E N E U T I C S

Has God Really Said?

8 Knowing What You’re Looking For in the Bible Are we forcing our interpretation onto Scripture if we say that all of it is about the place of Christ at the center of God’s redemptive drama? by Michael Horton Plus: Tips for Reading and Preaching the Bible in a Christ-Centered Way

16 Recovering the Riches of Premodern Exegesis Believe it or not, people read the Bible before the Reformation. And wisely, they interpreted it within the community of faith. by Mickey L. Mattox Plus: Premodern/Pre-Critical

21 “But That’s Your Interpretation” Realism, Reading, and Reformation Postmodernism has rightly challenged naive hermeneutical realism. Is anti-realism then the appropriate remedy? by Kevin J. Vanhoozer Plus: The “Death of the Author”

29 The Tabula Rasa Fallacy Why we must become self-conscious about our interpretation. by D. A. Carson

33 A Plea for Greater Dogmatic Engagement with the Old Testament COVER PHOTO BY PHOTONICA

The Old Testament helps prevent the Christian story from leaving the historical world and flying off into the realms of platonic ideas or inward subjectivity. by Paul R. Raabe Plus: A Brief Instruction on What to Look For and Expect in the Gospels

In This Issue page 2 | Letters page 3 | Ex Auditu page 5 | Speaking Of page 7 | Resource Center page 22 Free Space page 37 | Reviews page 41 |On My Mind page 44 J U LY / A U G U S T 1 9 9 9 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 1

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MODERN REFORMATION A publication of Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals Editor-in-Chief

Dr. Michael Horton Executive Vice President

Diana S. Frazier Assistant Editor

Benjamin E. Sasse

by Michael Horton

Hermeneutics

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owtheserpentwasmorecunningthananybeastofthefieldwhichtheLORDGodhadmade.Andhesaidtothewoman,

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tive of the creation and fall of humanity

is the question of interpretation—hermeneutics, if you’re after the technical term. The cunning serpent knew what he was doing when he tried to “interpret” God’s word as tyrannically restrictive: “‘not eat of any tree’?” Eve answers the serpent in an attempt to “interpret” God’s command, replying correctly that God has only singled out one tree whose fruit is forbidden, but then she, too, adds to it: “...God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’” Before there is any explicit act of rebellion, Scripture is already being twisted, preparing the way. Finally, the serpent gets to the point: “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

In other words, Adam and Eve will be autonomous, able to decide for themselves what they should believe, how they should conduct their lives, and to what end their destiny drives them. The only criterion left for this decision was pragmatism: the cash-value of eating over against not eating. “So when the woman saw that Next Issue the tree was good for food, Classical Theology that it was pleasant to the and Contemporary eyes, and was a tree desirObjections able to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate.”

A “God’s-eye” perspective on everything, the ability to make of yourself, others, the world—and perhaps, if there’s room, even a god or two, whatever you wish: that’s the dream of humanity ever since the fall. It was particularly the view of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment and Romanticism. And despite its rejection of this

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“God’s-eye” or “autonomous” perspective of modernity, “postmodernism” in all its varieties seems to persist in the notion that the self (if there is a self) is free to construct its own “reality” and “meaning.” In the more dogmatic forms of reader-response theory, “interpretation” is not an act of discovering meaning, but of creating and constructing it. The reader is no longer accountable to authors or even to texts: they become occasions for the sovereign self to engage in “world-making.”

But if you think that this is just a hobby of radical academics, just sit in on a typical evangelical Bible study and observe the subjective method of interpretation. “What this passage says to me” becomes more important than “what this passage says.” Application is everything, which is to say that the reader, not the author, is sovereign in interpretation. Leading defender of philosophical pragmatism, Richard Rorty, may say it better, but the questions, “Does it work for me?”, “Does it jibe with my experience?”, “Is this going to make me happy?”, are just as truly at work in popular Christian circles as anywhere else these days.

At the same time, the more we think about what we’re doing when we interpret, the more complicated the matter seem to be. In this issue of MR, we want to take a look at the way the Church has historically read the Bible and the way in which many are beginning to read it now. From Scripture itself, we will attempt to derive some guidelines for interpretation. It is biting off more than we can chew, of course, but we have some excellent writers who have established reputations in this field. Above all, we hope that you will see just how practical and relevant this discussion is for the future of biblical reading, preaching, teaching, and practice. ■

Alliance Council

Dr. John H. Armstrong The Rev. Alistair Begg Dr. James M. Boice Dr. W. Robert Godfrey Dr. John D. Hannah Dr. Michael S. Horton Mrs. Rosemary Jensen Dr. J. A. O. Preus Dr. R. C. Sproul Dr. Mark R. Talbot Dr. Gene E. Veith, Jr. Contributing Scholars

Dr. Sinclair B. Ferguson Dr. Allen C. Guelzo Dr. D. G. Hart Dr. Carl F. H. Henry Dr. Arthur A. Just Dr. Robert Kolb The Rev. Donald Matzat Dr. John W. Montgomery Mr. John Muether Dr. Richard A. Muller Mr. Kenneth A. Myers Dr. Tom J. Nettles Dr. Leonard R. Payton Dr. Lawrence R. Rast Dr. Kim Riddlebarger Mr. Rick Ritchie Dr. Rod Rosenbladt Dr. David P. Scaer Ms. Rachel S. Stahle Dr. David F. Wells Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

© 1999 All rights reserved. The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals exists to call the church, amidst our dying culture, to repent of its worldliness, to recover and confess the truth of God’s Word as did the Reformers, and to see that truth embodied in doctrine, worship and life. For more information, call or write us at: Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals 1716 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103 (215) 546-3696 • ModRef@Alliance Net.org www.AllianceNet.org

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The First Use of the Law I applaud Rick Ritchie’s exhortation for Christians to be more imaginative in their speculations of heaven, but how seriously are we to take his suggestion that some reject Christianity because our presentation of the good news just isn’t good enough? He implies that hardened skeptics may “give Christianity a chance” as a result of presenting a more appealing picture of God’s promises, noting that many prefer this life—which, “despite its Can Reformation Churches troubles, at least offers variety”—over a heaven featuring Transcend Ethnicity? “a never-ending church service, or a bunch of angels with harps, or something equally dull.”

I am working my way through an issue of Modern This especially puzzles me since MR has consistently Reformation, and I am fully aware that I have been missing taught that the Law must precede the Gospel—that the a wonderful publication. I write, however, to raise a quesbad news prepares one to receive the good news. tion. Dr. Horton has written that Lutheran and Granted, preaching the Law without the Gospel will Reformed congregations, by refusing to become politionly promote despair. But can we seriously believe that cized, are able to become counter-cultural models for they, who reject the Gospel because it “sounds boring,” genuine racial reconciliation. I want to know where I have really encountered the Law to begin with? The might locate one of these congregations!

Gospel, even in its most dry and unimaginative presenOf the three hundred or more active (or mostly semitation, extends forgiveness of sins, acceptance by God, active) members in my home parish, I represent oneand deliverance from eternal r. Horton has written that Lutheran and Reformed congregations, by refusing to damnation. Those who have grappled with God’s holiness and their sin to any extent will become politicized, are able to become counter-cultural models for genuine racial not ask to bargain.

The article also notes that reconciliation. I want to know where I might locate one of these congregations! those who are disenchanted with the unfulfilled promises of a decadent lifestyle may fourth of our black enrollment. Fifty percent of our black reject a gospel that merely promises dull security and membership lives at my address. And my Lutheran consafety. I would agree that it’s not the true Gospel they gregation in Joliet, Illinois, is typical of most Lutheran reject. But it is also not the true Law they have encounbodies I know in the Midwest. Lots gets said from the pulpit about Swedish and Norwegian backgrounds; little tered. Disappointment and grief over a wrecked life may is done to invite our immediate neighbors, blacks and be part of the curse of the Law; however, it does not folLatinos, to join us in worship; and the majority of our low that the Law has done its work to prepare the person membership has not been in recently to receive Word or to receive the Gospel. With Paul, we should be careful to Sacrament. distinguish godly sorrow from worldly sorrow (2 Cor. I am starving for reform, and I often listen to your col7:10). Only the former leads to God-centered repenleague, James Montgomery Boice, via radio to suppletance and salvation, while the latter produces self-cenment my spiritual diet. May God bless your work. tered regret.

John B. Carter Yes, we should proclaim heaven in all its lavish Joliet, Illinois glory—not so much, however, to “soften the hearts” of

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“Christianity’s most hostile critics” but, instead, to stimulate gratitude among the people of God, whose hearts have already been shattered by the hammer of the Law. As prodigals, each of us should first acknowledge to God, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.” Sure enough, our Lord will clothe us with the best robe and feed us with the fattened calf, but such blessings that exceed expectation follow rather than cause the initial repentance. Let us be

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Design Issues

I have been a reader of Modern Reformation for approximately two years. From the first issue that I had the pleasure of reading, I have been searching for a footnote or notation explaining your use of the uppercase “I” instead of the usual convention, the numeral “1.” I assume that this missing notation appeared in Volume I, Number I, but unfortunately I do not have access to the first volume.

No doubt I am overlooking a reasonable explanation: perhaps in the font set you have selected “I” always replaces “1”; or perhaps there is a subtle theological reason which s prodigals, each of us should first acknowledge to God, “Father, I have sinned escapes my unsophisticated mind; or perhaps in some way it against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; signifies a Roman Numeral, in which case I guess it will soon make me like one of your hired men.” read: “Volume 9, Number I January/February II000”! careful, lest we trivialize God’s holiness with a shallow Whatever the explanation, I would appreciate being view of the office of the Law and resort to marketing the let in on the secret. With each subsequent issue I keep Gospel in the ravenous spirit of consumerism. saying to myself: “You’ll get use to reading page numbers Nam Yu as I0, II, I2 and dates as I999 or Scriptural references as Boston, MA Eph. I:2I”—but they continue to catch me off guard.

The Opportunities of “Free Space” Nonetheless, a great magazine—and this small matter shall not preclude the continuation of my subscription.

It seems that your new “Free Space” column would be Wayne D. Lance the perfect place to let someone like N. T. Wright Springville, CA (whose positions were described and critiqued in the March/April issue) air his views unfiltered. Though his EDITORS’ RESPONSE work may appear to be putting the doctrine of “Justification by Faith” in a secondary role, I think he is Mr. Lance, you are not alone! We are continually surdealing honestly with the evidence before him and seekprised at the percentage of our letters that relate to ing to interpret the Bible faithfully. Perhaps in this way design issues in general (both pro and con), and to the we can be “semper reformanda.” type of our “1.” (No big theological secret here: the font B. C. package we have been using came with a gothic “1.”)

Via Internet Nonetheless, as you will notice (we hope!), our magazine has been “under construction” in 1999. On the content side, we have added a number of departments to allow more “points of entry” into the magazine. On the design side, improvements are much more expensive, but we are trying a number of things: a redesign of the cover, Modern Reformation a bit more color, even some alternative type.

If you like what you see and read, we hope that you Letters to the Editor will pass the word about MR on to your friends. And, as this project is ongoing, we surely welcome your feedback.

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Romans 8:13-14

The Secret of Christian Living

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orifyouliveaccordingtothesinfulnature,youwilldie;butifbytheSpirityouputtodeaththemisdeedsofthebody,youwilllive,because

faith—and Sanctification—the holy life—are gifts of God, thosewhoareledbytheSpiritofGodaresonsofGod.”(Rom.8:13-14).¶Thereissomebadnewsinourtext.Butthat’sagoodthing, earned by our Lord Jesus Christ, dispensed to us in the means of grace. because No one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit, we cannot believe the good news of the Gospel unless we read in Holy Scripture. And we also believe the bad news of the Law. True to form, From so it is. Born again of water and God gives us the bad news straight: if you live according HAROLD the Spirit, we have been brought to the sinful nature, you will die. We need to hear this L. SENKBEIL out of death into life, out of message again and again, and to take it to heart. darkness into light. If we confess For you and I like to play fast and loose with the with our lips “Jesus is Lord” and Law of God. We like to think that since God is love, he believe in our hearts that God isn’t really very much concerned about sin. We like to Pastor, raised him from the dead, we think we can have our cake and eat it too; that we can Lutheran Church will be saved (Rom. 10:9). be good Christians and yet indulge our sinful passions Missouri Synod This is most certainly true. now and then.

That much we know, and believe, There is a warning in our text that comes straight from and confess. But there is another the heart of God for the likes of us. The cravings of the reality which flows from this, organically connected with lust of the heart, you see, cannot be stopped. Our sinful the eternal life we have with Jesus Christ in the power of nature will not stop until it has its way with us, until our his Spirit. And this is the reality of the holy life. own pride and our own pleasure and our own power hold For the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead absolute sway and God is toppled from his throne. Our dwells in us by faith. And though we live in mortal bodsinful nature will not stop until our life in Christ is crushed ies, though these bodies will one day die and decay, they to smithereens. But when we have no life in Christ, you see, we have no life. When we have only ourselves in this even now are inhabited by the life-giving Spirit of God. world, we have only hell to look forward to. This soberThese bodies of ours are the temple of the Holy Spirit, ing warning of God hits us straight between the eyes, and made holy by the presence of God. Even now they are we will do well to sit and take notice: If you live accordholy—not just in the resurrection, when they shall be ing to the sinful nature, you will die. conformed to the likeness of Christ’s own glorified body.

But besides this warning, there is also a promise: but if Do you see it? The life we have by faith in Christ, the by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, life that never ends, is the same life in which we live by you will live. And so the holy apostle today instructs us in faith in Christ. Holy people lead holy lives. It’s as simple the holy life. By inspiration of the Spirit of God he gives as that. Right? us the secret of Christian living. And we’re all ears. “I Well, actually not. For this side of heaven we are burknow how to be saved,” we say, “tell me how to live.” As dened with the sinful flesh—not this skin and bones, but if salvation were God’s doing, and holy living were our the sin that lies inside of us—which does not believe doing. The actual fact is, holy living is as much God’s God’s Holy Word, which will not allow us to do the doing as salvation is God’s doing. Justification and sanctigood we want to do but instead drives us to do the evil fication are both gifts of God. Both Justification—the forwe do not want to do. giveness of sins and the righteousness that comes by This is the problem in Christian living: What is to be

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warning: If you live according to the flesh you will die.

There is no taming the sinful nature. It will have its way with you sooner or later, and the sinful nature leads to death. But you need not die. Turn from your sins, and live!

But others of you are broken and contrite. You know your sin, and you know your Savior. Take this word of promise to heart: if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live. In contrition and repentance there is life in the forgiveness of our sins. It is the forgiveness earned by Jesus Christ on his cross, announced this day in your hearing, eaten this day at his holy altar in his body broken and his blood shed for you.

There is hope and life today for every penitent soul and every broken heart. Take heart, my son, my daughter, our he Church is not a gymnasium, you see.

Lord Jesus says to you this day: Your sins are forgiven you. This It is a hospital for the walking wounded, for sick and dying souls. is the very Word of God. And then, believing God’s Here God the Holy Spirit goes to work.

Holy Word, we also lead holy lives according to it. In the Name of the Father and of because it sounds so good. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, the Son and of the Holy Spirit. ■ after all, if we could redirect our spiritual energies in godly paths? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could gain the upper hand over our sinful nature and keep it under Rev. Senkbeil has been a pastor in the Lutheran Church—Missouri control? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could tame our Synod for 27 years. This sermon was preached at Elm Grove sinful nature and train it to be more holy?

(Wisconsin) Evangelical Lutheran Church. A collection of meditaBut there is no training the sinful nature, and there tions based on his sermons, edited by Dr. Beverly Yahnke, has recentwill be no taming it. Like a wild lion, it may be kept at ly been published (Where in the World is God? [Milwaukee: bay for a little while with a whip, but you will not turn Northwestern, 1999]). that lion into a lamb. The sinful nature cannot be tamed; it has to be killed! The sinful nature cannot be trained; it must be put to death—by daily contrition and repentance.

The Church is not a gymnasium, you see. It is a hospital for the walking wounded, for sick and dying souls.

Here God the Holy Spirit goes to work, forgiving sins to all believers by his Holy Word, pouring on the oil and wine of the balm of Christ’s Holy Sacraments, bringing gain, the issue is not simply the the health and healing earned by Jesus Christ on his cross and conveyed to you and me here in his holy historical character of redempChurch. He not only calls and gathers us around his Word and Sacrament, but he sanctifies us by that Word tion or the prominence of narand Sacrament. That is, he makes us holy.

He goes to work on us, cutting out the poison of sin rative material in Scripture. Something and death, killing the sin in us, drowning the old Adam so that the new man might daily emerge and arise to live much more basic is in view: the history of before God in righteousness and purity forever. All those who are led by the Sprit of God are the sons of God. redemption as the subject matter and focus This is exactly what Jesus was talking about when he said: “If you seek to save your life, you’ll lose it; but if you of the entire biblical record.” lose your life for my sake, you’ll keep it.” He invites us into genuine repentance. And in that repentance there is —Richard Gaffin, Jr., Introduction to Redemptive life in Jesus Christ in his forgiveness; therefore there is holy living as well.

History and Biblical Interpretation: The Shorter Some of you are calloused and hardened against sin; you could care less about the holy life. For you, heed this Writings of Geerhardus Vos, xx done with the sinful nature?

We’re tempted to coddle it, hoping that if we’re nice to our sinful nature, then maybe it will change its ways after a while. We hope that we can teach an old dog to do new tricks; we hope we can train our sinful nature to do right things. We look for the right formula, a new handle on Christian living, something that will help us get a grip on our lives and change them, something that will redirect our lives in the paths of God. And so churches are being remodeled into spiritual gymnasiums, where people go to work out spiritually and strengthen their spiritual muscles and gain control over the sinful nature. And you can understand why,

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SPEAKING OF

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Speaking of...

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ou diligently study

the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life.

These are the Scriptures that testify about me....

John 5:39

he entire Biblical Scripture is solely concerned that man understand that God is kind and gracious to him and that He has publicly exhibited and demonstrated this His kindness to the whole human race through Christ His Son. However, it comes to us and is received by faith alone, and is manifested and demonstrated by love for our neighbor.

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First Helvetic Confession of Faith, Article V (The Purpose of Holy Scripture)

onsequently in all evangelical teaching the most sublime and the principal article and the one which should be expressly set forth in every sermon and impressed upon the hearts of men should be that we are preserved and saved solely by the one mercy of God and by the merit of Christ. However, in order that men may understand how necessary Christ is for their salvation and blessedness, the magnitude and gravity of sin should be most clearly and plainly pointed out, depicted and held up before them by means of the law and Christ’s death.

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First Helvetic Confession of Faith, Article XII (The Purpose of Evangelical Doctrine)

pparently [the historic church] felt that to speak in confessional terms about the events that had happened to it in its history was not a burdensome necessity but rather an advantage and that the acceptance of an historical point of view was not confining but liberating. The preaching of the early Christian church was not an argument for the existence of God nor an admonition to follow the dictates of some common human conscience, unhistorical and super-social in character. It was primarily a simple recital of the great events connected with the historical appearance of Jesus Christ and a confession of what had happened to the community of disciples…. The confession referred to history and was consciously made in history… Even [the prophets’] visions were dated, as “in the year that King Uzziah died,” even the moral law was anchored to an historical event, and even God was defined less by his metaphysical and moral character than by his historical relations, as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

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H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation

n a word, if the Scripture be obscure or ambiguous, what need was there for its being sent down from heaven? Are we not obscure and ambiguous enough in ourselves, without an increase of it by obscurity, ambiguity, and darkness being sent down unto us from heaven? But I fear I must already be burdensome, even to the insensible, by dwelling so long and spending so much strength upon a point so fully clear; but it was necessary that that impudent and blasphemous saying, “the Scriptures are obscure,” should thus be drowned.

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Martin Luther, Bondage of the Will

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x H E R M E N E U T I C S | Has God Really Said?

Knowing Bible What You’re Looking For in the

e all know what it’s like when we’re leaving our driveway and have to return to the house for something we forgot. And then, for some of us, we forget what we were looking for in the first place. We waste time and energy looking for something when we have forgotten even what that something is.

The same is true when we come to the Bible. I would not be surprised if one reason for the popularity of practical “how to” guides to personal Bible reading is that the Scriptures, though revered, are generally regarded as incomprehensible. In the past, we talked about the Bible’s “perspicuity”—that is, its clarity or straightforwardness. But many today, if they express

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their true feelings about it, think of the Bible as the Encyclopedia Britannica: if you know what you’re looking for, fine, but it cannot be read like any other book, having its own plot which is presented and developed by an ordinary reading of the text.

In that sense, the popular guides to Bible reading, not to mention the myriad “study bibles” (a proliferation we should understand as motivated largely by financial considerations), actually undermine the study of Scripture, in most cases. The writers often assume that the Bible does not have its own clear and distinct message, so they find hidden messages between the lines. Ironic, isn’t it: many of those who charge confes-

“The Scriptures Testify of Me”

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f anyone is qualified to answer that question it is surely Jesus Christ, the Living Word himself. And, in fact, he does. To the religious leaders who highly revered but failed to truly understand this book, Jesus declared, “You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life” (John 5:40). I am reminded of the type of preaching I often heard growing up in which the answer for nearly everything was: read the Bible more.

The last thing I wanted to read was the Bible, since it had become a talisman. It is ironic that as much as these brothers and sisters recoil at any suggestion of an ex opere operato (literally, “by doing it, it is done”) view of the Sacraments, there The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to a greater end: to lead us to the seems to be a similar view of devotions and Bible reading— living person of Jesus Christ and to unite us to him by the Spirit. the “quiet time.” Just do it, and everything will be better.

But this vague approach to the Scriptures fails to recognize that Scripture itself tells sional folks with imposing their systems on Scripture us loudly and clearly what we should come to it to find end up only imposing a shallow substitute, a “system” each time. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means that does not arise naturally from the text itself, but to a greater end: to lead us to the living person of Jesus emerges from the life-experience of a single individual Christ and to unite us to him by the Spirit. It is possible and his or her friends? to be a “Bible-believer,” but not a Christian—that is, not As the late Yale theologian Hans Frei explained, the someone who reads this as a book about the person and blame for interrupting this reading of the biblical text as work of Christ. But, some will say, not all of Scripture can a single story is not the fault only of the higher critics but be about Christ. After all, the Book of Revelation, for of conservatives also, as both tried to get above or instance, is about the end times, right? Yes—and yet, behind the narrative in order to discover what really hapRevelation is a rich tapestry bringing together the pened or what really mattered. In other words, the readthreads of redemptive history around Christ: nothing er decided what he or she was looking for—and then could be more obvious from the text itself. Furthermore, found it. But what was found was no longer the story of Jesus was criticizing the religious leaders for not underGod’s saving work in Christ. So Frei, his colleagues and standing that the Scriptures were all about him when the students in the trend of so-called “narrative theology” only Scriptures to which he had reference consisted of have called for a return to a pre-critical way of reading the Old Testament. If Christ is the center of the Old Scripture. This doesn’t mean that they have rejected the Testament, then is he any less central in the New? If last two centuries of biblical criticism. Rather, they argue that the modern way of reading Scripture has missed the there is any doubt, we are reminded of our Lord’s appearwhole point. ance to his disciples on the road to Emmaus. Not underWhile we would have significant concerns about the standing the meaning of Jesus’ death, these disciples were way some narrative theologians read this text, given their utterly despondent. Jesus told them, “‘O foolish ones, generally Barthian view of Scripture, there is some indiand slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have cation that the insistence on: (a) the Bible as a narrative spoken! Ought not the Christ to have suffered these of saving events, (b) its Christ-centered focus, and c) the things and to enter into his glory?’ And beginning at unity of the canon as a presupposition of the promiseMoses and all the Prophets, he expounded to them in all fulfillment pattern of the testaments, at least points us in the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke the right direction. As Hans Frei, Brevard Childs, and 24:25-7). No wonder their hearts burned within them as other representatives of this school insist, we need to get he opened up the Scriptures. It could happen on a broad past the Enlightenment hangover and begin to read the scale today, too, if the Scriptures would only be Bible the way Luther and Calvin did again. So how did approached this way in preaching.

Luther and Calvin read the Bible? More importantly, Through the Scriptures, Peter says (again referring to how was the Bible meant to be read? What are we lookthe Old Testament), the Spirit revealed “…the sufferings ing for when we open the Bible or hear a sermon? of Christ and the glories that would follow” (1 Pet. 1:11).

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Tips for Reading and Preaching the Bible in a Christ-Centered Way

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In the reading of Scripture, whether privately or in public worship, consider including both an Old Testament and a New Testament reading, the former selection related to the latter as promise to its fulfillment. We begin to think in terms of this pattern by hearing the connections.

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Ask yourself: What’s the stage of redemptive history at which we find ourselves in this passage? If this question were asked each time, it could clear up the tendency to convert a significant event in redemptive history into an unhistorical pattern for us today (viz., the theocracy in Israel, temple worship, tongues in Acts, etc.).

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How do I find myself in Christ (and therefore with his church) in this story? Make your life conform to this story, not vice versa. And be willing to allow it to critique its rivals, such as the narrative of self-fulfillment, consumerism, etc.

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Read with the Church. Creeds, confessions, a good systematic theology, can all help you to see the limitations of your own narrow range of ideas, presuppositions, experiences, and longings. Instead of trying to start from scratch, join the conversation that has been in progress since Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

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Read/hear prayerfully. The Holy Spirit, who inspired the Scriptures, illumines believers so that they may understand their significance. Interpretation is never simply an intellectual exercise, but involves the imagination, the heart, and the will. In every act of interpretation, we are entirely dependent on the Spirit who reveals Christ to us, as our Savior said: “…he will testify concerning me” (John 15:26). ■

The sermons in the Book of Acts all reflect this way of preaching the Scriptures: Christ is proclaimed from the Old Testament. The first Christian sermons, therefore, do not proclaim Moses as a great Christian leader, nor is the purpose to set forth the example of Joshua’s courage or David’s “heart for the Lord,” nor is Gideon’s fleece a parable of seeking the Lord’s will for our lives. Rather, Scripture is all about Christ, from beginning to end: his sufferings, and the glories that would follow.

Too often in conservative hermeneutics, there is a biblicism which is unbiblical: the naïve (not to mention tautological) assumption that we’re simply looking for what is there. Each time we go to the text, we are starting from scratch, as if we had no blinders, no presuppositions. This is not only impossible, it blinds us to our presuppositions so that we cannot critique them. To say that all of Scripture is about Christ and that, therefore, whatever does not proclaim Christ is not sufficiently biblical, is not to impose expectations on the text. Rather, it is to come to have certain expectations of the text because it is the text itself which tells us to expect it! One conservative evangelical pastor told me, “I just preach the Word. If I’m in Galatians, I sound like an antinomian; if I’m in the Sermon on the Mount, I sound like a legalist.”

The assumption here, of course, is that one is just sticking close to the text, preferring exegesis (reading out the meaning) rather than eisegesis (reading the meaning into the text). But in reality, one may be simply engaging in the higher critics’ tendency to view the Bible as a patchwork quilt of disparate pieces rather than as a single bolt of fabric. It is ironic when Brevard Childs, at Yale Divinity School, argues for reading the Bible as a single book while my conservative evangelical friend insists on reading it as a collection of fragments.

But if we know what we’re looking for (the “big picture”), because the Bible itself clearly sets forth that goal, we sound like neither an antinomian nor a legalist. God speaks with consistency. Therefore, there is a “system” which arises naturally from the Bible itself, a coherent discourse concerning God’s redemptive drama. Reading the parts (individual passages) in the light of that whole (redemptive-historical interpretation) becomes a fruitful process. As Jesus himself reminded the religious leaders, it is possible to read the Bible and yet not read the Bible.

In other words, it is possible to read the words of Scripture without “getting it,” without recognizing that Christ and his saving office is the point of it all.

Another temptation in reading/hearing the Scriptures is our impatience. For something to be useful reading, we unwittingly think that it has to either entertain or inform us. Thus, Scripture somehow has to fit into one or both of those categories. A practical lot, Americans don’t like “wasting” their time on subjects whose usefulness cannot be easily and quickly measured. The problem is, Scripture is divided into “Law” and “Gospel,” as our Reformed as well as Lutheran forebears insisted. These

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are categories, not sections, of the Bible. So, for instance, often even the same verse is, in one sense, Law, and in another, Gospel. “I will be your God” may be “Law” to me when I realize God’s righteousness and how prone I am to doing things my way, while it may be “Gospel” to me when I recognize that in the covenant of grace God not only promises eternal life to sinners, but grants repentance, faith, justification, sanctification, perseverance, and glorification. Consequently, nothing—not even my unfaithfulness—will keep God from being my God. But what happens when we demand that our reading or hearing of Scripture must be either entertaining or practical?

Necessarily, it subverts this Law-Gospel distinction.

Good news becomes entertainment and the Law is reduced to practical tips. As a result, the bad news isn’t really that bad, and the good news isn’t really that good.

The bad news is that we are not as faithful as we should be in our discipleship; the good news is that God has provided us with clear instructions as to how we can love him from the heart. From the heart, mind you! After all, the good news is that while the Old Testament required obedience to a lot of rules, the New Testament requires heart-religion: that we love God and our neighbor. That is what we hear often these days, but it is not good news.

Jesus summarized the entire Law in terms of loving God and neighbor. All along, the Law had been a matter of the heart and not just of the hands, as the judgments against Israel in the prophets indicates.

Even if such a contrast were legitimate, it is not good news that God used to require adherence to external commands and now enjoins an internal love of God and neighbor. Rather, this is the most rigorous center of the Law itself: it demands far more, not less. So when people preach (or read) the Bible as a handbook of helpful tips or as a practical guide for happier living, they are not really encountering the Bible at all, despite their appeal to it. If one comes to the Bible always looking for the

Christ and redemptive history. These latter classifications are hermeneutical (i.e., interpretive) clues, guardrails, and categories, but not the content itself. Each passage has its own life within a larger context of its own place in both Scripture and redemptive history. If every sermon sounds the same, then these categories have become the content rather than the method, rendering every sermon “topical” instead of being genuinely exegetical and redemptive-historical. To say that all of Scripture points to Christ is not to suggest that we can trample on the immediate context and content of a passage. It is more like a light illumining all of Scripture than a vacuum inhaling all of it. The revelation of Christ in the history of redemption is the reference point for interpretation, but should in no way mute the specifics of a given passage. If we fail to recognize that each passage has its own place and must be given its due, we risk turning “preaching Christ,” “Law-and-Gospel,” or “redemptive-historical interpretation” into new ways of doing merely topical preaching. In other words, it is possible to understand “redemptive-historical” preaching in a way that undermines all sense of real history and a genuine sense of an unfolding plot.

A related temptation is the tendency to regard the Bible as a handbook of timeless principles: Genesis as handbook of science; Leviticus as handbook of worship; Deuteronomy as handbook of government; Proverbs as handbook of helpful tips for life; Daniel and Revelation as handbooks of end-times predictions; the Sermon on the Mount as the handbook of discipleship; Romans as handbook of doctrine. Some people, therefore, read the whole Bible as if it were the Book of Proverbs and others as if it were the Book of Romans: timeless eternal principles of living or of doctrine. But Scripture is full of many different genres, chief among them narrative. Thus, they are to be read as a divinely inspired and authorized account of redemption, from Genesis to Revelation.

Let’s use an example from a widespread interpretive mistake: “If my people who are called by Scripture points to Christ is not to suggest that we can trample on the immediate my name will humble themselves, and pray and seek my context and content of a passage. It is more like a light illumining all of Scripture face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heavthan a vacuum inhaling all of it. en, and will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chr. 7:14).

This verse is often used as a proof-text for America’s “practical,” that usually means that one will come looking for watered-down “Law.” Remember, this is already our restoration as God’s favorite country. But this ignores tendency, as Calvin’s successor, Theodore Beza, reminds both the immediate and the wider context. As to the us: “The Law is natural to man…. But the gospel is a immediate context, this oft-quoted slogan does not even supernatural doctrine which our nature would never have begin at the beginning. The first part of the severed verse been able to imagine nor able to approve without a spereads, “When I shut up heaven and there is no rain, or cial grace of God.”1 command the locusts to devour the land, or send pestilence among my people, if my people who are called by my This doesn’t mean, however, that one should preach name….” This verse’s historical context is discarded so (or read) every passage as a direct republication of “Law” that it may more easily serve as a universal and timeless and “Gospel,” “Guilt, Grace, and Gratitude,” or even of

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moral principle, to be applied at will. In terms of the wider context, it ignores the covenantal structure of biblical revelation. In the Old Testament, there are two covenants running concurrently throughout the story: the Abrahamic and the Mosaic. The former represents the covenant of grace, while the latter is strictly conditional on Israel’s obedience in the land. To misapply the threats or blessings which God directs to the theocratic kingdom of Israel is to confuse the covenant of grace with the covenant of works. This passage must be understood in the light of its covenantal framework and its place in redemptive history.

While doctrinal and ethical truths are clearly gleaned from this Word, they are subordinate to the central plot and the principal character of this drama. As theologian Richard Gaffin observes, Revelation never stands by itself, but is always concerned either explicitly or implicitly with redemptive accomplishment. God’s speech is invariably related to his actions. It is not going too far to say that redemption is the raison d’etre of revelation. An unbiblical, quasi-gnostic notion of revelation inevitably results when it is considered by itself or as providing self-evident general truths.

Consequently, revelation is either authentication or interpretation of God’s redemptive action.2

Recovering the Narrative As noted earlier, it is not only confessional folks who are currently talking about the Bible’s plot and the drama of God’s salvific action. In reaction to the “scorched earth” policy of the higher critics toward the New Testament documents (characterized by an obsession with getting above, behind, or underneath the biblical narrative), some academic theologians have decided that it is time again to take the Bible’s story seriously. These “postliberals” or “narrative theologians” trace their lineage back to Hans Frei’s insightful The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974).

While we must not forget the problems associated with this movement (especially the Barthian reluctance to address the relationship between the narrative and factual history or other truth-claims), it has helpfully drawn attention once again to the Bible’s narrative character. Applying literary theory, of course, is nothing new.

In fact, Frei saw himself and recent biblical theologians as reiterating the approach to interpretation embodied in the history of the church’s most ordinary Bible reading and preaching.

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ong before a minor modern school of thought made the biblical “history of salvation” a special spiritual and historical sequence for historiographical and theological inquiry, Christian preachers and theological commentators, Augustine the

most notable among them, had envisioned the real world as formed by the sequence told by the biblical stories.3 The most dominant form of interpretation, says Frei, was the “literal and historical reading”; or, if you will, the sensus literalis (literal sense), which is not to be confused with literalism. “It actually received new impetus in the era of the Renaissance and the Reformation when it became the regnant mode of biblical reading.”4 Reading the Bible for something other than the story—a strategy employed by liberals and conservatives alike—has led to a colossal distraction and a lengthy hiatus from the most common practice throughout church history. After the Enlightenment, it is demanded, “But to what does this narrative refer?” Both liberals and conservatives tended to see the Scriptures as a source for “what really happened” (i.e., outside of the biblical narrative itself). As a result, the meaning and significance shifted from the dramatic plot of redemption itself to the evidence for or against certain claims, requiring this particular narrative to serve in its own way the metanarrative of universal reason, experience, and morality. At the end of it all, the biblical story was little more than an illustration of universal truths which were already true and knowable apart from revelation.

In some ways, Frei’s project was anticipated three decades earlier by his Yale colleague, H. Richard Niebuhr, in the latter’s The Meaning of Revelation (1941). Especially in the chapter titled, “The Story of Our Life,” Niebuhr defends a contrast between “outer history” (history as told by an “objective” bystander) and an “inner history” (history as told by a participant in that history). Note the following example he uses:

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incoln’s Gettysburg Address begins with history: “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The same event is described in the Cambridge Modern History in the following fashion: “On July 4, 1776, Congress passed the resolution which made the colonies independent communities, issuing at the same time the well-known Declaration of Independence. If we regard the Declaration as the assertion of an abstract political theory, criticism and condemnation are easy. It sets out with a general proposition so vague as to be practically useless.

The doctrine of the equality of men, unless it be qualified and conditioned by reference to special circumstance, is either a barren truism or a delusion.”5 It hardly seems that Lincoln and the Cambridge Modern History could have been describing the same founding event in our national memory, the former speaking from within that history while the latter is detached and distant. “Hence we may call internal history dramatic and its truth dramatic truth, though drama in this case does not mean fiction.” Furthermore,

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he inspiration of Christianity has been derived from history, it is true, but not from history as seen by a spectator; the constant reference is to subjective events, that is to events in the lives of subjects. What distinguishes such historic recall from the private histories of mystics is that it refers to communal events, remembered by a community and in a community. Subjectivity here is not equivalent to isolation, non-verifiability, and ineffability; our history can be communicated and persons can refresh as well as criticize each other’s memories of what has happened to them in the common life; on the basis of a common past they can think together about the common future.6

to come he may show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:6-7).

So in Baptism, the Story of Jesus incorporates My Story. The eyewitness accounts of the apostles focus on the Story of Jesus: how he fulfilled the role of Messiah in Israel’s history by conquering sin, hell, and death. Almost entirely absent from the Gospel narratives is a description of what happened to the disciples: so focused are they on being witnesses to the Story of Jesus. And yet, all along in the accounts their lives’ plots are rewritten, their characters recast, their roles transformed: Matthew the greedy tax-collector is no longer to exist, but is to be made one of the Twelve, each of whom is to the New Testament what the twelve tribes of Israel are to the Old. Although Jesus Christ’s living, Ever present in an Evangelicalism dominated by pietism is the tendency to dying, and rising are vicarious acts of redemption, my identity, concentrate on the act of faith rather than on the object of faith; our experience from character to plot, is inserted into the identity, from charwith Jesus Christ rather than the person and work of Jesus Christ himself. acter to plot, of this other person and his story. No longer a spectator to this remarkable story, suddenly I—gentile, outTo be sure, there are dangers here of reverting to the sider, “nowhere man living in his nowhere land, making classic liberal tendency to see claims such as the all his nowhere plans for nobody”—get written into the Resurrection as statements concerning what happened to elevated story of chosen Israel, of which Jesus Christ is the disciples rather than to Jesus: in other words, the the crucial character. The outcast gets “re-scripted” as a “Easter faith” of the apostolic community rather than any privileged one. “In Christ,” and with his whole body, I am truth claim about the empty tomb. Ever present in an elect and precious, redeemed, justified, sanctified, bodiEvangelicalism dominated by pietism is the tendency to ly raised on the last day and glorified forever. Many concentrate on the act of faith rather than on the object metaphors hint at this amazing reality: grafting wild of faith; our experience with Jesus Christ rather than the branches onto the fruitful vine, living stones being built person and work of Jesus Christ himself; the testimony of into the heavenly sanctuary of Christ’s body, those “who what happened to us rather than the apostles’ testimony once were not a people but are now the people of God, of what happened to Christ. “My Story” begins to take who had not obtained mercy but now have obtained precedence over “His Story.” mercy” (1 Pet. 2:10). I’m not making this up: Nevertheless, that which links us here and now to the founding events then and there, and ties us to everything in between, is the fact that My Story has now become hat shall we say then? Shall we continpart of His Story. I have been written into the script, ue in sin that grace may abound? joining the cast of players, running the race to the cheerCertainly not! How shall we who died ing throngs of glorified saints until, one day, I, too, join to sin live any longer in it? Or do you those satisfied spectators in the stands (Heb. 12:1-2). It not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ is the biblical eschatology of the “already/not yet” which Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we were keeps all of this in balance, reminding us that all of us buried with him through baptism into death, that just as who are baptized into Christ belong already to the “new Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the creation,” but that this new creation is not yet consumFather, even so we also should walk in newness of life. mated. Our “story” is no longer “a tale told by an idiot, For if we have been united in the likeness of his death, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Shakespeare’s certainly we also shall be in the likeness of his resurrecMacbeth). In other words, it is not a merely chronological tion, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with life (“one damned thing after another,” or that which him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that Peter calls “your aimless conduct received by tradition we should no longer be slaves of sin…. Now if we died from your fathers”), but is new, eschatological life: with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him, “…even while we were dead in trespasses, [God] made us knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, alive together with Christ (by grace you have been dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over him. saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit togethFor the death that he died, he died to sin once for all; but er in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages the life that he lives, he lives to God. Likewise you also,

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reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 6:1-11).

But before we get too carried away with “narrative” approaches, let us remember that the Story of Jesus cannot be separated from the truth claims of Jesus and his disciples. This narrative is true not merely in the sense that a poem is true or Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is “true to life.” So “history-like” versus “historical,” a distinction often employed by Frei and other narrative theologians, cannot prove very beneficial for those of us who regard the biblical narrative(s) as thoroughly historical. Nor are we imposing an Enlightenment criterion of external reference or rationality upon the narrative, for it is the narrative itself which makes claims to final, external, historical truth.

Nor should this recognition of the power of narrative, which has been emphasized already by such conservative biblical theologians as Geerhardus Vos, Herman Ridderbos, and Meredith Kline, be used by faddish preachers. As Johann Baptist Metz warns, “This is why, in giving renewed emphasis to narrative, it is important to avoid the possible misunderstanding that ‘story-telling’ preachers and teachers will be justified in their narration of anecdotes, when what is required are arguments and reasoning. After all, there is a time for story-telling and a time for argument.”7 Drawn to the Life and, by the power of the Holy Spirit working through the Word, drawn into the Life, all other stories fade—not away, but into the background. Rival narratives which threaten to misshape us and ultimately lead to death are exposed for the shallowness of their plot, the narrowness of their vision, and the hopelessness of their characters. His Story becomes My Story, and vice versa, while both become Our Story, the witness of the New Humanity to its Living Head:

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hat which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life— the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us—that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And these things we write to you that your joy may be full (1 John 1:1-4). ■

Dr. Horton is associate professor of historical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in California, and serves on the Council of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

SPEAKING OF

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he Churches of the Reformation from the very beginning distinguished between the law

and the gospel as the two parts of the Word of God as a means of grace. This

distinction was not understood to be identical with that between the Old and New Testaments. There is law and gospel in the Old Testament, and there is law and gospel in the New. The law comprises everything in Scripture which is a revelation of God’s will in the form of command or prohibition, while the gospel embraces everything…that pertains to the work of reconciliation and that proclaims the seeking and redeeming love of God in Christ Jesus. And each one of these two parts has its own proper function in the economy of grace. The law seeks to awaken in the heart of man contrition on account of sin, while the gospel aims at the awakening of saving faith in Jesus Christ. The work of the law is in a sense preparatory to that of the gospel.”

—Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology

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Recovering I

n his preface to the 1545 Wittenberg edition of his Latin writings, Martin Luther provided an autobiographical account of his discovery of the meaning of the Gospel. There the old doctor recounted the story of that all-important time when, as a young theologian troubled by his sin and by the threat of God’s justice, he had hammered away at Paul until he discovered the evangelical meaning hidden in the

enigmatic words of Romans 1:17: “For in it [i.e., in the Gospel], the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, ‘But the righteous man shall live by faith’” (NASB, italics mine). As Luther remembered—and clearly also romanticized—the course of events, he had after a lengthy struggle come to understand the righteousness of which Paul speaks here. The passage refers not to God’s personal righteousness, on the basis of which he will one day judge every sinner (iustitia activa). Instead, the passage reveals a righteousness passively imparted to the sinner by grace for Christ’s sake, through faith alone (iustitia passiva). Thereupon, Luther reports, “I ran through the Scriptures from memory. I also found in other terms an analogy, as, the work of God, that is, what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us strong, the wisdom of God, with which he makes us wise…”

The rich mercies of God, epitomized in the Gospel, became for Luther a hermeneutical key to unlock the meaning of the whole Scripture.

Since Luther’s time, Protestants committed to the sole final authority of Scripture—particularly anyone unfamil-

iar with the rich array of resources a late medieval exegete like Luther used to understand the Bible—have been tempted to romanticize his story even further, finding within it an ideal for individual exegesis. The great Luther, so our thinking quite logically proceeds, armed only with faith and a passable knowledge of the biblical languages, barely subsisting in a church which had lost the center of its saving message, stood locked in lonely struggle with the text until at last he broke through to the Gospel. A romanticized view of Luther’s evangelical breakthrough and the corresponding demonization of the late medieval church combine to create a useful but historically misleading myth.

As Lessing might have reminded us, good logic does not necessarily good history make. While there is more than an element of truth in the heroic retelling of the story of Luther’s struggle, it nevertheless must be rejected, not only because it is wrong hermeneutically, but also, and most importantly, because it is wrong historically. In the first place, an individualistic ideal of exegesis is wrong hermeneutically because it inevitably oversimplifies the way

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the Riches in which the texts of Holy Scripture exercise their unique authority in the life and faith of the Church. While every Christian should be a devoted student of the Scriptures, individual interpretation must have its home in, and take its point of departure from, the worship life and theological reflection of the Church universal. The exposition of Scripture, even when undertaken privately for purposes of personal edification, is a profoundly public and ecclesial act.

The tale of Luther’s individualistic exegesis is also wrong historically because that is not in fact how Luther read the Bible. In the pithy aphorism with which Luther summarized his approach to Scripture, the task of the exegete is to discern was Christum treibt, “whatever promotes Christ.” The Scriptures are the “cradle” in which Christ is laid, or the “swaddling cloths” in which the Christ child is wrapped. It is as a Christian, in other words, that the Christian reads the Bible. The Christian looks expectantly for the saving Word of Christ in the Scriptures precisely because, in faith, he or she already believes that Word is there. The Christian reads the text as one who knows, and not, for example, as a mere grammarian. By faith, the Christian knows the very substance to which the Scriptures refer, the substance which is none other than Christ himself.

How did Luther know this? Because he was one of the baptized, a Christian who lived in communion with all

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the saints, and who had been nurtured by their corporate faith. That faith had itself borne fruit in more than a thousand years of Christian commentary on Holy Scripture, commentary of which Luther readily availed himself in his own vocation as Doctor in Biblia. Without doubt, Luther felt free to criticize the errors which he sometimes found in the exegetical traditions of the fathers. But his own exegetical work demonstrates time and again how very much he stood in the debt of the fallible traditions of premodern exegesis.

undoubted defects, flourished because it is true, while the modern theory of a single meaning, with all its demonstrable virtues, is false.”

In the now nearly two decades since the publication of Steinmetz’s essay, additional work in the history of exegesis has established his claim, showing just how a recovery of premodern exegesis can contribute to the task of contemporary Christian proclamation. Much of the impetus behind those studies may be traced not only to Steinmetz, however, but also to work like that of Gerhard Ebeling. His 1947 book, Church History as the History of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture, Premodern Exegesis ingeniously suggested that the history of the Christian church could be written as a history of the gathering—and ith the publication of the essay “The sometimes dividing—streams of Christian biblical exposiSuperiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis” in tion. The very idea of writing such a history implies from the 1980, Duke historian David C. outset that any history of exegesis will be in fact a history of Steinmetz not only challenged the tradition. It thus implies the necessity of setting the work of hegemony of the historical-critical method of biblical biblical commentators from each age of the Church into the exegesis, but also breathed new life into the study of the context of the writings of their predecessors and contempo“premodern” (i.e., before 1600) Christian biblical interraries. Such contextualization has the salutary and (in my pretation upon which Luther and his contemporaries judgment) necessary benefit of rendering triumphalist relied so heavily. Steinmetz’s bold claim for the superiority appeals to party favorites—say, Luther for the Lutherans, of “pre-critical” exegesis amounted to a kind of rescue Calvin for the Reformed—suspect from the outset. One operation for that vast body of exegetical literature should still ask what Luther or Calvin says, but one must also (commentaries, lectures, sermons, and the like). ask what they repeat and from whom they learned. The Practitioners of historical-critical interpretation had been questions, in short, have to do not only with Luther’s or inclined smugly to dismiss these writings as, at best, the Calvin’s explanation of a given text, but also with the exegetwishful thinking of churchmen woefully lacking in hisical traditions upon which they knowingly built. Premodern torical sense. At worst, premodern exegesis actually exegesis, in other words, is the sine qua non of Reformation seemed to them an obstacle to uncovering the Bible’s true exegesis: no premodern exegesis, no Reformation. meaning, because, so the argument went, the premodSteinmetz’s emphasis on the recovery of a worthy traerns had forced fanciful allegories upon the text, many of dition and Ebeling’s recognition of the centrality of exewhich were transparent props for outdated doctrines. gesis to the history of Christian thought combine neatly In fact, as Steinmetz himself showed, premodern exewith emerging trends in “post-modern” exegesis, particugesis, when taken on its own terms, was anything but larly so-called “theological exegesis.” Stephen E. Fowl, for pre-critical. And because it was not hog-tied to the hisexample, in the introduction to a recent collection of torical-critical insistence that the meaning of a biblical sources in classic and contemporary exegesis, emphasizes text must be sought solely in mind of the original human the value of premodern exegesis, arguing that it “should be seen as a conversation partner providing Rather than engaging in an endless search for the “real”meaning of the text which insights and resources for reading scripture theologically in the once existed in the mind of the author, premodern exegetes read the Scriptures as present.”1 And in a kind of mania text rich with divinely-intended meaning. festo for the value of the premodern exegetical tradition, the editors of a recent festschrift for author, premodern exegesis proved more useful to the David Steinmetz, Richard Muller, and John L. Church. Rather than engaging in an endless search for Thompson, propose that a retrieval of premodern exegethe “real” meaning of the text which once existed in the sis is essential to the recovery of Scripture as a Word mind of the author, premodern exegetes read the addressed to the living, and not just to the dead.

Scriptures as a text rich with divinely intended meaning.

Contextualizing Reformation thought, it should be To be sure, the possible spiritual meanings of the text noted, is not a new idea. In the 1960s and 70s, the work of were delimited by its plain literal meaning, by other clear the Dutch historian Heiko A. Oberman stimulated feverish biblical assertions, and by the traditions of faith. research in the late medieval context of Reformation theoloSteinmetz’s bold conclusion: “The medieval theory of gy. No longer, Oberman insisted, should Luther be imagined levels of meaning in the biblical text, with all its as appearing out of the blue, or even out of the dark night of

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late medieval thought. Instead, he claimed, the late middle ages should be thought of as the cradle of the Reformation.

In similar fashion, the work of scholars like Steinmetz and Ebeling challenges us to set the Reformers’ biblical work in its own late medieval context. Likewise, talk of exegetical context leads inevitably to talk of the Church, for the Christian exegetical conversation takes place in the community of faith.

Luther as a Biblical Exegete

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cholarship has long recognized that Luther made use of the latest critical tools available in his day. In his translation of the New Testament into German, for example, he relied upon Erasmus’ edition of the Greek New Testament, the so-called Novum Instrumentum, while in some of his early work on the Psalms he used the cutting-edge work of the French humanist, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples. Luther’s ear was tuned not only to what was new in his day, however, but also to the classic patristic and medieval sources of Christian interpretation. Among these, one of the most important, particularly for his exegesis of the Old Testament, was the work of Nicholas of Lyra, whose so-called Postillae provided exegetes like Luther with a commentary on the whole Bible. Indeed, Lyra’s influence on Luther has been thought by some to be so pervasive that it was said, “Had Lyra not Lyred, Luther would not have danced” (si Lyra non Lyrasset, Lutherus non saltasset).

Through his knowledge of the Hebrew language, Lyra offered Christian biblical interpreters not only his own interpretation of the text, but also insights from Jewish commentators like Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac) on the Old Testament text. In hermeneutical terms, Lyra’s work offered Christian commentators solutions to problematic texts based on what has been called the “doubleliteral sense of the text,” i.e., a literal-historical meaning intended by the human author, and another, literalprophetic meaning intended by the divine author. Using this approach, Lyra could affirm, for example, that a psalm spoke literally both of David and of Christ.

But hermeneutical theories about the meaning of a text tended, then as today, to play a considerably less important role in the actual practice of exegesis than do the published opinions of respected interpreters. Not every exegete consciously applies a hermeneutical theory to each text, but almost all of them consult respected authorities. No single instrument published in the middle ages did more to make those opinions widely available to Christian exegetes, including Martin Luther, than did the so-called “Ordinary Gloss” (Glossa Ordinaria).

Originally compiled in the twelfth century, the Gloss provided under one cover the exegetical opinions of such diverse Church fathers as Augustine, Jerome, Gregory the Great, Bede the Venerable, and many others, on every text of Scripture. The Glossators did much more, in other words, than simply pass on their own reading of Scripture. Page after page of the Gloss is filled with choice selections from the fathers and the medievals. In

fact, on many of its pages a scant few lines of Scripture stand surrounded by many lines of commentary. In short, the Bible known through the Gloss was a traditioned text, one whose voice was heard in the context of a chorus of witnesses who testified to the meaning of the text as it had come to be understood by the Church. An individualistic reading of such a Bible was literally impossible, since what any individual exegete might say about a particular biblical text—even if one might disagree with a received consensus of interpretation—would itself become part of that larger chorus of witnesses.

The glossed Bible thus stood as an invitation for genuinely Christian reflection on the text in the context of a real communion with sainted exegetes from ages past. As such, it encouraged the study of the ancient and medieval commentators, most of whom had relied upon one or another version of a four-fold allegorical method.

The Quadriga, as this method came to be known, provided an ingenious way to account for multiple levels of meaning within the biblical text while, at the same time, providing a means of explaining difficulties which sometimes arose from a literal reading of the text. In its classic form—developed by Origen, John Cassian, Augustine, and others—the Quadriga alerted biblical readers to expect to find as many as four different kinds of meaning

Premodern/Pre-Critical

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s normally used in relation to biblical studies and theology, “premodern” refers to the interpretive strategies which the Enlightenment came to regard as naïve, belonging to the infancy of humanity’s education. At the heart of modernity (i.e., the Enlightenment and its descendants) is the autonomous self, guided only by universal reason and experience. Usually associated with Descartes, modernity is conceived in the subjectivity of self-awareness.

After systematically doubting everything he held to be true, Descartes said he came at last to the one thing that couldn’t be doubted: his own existence as a thinking being (Cogito ergo sum). From this modern outlook, presuming to build on a rational foundation of absolute certainty, the self could attain mastery over its domain at last.

“Pre-critical” refers to the approach to Scripture prior to this rise of modern rationalism. While the Church’s leading exegetes and theologians have always been engaged in some form of “biblical criticism” (i.e., determining authorship, date, historical context, apparent discrepancies, etc.), the Enlightenment launched an era in which all external authority, including biblical authority, was to be rejected in principle. Just as many theologians today call themselves “postmodern” or “postliberal,” they will often refer to themselves as “post-critical” as well. This is not because they have necessarily rejected the conclusions of higher criticism, but because they wish to go beyond it, whether in a less radical or more radical direction. ■

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in a biblical text. Each of these possible meanings was summarized in a popular Latin rhyme which served as a convenient mnemonic device:

An expanded translation might read: “The letter of the Scriptures instructs us about past events; at the allegorical level the same text teaches what we ought to believe; a moral meaning teaches us how we ought to live; and an anagogical meaning reminds us of that for which we ought to hope.” It should be emphasized that this did not mean that every biblical text had to have four meanings.

But it might. Perhaps the best example of one that did, made famous by Cassian, came from the Psalms. Using the Quadriga, Psalm 137—in its literal meaning an imprecation against Israel’s Babylonian conquerors—could be transformed into a worthy Christian prayer. On a literal level the “Jerusalem” for which the Israelites longed was simply a city in the Middle East. Understood through the lens of the allegorical method, it could mean three additional things: allegorically it referred to the Church; morally, to the faithful soul; and anagogically, to the heavenly Jerusalem referred to in the Apocalypse of St. John. Of course, allegory did not always play such a clear or even clearly edifying role in Christian exegesis.

Transparent allegorical appeals to the Scriptures in support of papal claims to ultimate authority in both heavenly and earthly matters made allegorical interpretation seem arbitrary, subject only to the whim of the interpreter. Pope Innocent III, for example, claimed that the “greater light” and the “lesser light” of the creation narrative in Genesis represented, respectively, the papal authority and that of the secular ruler. The fact that such claims sometimes went so far as to make subjection to papal authority essential to final salvation, moreover, did little to endear allegory to Protestant biblical interpreters.

Abuses such as this inclined Reformers like Luther to speak derisively of allegorical exegesis when unmoored from the literal sense of the text. Apart from polemical attacks against the practitioners of such interpretive strategies, however, Luther himself clearly also recognized levels of meaning in the biblical text, most prominent among them an allegorical/Christological and a moral meaning applied to the virtue of faith. Besides searching the Scriptures for testimony of Christ, Luther also tended to interpret its stories as examples to build up Christian faith. In the final analysis, for Luther biblical exegesis meant an encounter between text, the reader, and the whole community of faith.

In the “Epitome” of the Formula of Concord we read the following: “We believe, teach, and confess that the Prophetic and apostolic writings of the Old and New Testaments are the only rule and norm according to which all doctrines and teachers alike must be appraised and judged….” Scripture alone, in short, is the infallible norm of doctrine. What room is there, then, for the traditions of interpretation in the work of the Lutheran exegete?

Plenty. Without a doubt, in the context of the debates over the comparative authority of Scripture and tradition during the latter half of the sixteenth century, the authors of the Formula stake out a position in which Scripture alone rules as the only infallible norm of all doctrine. But, in the same article they also clearly admit to the conversation “other writings,” including those of “ancient and modern writers,” the catholic creeds, the “first and unaltered” Augsburg Confession and its Apology, and the Small and Large Catechisms of Martin Luther. All these are subordinated to the authority of Holy Scripture. The creeds are received as symbols of the faith, and the Augsburg Confession and Apology as “the symbol of our time.” The catechisms are “the layman’s Bible,” texts which contain everything “which a Christian must know for his salvation.” They are received, in other words, as statements which have been normed to that “sole norm” of the Scriptures. Their authority is derivative, but real.

“Other writings,” those of learned doctors and teachers, are received not as normed standards which authoritatively set forth the faith. But they are received, and that is the important point. It is not necessary for Lutheran Christians to be cut off from the traditions of the Church. On the contrary, “other writings” will help the Christian understand “how at various times the Holy Scriptures were understood by contemporaries in the church of God with reference to controverted articles, and how contrary teachings were rejected and condemned.” In addition to consulting Luther, Lutheran Christians are, I would argue, not only free, but beholden, to treasure and esteem the exegetical traditions of the patristic and medieval Church. These are not infallible norms of doctrine, nor even authoritative symbols of biblical teaching, but are helpful—even if fallible—guides into the faith which the Church believes, teaches, and confesses.

It is therefore encouraging to note the increasing attention being paid to premodern exegesis among American evangelicals. The publication by InterVarsity Press of the AncientChristian Commentary on Scripture, for example, under the editorial leadership of Thomas C. Oden, promises to enrich both preaching and exegesis for many years to come. The express goal of the series, as Oden puts it, is “the revitalization of Christian teaching based on classical Christian exegesis.” That goal is perfectly consistent with the classical Protestant insistence on the sole final authority of Scripture, and has the potential to contribute much toward the reformation of American Christianity in modern—or are they post-modern?—times. ■

Holy Scripture and the Traditions of Exegesis in the Lutheran Confessions

Dr. Mattox is professor of church history at Concordia University, River Forest, Illinois.

Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia.

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PHOTONICA

“But That’sYour Interpretation” Realism, Reading, and Reformation here is a subterranean issue that bedevils contemporary debates over the interpretation of Scripture. This fault-line is not geological but philosophical, and ultimately theological. On one side of the chasm are those who believe that texts have a specific message, a determinate meaning—in principle knowable— which the author verbally conveys to the reader. On the other side are those who deny this belief, maintaining that what the reader finds in the text is largely a function of one’s interests, background, creativity, and skill. For the first group, interpretation is embarking on a voyage of discovery with a clear destination: the author’s intended message. For the second

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In Print July/August Book Recommendations Is There Meaning in This Text?: The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge Kevin Vanhoozer (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998) The Unfolding Mystery: Christ in the Old Testament Edmund Clowney (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1988) A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible Robert M. Grant (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984, second edition) The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996).

Paul: An Outline of His Theology Herman Ridderbos (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975, 1997) Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation Richard A. Muller and John L. Thompson, eds.

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996) Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation Geerhardus Vos (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1980) Calvin in Context Steinmetz, David C. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers Christopher A. Hall (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1998) Medieval Exegesis, Volume 1: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. Mark Sebanc Henri de Lubac (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998) The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings Stephen E. Fowl, ed., (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997) 2 2 M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N | J U LY / A U G U S T 1 9 9 9

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Themes and Tapes from the White Horse Inn July/August Cassette Tape Recommendations White Horse Inn Single Cassettes, $5.00 each • Vocation C-W431-32 • Finding a Church C-W433-34 • Heaven and Hell C-W435-36 • A Debate with Robert Schuller C-WHI-340 • Prophet, Priest and King C-WHI-212 • What about Promise Keepers? C-WHI-23 The Book of Hebrews This four-tape White Horse Inn series looks in-depth at the supremacy of Christ as laid forth by the author of the book of Hebrews. Michael Horton, Ken Jones, Kim Riddlebarger and Rod Rosenbladt discuss how this great New Testament book passionately illuminates the superiority of the new covenant over the old. C-H-S 4 tapes in an album, $23.00 Predestination This White Horse Inn series focuses on the Scriptural view of God's sovereignty in election. Michael Horton, Ken Jones, Kim Riddlebarger and Rod Rosenbladt cover the practical implications of predestination. They also give a thorough critique of Arminianism. CP-S 4 tapes in an album, $23.00 Revivalism How has revivalism shaped contemporary religious life in America?

How has it affected our understanding of church life, worship or even of the Gospel, itself? In this six-part White Horse Inn series, Michael Horton, Ken Jones, Kim Riddlebarger, and Rod Rosenbladt seek to answer these questions and more as they discuss the history and impact of revivalism on Christianity. C-REV-S 6 tapes, $33.00 Eschatology As we approach the end of a millennium, speculation about the end

times seems to abound. In this four-part White Horse Inn series, hosts Michael Horton, Ken Jones, Kim Riddlebarger and Rod Rosenbladt provide for us a classical approach to the study of eschatology and why it's important to understand it not merely as various views of the end of the world, but rather as a way of reading the Bible from Genesis to revelation. C-ESC-S 4 tapes in an album, $23.00 Great Debates in Church History In this series, the White Horse Inn hosts discuss how leaders in Christian history left their marks on the evangelical church.

Theological issues spanning many centuries caused church friction, and the resulting debates were instrumental in bringing the church to its present state. The White Horse Inn hosts discuss the debates between Athanasius & Arius, Augustine & Pelagius, Anselm & Abelard, Luther & Erasmus, and Machen & Fosdick. C-GD-S 6 tapes in an album, $33.00 Unity in the Church How should modern Christians think about and strive for unity?

What is the basis for unity among different kinds of Christians? In this White Horse Inn series, Michael Horton, Ken Jones, Kim Riddlebarger and Rod Rosenbladt help to answer these and other questions as they teach us about the proper relationships between unity and doctrine.

C-UIC-S 4 tapes in an album $23.00 The Greatest Story Ever Told This White Horse Inn tape series highlights all of redemptive history, revealing Christ as the center of Scripture. From the Law and the prophets through the whole New Testament, the White Horse Inn hosts discuss how Christ is the central theme of the entire Bible. CGST-S 20 tapes in 2 albums, $106.00—save 20%—$84.80

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group, interpretation is only a virtual voyage where one explores self-created worlds. Whereas the former hope to set foot on dry land, the latter are content to drift. But sailing without a compass is a risky endeavor, for some “have made shipwreck of their faith” (1 Tim. 1:19).

way we see, interpret, and experience life, that the “world” corresponds to human words rather than vice versa. To the postmodern anti-realist, this insight is liberating: if there is no “one way” that the world is, then we are free to create our own worlds. Similarly, if there is no “one way” that the text is or means, interpreters are free to create their own Realism in the Reformation Tradition interpretations. In each case—God, world, text—the he technical name for the subject is “realism,” “death of the Author” leads to the demise of authority as but it is hardly a technical matter. Realism is the well. Henceforth, no one—not even the author—can say that things are one way rather than another. We are sailing view that what there is (in the world; in the on the open sea under a starless sky. text) is independent of human language, Why would any intelligent person not be a realist? The postmodern response to this query is Hermeneutical naiveté is a dangerous thing if and when interpreters confuse worth pondering. Absolute truth corrupts absolutely. The belief that textual meaning with “what I think it means.” In sum, naive hermeneutical realism one possesses the single correct interpretation—of the text, of refuses to recognize the problem of interpretation in its haste to equate the the world, of God—is a powerful motive for suppressing the views appearance with the reality of meaning. of others. Nietzsche expresses the postmodern suspicion: “Ultimately, man finds in things nothing but what he thought, and action. All realists agree that “x is mindhimself has imported into them.” There you have it: rhetindependent,” though “x” could stand for the external oric is the secret of reason, anthropology the secret of world, moral values, numbers, concepts, other minds, theology, and eisegesis (personal imposition upon the or God. For the sake of clarity, then, it is helpful to distext) the secret of exegesis. Postmoderns thus expose the tinguish between various kinds of realism (e.g., metatruth claim “The meaning of x is y,” for the personal prefphysical, moral, theological). What happens if “x” erence they believe it really is: “I like seeing x as y.” Make stands for “meaning”? We then speak of hermeneutical no mistake: reading the Bible is an exercise of power, as realism, a meaning that is independent of the interthe authors of The Postmodern Bible assert, “Biblical scholars preter’s interpretation. have been slow to awaken from the dream in which posThere is a strong bond between Reformed theology itivist science occupies a space apart from interests and and realism. The Creator-creature distinction, for values, to awaken to the realization that our representainstance, affirms the fundamental independence of God tions of and discourse about what the text meant and from his world, as well as from human thought and expehow it means are inseparable from what we want it to rience. God is God no matter what humans say or think mean and how we will it to mean.”1 about him. Revelation discloses the nature and will of God; the task of theology is to say of what is (e.g., God) Why Realism Matters that it is. The whole point of speaking of the knowledge of God is that we can know, thanks to revelation, the he postmodern critique of absolutism is essentially way God really is. Theological realists intend their forcorrect. Human knowers do not enjoy a God’s eye mulations to correspond to fact, rather than be idolatrous point of view, even (especially!) when this concerns projections of what one may prefer God to be like. biblical interpretation. However, we shouldn’t have Something similar is true of the Reformed view of biblineeded Nietzsche and the postmoderns to remind us; the doccal authority: our theologies are to receive and conform trine of sin should have done that. Moreover, the biblical conto the Word of God, not revise or create it. The authordemnation of idolatry stands as a permanent warning not to ity of the Scriptures follows from God’s authorship. think too highly of our own thoughts. But if we agree that the will to power—violence—is the crucial problem in interpretation (as The Postmodern Protest I am inclined to agree), does it follow that anti-realism is the most appropriate remedy? n our postmodern times, however, realism in all its Biblical authority still demands a hermeneutical realism forms has taken a beating. Words, we are repeatedly told, do not reflect reality but structure it. Language is for three reasons—theoretical, practical, and spiritual. First, not a tool that hooks onto the world, but a screen that realism reminds us that there may be more to “x” than we blocks our access. Indeed, language is thought so to probknow at present. Stated more vigorously, the realist holds lematize the mind-world relationship that the second term that we may be mistaken about “x.” For realists, a proposi(the real world) virtually drops out. Language so shapes the tion is true or false regardless of whether we can know it as

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such. In short: there can only be a false interpretation if one assumes something is really there to get right.

Second, realism matters because we believe that we may encounter something beyond ourselves through interpreting the Bible (or any other text). If we cannot, if we are condemned to self-discovery only, then it is difficult in the extreme to see how we could be transformed

by Scripture.

Finally, realism is the best response to the postmodern protest against absolutism. As we have seen, postmoderns object that knowledge claims really amount only to the rhetoric of power (or the power of rhetoric).

Might it be, however, that much of the appeal of postmodernism itself derives from an anti-authoritarian ideology? The philosopher John Searle, himself no friend to Christian theology, suggests that the ultimate appeal of anti-realism lies in its ability to satisfy the human desire for control and autonomy: “the motivation for denying realism is a kind of will to power.”2 Whereas Searle imagines the anti-realists as rebelling against the constraints of the real world, the Christian theologian knows that the basic rebellion is directed against God and God’s created order. Anti-realism is a symptom of a theology (or an “a-theology”) that denies any order to the world that is not of one’s own making. Theologically speaking, antirealism is the attempt to play god.

It is impossible, in hermeneutics (as in anything else) to turn back the clock. Our time bears the post-age stamp.

On the one hand, biblical authority seems to demand an affirmation of a fixed meaning in the text. On the other hand, the postmoderns point out the all-too-human biases and blind spots of the biblical interpreter. How then can we reassert biblical authority “after realism”?

What follows are four approaches to biblical interpretation. The first two—objectivist and deconstructionist, respectively—do not even pretend to offer theologies of interpretation. Indeed, the latter is explicitly “atheological” in its skeptical thrust. Neither gets us beyond “secular reason”: the epistemology of modernity.

Accordingly, the real interest lies in the third and fourth positions. Each of these claims to represent a theological hermeneutic, and each has recently been presented in a book-length study: Stephen Fowl’s Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation and my Is There a Meaning in this Text? the Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge. Each book represents a possible way forward for churches in the traditions of the Reformation.

Naive Hermeneutical Realism: Determinate Interpretation

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aive realism is the view that our ordinary perception of the external world is pure and direct, uncontaminated by subjectivity or language. As far as the naive realist is concerned, the world just is the way it is experienced: colors and sounds are not in the head of the observer

but are rather properties of the objects themselves. This position is realist because it holds that the world is independent of the mind for its reality. However, it is naive because it assumes that the way the world appears in the mind corresponds exactly to the world as it is. It is objectivist because it assumes an objective observer who is able to “read” the world without allowing subjectivity (or language) to get in the way.

Against naive realism, modern philosophers of science point out that all data are “theory-laden” and postmodern thinkers contend that observers always come to the data with a linguistically structured system of ideas—an ideological framework—already in place. Kant says we approach the world with a conceptual framework, Derrida says we come with an arbitrarily constructed vocabulary, but the point is the same: we have no unmediated access to the way things—the world or texts—actually are.

The naive hermeneutical realist approaches texts with the same optimistic faith in his or her powers of observation. The good commentator gives objective descriptions of textual phenomena. The non-realist protest should by now be familiar: interpreters actually impose categories on the text that are not intrinsic to the text itself. Again, this is a salutary caution. Hermeneutical naiveté is a dangerous thing if and when interpreters confuse textual meaning with “what I think it means.” In sum, naive hermeneutical realism refuses to recognize the problem of interpretation in its haste to equate the appearance with the reality of meaning.

The naive hermeneutical realist typically believes in determinate meaning. On this view, the goal of biblical

The “Death of the Author”

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oland Barthes’ notion of the death of the author is one of the rallying cries for poststructuralism in its insistence that the author is not to be regarded as the final arbiter of a text’s meaning. In Barthes’ view, authors had come to be considered as authority figures, thus placing the reader in an inferior position.

He called for the death of the author (more precisely, the death of a certain conception of the author, the author as authority figure) in order to free the reader to be creative. Reading was no longer to be considered a passive process, but instead an active one in which the reader was fully engaged in the production of textual meaning. The birth of the reader, as Barthes put it, was to be achieved at the expense of the author.

The major thrust of Barthes’ attack is against the modern tendency to treat authors as cultural icons (the Author rather than the author, with the capital “A” signaling the importance accorded this figure), rather than authorship as such, and the death of the author is an implicitly antitraditional notion much in keeping with the liberationist tenor of the 1960s when it was devised.1 ■

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interpretation is to gain clear, even certain, knowledge of the specific propositions conveyed by the text. As Stephen Fowl characterizes the position: “The operating assumption here is that matters of doctrine and practice are straightforwardly determined by biblical interpretation and never the other way around.”3 According to Fowl, the fundamental weakness of this approach is that it presupposes some definition of meaning (e.g., author’s intention) which is the very point at issue. The real problem, says Fowl, is that interpreters disagree as to what they should be doing, so that appealing to “determinate meaning” amounts to the less obvious claim “my way of reading is the only way of reading.”

Internal Hermeneutic Realism: Underdetermined Interpretation

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hird, consider Stephen Fowl’s proposal for theological hermeneutics. Fowl believes that interpretive debates are better served by eliminating claims about textual meaning in favor of offering more precise accounts of interpretive aims and practices. Biblical interpretation is under-determined: there is no one thing that meaning is, thus there is no one task that interpreters have to do.

What governs biblical interpretation is not a definition of meaning but rather the interests of the interpreting community. Fowl himself advocates the properly theological aim of engaging Scripture toward an “ever deepHermeneutic Non-Realism: er communion with the triune God and with each Anti-Determinate Interpretation other.”5 he second approach we will consider is the deconTo his credit, Fowl acknowledges a possible objection structionist. Non-realists, as we have seen, refuse to to his proposal. If meaning is not a property of the text believe in mind-independent realities. Now it is quite but rather the result of a community’s engagement with possible to be a realist with regard to the physical a text, what prevents the Bible from being used to underworld but a non-realist with regard to morality or to God. What write oppressive or harmful practices? How, in other all forms of non-realism have in common, however, is the words, might Fowl respond to the postmodern protest assumption that the mind and/or language get in the way of our that all interpretation is simply an exercise in the will to apprehension of the world. The categories and the vocabulary power, in this case corporate power? More pointedly: if one uses for thinking about “x” do not reflect the nature of “x” but meaning is always underdetermined, could Fowl ever say rather shape, indeed create, “x.” that any particular interpretation is wrong?

Transferred to the realm of meaning, the hermeneutiWe should not underestimate the gravity of this cal non-realist rejects the notion that there is something objection. For if there is no determinate textual meaning, determinate “in” the text, waiting to be discovered by an and if theological interpretation is only a matter of one’s inquiring mind. The practical implication of this theogeneral goal (rather than a particular method), then there retical position is that no one’s interpretation has more is no way to distinguish “what it (really) means” from legitimacy than another’s. What is the point of “what it means to me.” Fowl’s response to this objection hermeneutical non-realism? It is, I believe, an extreme is intriguing. He rightly reminds us that, from a Christian “Protestant” point, namely, a protest against any claim to perspective, interpreters are sinners. What we need, have attained the single correct meaning of the text. therefore, are vigilant and virtuous interpreters who are Hermeneutical non-realism, like antitrust laws, seeks to intent on fostering the kingdom of God rather than their break up monopolies: monopolies of meaning. Read own fiefdoms. “If Christians are to read and embody charitably, these postmoderns undo determinate interscripture in ways that result in lives lived faithfully before pretations for the sake of preserving the otherness, God, they will need to recognize themselves as sinners.”6 These virtuous interpreters must be prepared to repent of their sometimes forced (and someFar from creating a new meaning, or suggesting that the original meaning is times lazy) readings, acknowlsomehow defective, the Spirit’s task is to render the authorial meaning effective. edging that all interpretations are provisional and subject to correction. indeed the freedom, of the text.

This is Fowl’s basic position. Does it count as Yet hermeneutic non-realism ultimately disappoints. hermeneutical realism? As theological interpretation?

For a consistent emphasis on anti-determinate interpreThe answer, I fear, is “no” on both counts. At first blush, tation ultimately prohibits any encounter with a meanFowl seems merely to have recovered and updated ingful word that is not of our own making. If we do not Augustine: read for the meaning that most fosters love of encounter anything other than ourselves in a text, we God and neighbor. Concerns for charity and fellowship will go away as empty as we came. On this unfortunate outweigh disputes over which exegetical tools or result, Fowl and I agree: hermeneutic non-realism “will hermeneutical approach to follow. Upon closer inspecparalyze actual attempts to order one’s life in accordance tion, however, it appears that Fowl’s method tacitly relies with one’s interpretation.”4 on two other, less Christian, theoretical supports.

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Fowl draws firstly on Jeffrey Stout’s celebrated neopragmatist essay, “What Is the Meaning of a Text?”, which advocates eliminating the term “meaning” in favor of describing interpretive aims and interests.7 Attempts to define meaning do not capture some objective essence but should be regarded as ways of doing things with texts. This is similar to Princeton professor Richard Rorty’s suggestion that we abandon attempts to “get it right” and instead concentrate on “making it useful.” Meaning and truth for Rorty are merely descriptions of specific social practices, ways in which communities seek to cope with life. What one understands by “truth” is a matter of the linguistic habits of this or that community. Truth is like a designer label that communities attach to beliefs or practices which serve a useful purpose. It is not a matter of what is, but of what works in a particular context. If that context happens to be the Christian community, then truth is what facilitates fellowship with God and neighbor. While Fowl wants to use the Bible in the admirable project of spiritual formation, the hermeneutical realist nevertheless responds that to use a text is not yet to interpret it.

A second possible theoretical support comes from the Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam’s notion of “internal realism.” On the one hand, Putnam rejects a naive objectivism where the mind simply apprehends the world (or meaning). On the other hand, he rejects the relativist claim that we simply create the world (or meaning). Putnam proposes a middle way: we can still talk about the world (or meaning), but only from within a conceptual scheme or interpretive community. Whereas the external realist distinguishes the way the world (or meaning) is from the ways we know it, Putnam collapses the distinction: “the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world.”8 It is difficult to know where Fowl himself stands on the issue of realism vs. anti-realism. Yet what he says about the relation between interpreter and text bears more than a passing resemblance to what Putnam says about mind and world: “I wish to argue that theological convictions, ecclesial practices, and communal and social concerns should shape and be shaped by biblical interpretation.”9 Fowl is perhaps best construed as an internal hermeneutical realist: text and interpretation jointly make up text and interpretation. For Fowl, the meaning of the text is partly dependent on the practices and interpretive interests of the ecclesial community. His claim that the text is underdetermined is equivalent to asserting the hermeneutical insufficiency of Scripture.

Against Fowl, theologians in the tradition of the Reformation point out that the very practice of biblical interpretation doesn’t make sense except on the assumption that we are encountering something independent of ourselves and our own interests, namely, an authoritative and transformative text: a Word of God. Though Fowl is right to seek a distinctly Christian hermeneutic, his house of interpretation includes a good bit of the mud and straw

of Egypt. Fowl’s thesis, though well intentioned, has been shaped by what are largely secular, non-theological assumptions about knowledge, truth, and meaning.

The Reformation Critically-Realist Resistance: Overdetermined Interpretation

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inally, I would like to offer an alternate way forward. The Reformation bequeathed a number of important principles relevant to contemporary biblical interpretation: sola Scriptura, the priesthood of all believers, Word and Spirit. Together, these principles provide the means for resisting the contemporary trend toward hermeneutic non-realism, namely, the tendency to substitute the encounter of text and reader for the authority of the text itself.

Sola Scriptura. The reformers were careful not to assign final authority to the opinion of the interpreting community, or even to the encounter of that community with the text. No, final authority belongs to Scripture alone.

For bereft of determinate textual meaning, how can we distinguish the Word of God from merely human words, Scripture from tradition? Sola Scriptura is a rallying cry for hermeneutic realism.

Priesthood of all believers. This principle—that biblical interpretation is the privilege and responsibility of individual readers—likewise challenges the authority of interpretive communities. At the same time, to affirm the priesthood of all believers is not to say that textual meaning is just anything individual readers say it is. It is common today to hear that how one reads the Bible depends largely on one’s cultural context (or race, gender, and class). How then can we affirm the priesthood of all believers without falling prey to interpretive relativism?

The answer is to see the Bible as overdetermined in meaning.

There is a single meaning in the text, but it is so rich that we may need the insights of a variety of individual and cultural perspectives fully to do it justice. To speak of overdetermined interpretation is, thus, to attest to the abundance of meaning, to a richer hermeneutic realism.

The single correct meaning may only come to light through multicultural interpretation.

Word and Spirit. What about new meaning? For instance, is Fowl correct when he says that Paul’s and the Galatians’ experience of the Spirit led them to impute new meaning into the story of Abraham? Should Christians today follow Fowl’s example when, upon seeing the Spirit’s work displayed in the lives of homosexuals, he draws the same conclusion as did Peter when faced with the Spirit’s work among the Gentiles?10 Is it true that a new experience of the Spirit can change the meaning of the Word? Is theological interpretation a matter of determining the ecclesiastical sense (what it means now to the Church) rather than the literal sense (what it meant then)?

It is just here that the Reformation insistence on Word and Spirit has an important bearing on contempo-

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rary hermeneutical debates. Where is the Word of God, and hence authority, in biblical interpretation? Is it in the literal sense of the Bible (the Word written), or is it in the encounter of the Spirit-led community with its Scripture (the Word interpreted)? Fowl identifies the Word of God with the believing (and practicing) community’s reading in the Spirit, a reading that may or may not correspond to the literal sense. The church enjoys charismatic authority, expressed in the principle “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28). The question that remains is whether Fowl can prevent this principle from being reduced to the anti-realist, relativist principle “It seemed good to us.”

briefly stated: “do not bear false witness.” To be sure, biblical interpreters would do well not to read their own ideas into Scripture. Yet it is not enough simply to avoid the interpretive vice of anti-realism. Readers must actively seek to cultivate the interpretive virtues as well: openness, honesty, humility, attention, thoughtfulness. These spiritual qualities are conducive to knowledge and to reaching understanding of what the divine Author, through the human authors, is saying. Cultivating these interpretive virtues will lead to the practice that best corresponds to hermeneutical realism: interpreters never ceasing to submit their interpretations to the authority of the Word written. Hermeneutic realism thus demands nothing less than an interpretive practice regulated by the prime Protestant principle: “always But no one agreed with this more than Friedrich Nietzsche. Listing stages in “the reforming.” ■

history of an error,” he describes “How the ‘Real World’ Finally Became a Fable.”

Dr. Vanhoozer, formerly Senior Lecturer of Theology and Religious Studies at New College, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, is now Research Professor of Systematic Theology at the Divinity School of Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois.

The real world was “attainable for the wise man, the pious man, the virtuous man.”

What is the role of the Holy Spirit in interpretation?

I believe, firstly, that the Spirit does not abolish the letter but ministers it. Thus, the spiritual sense is simply the literal sense, understood in all its fullness.11 Far from creating a new meaning, or suggesting that the original meaning is somehow defective, the Spirit’s task is to render the authorial meaning effective. In sum, the Spirit is the Word’s empowering presence.

Secondly, the Spirit sanctifies the reader, removing pride and prejudice and creating the humility of heart and mind ready to receive something not of its own making. In short, the Spirit transforms us from being nonrealists who prefer our own lies to realists who desire to hear the Word of God. Reading in the Spirit, therefore, means letting the letter accomplish the purpose for which it was sent (Is. 55:11). The interpretive interests and practices of the Church are important, but only when they help foster the desire and ability to reach understanding—not, as Fowl would have it, because readers contribute to the meaning of the text. The Holy Spirit leads the Church, in all its cultural and racial variety, into a deeper appreciation of the one true interpretation of the Scriptures. This should not surprise us, for the event of Jesus Christ itself takes all four gospels together to articulate it. This is a “Pentecostal plurality,” as it were, which believes that the objective textual meaning is best approximated by a diversity of reading contexts and communities.

Conclusion: Hermeneutic Responsibility Hermeneutical realism implies hermeneutical responsibility. The interpreter’s task is to seek understanding, to follow the text where it leads, and to bear true witness to authorial intention. The interpretive imperative may be

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SPEAKING OF

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hile it is comparatively easy to distinguish between the Law and the Gospel in the-

ory, it is extremely difficult to apply the distinction in practice….The Christian minister must constantly teach the Law and the Gospel side by side, with proper regard for both their distinction and their connection, so that the secure are terrified and the terrified are comforted. He must never commingle the two doctrines, but teach the Law in all its severity and the Gospel in its full sweetness.”

—John Theodore Mueller, Christian Dogmatics, 480

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The

Tabula Rasa Fallacy arl Henry has long been fond of saying that there are two kinds of presuppositionalists: those who admit it and those who don’t. We might adapt his analysis to our topic: There are two kinds of practitioners of hermeneutics: those who admit it and those who don’t. For every time we find something in the Bible (whether it is actually there or not!), we have interpreted the Bible.

There is good interpretation and there is bad interpretation, but there is no escape from interpretation.

Consequently, we should be self-conscious about our hermeneutical task. Yet it is ironic that in our day some people seem altogether too interested, and other people too disinterested, in hermeneutics. Some seem far more interested in challenges of the discipline of hermeneutics than in the Bible itself, while others think they can bypass hermeneutics altogether. Without being crass enough to say so, they secretly harbor the opinion that what others offer are interpretations, but what they offer is just what the Bible says.

In this article, I want to reflect on interpretive decisions by focusing on one relatively “simple” hermeneutical challenge: how to tell what parts of the Bible are binding mandates for us, and what parts are not. This will not

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be an attempt to deal comprehensively with the subject,1 but it should nonetheless provide some preliminary principles for sorting such matters out.

Translating the Word “Bread” Principle: Determine not only how symbols, customs, metaphors, and models function in Scripture, but also to what else they are tied.

We may be able to agree with the widely accepted conclusion that biblical language about sackcloth and ashes is a “placeholder” for repentance, and holy kissing for committed fellowship among church members.2 But is it then acceptable to lead a group of young people in a California church in a celebration of the Lord’s Table using Coke and chips? And how about yams and goat’s milk in Papua New Guinea? If in the latter case we use bread and wine, are we not subtly insisting that only the food of white foreigners is acceptable to God? The problem is one not only of churchmanship, but of linguistic theory: Bible translators face it continuously.

How do they translate “bread” and “wine” in the words of institution? Or consider a text such as Is. 1: 18: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.”

Suppose the target group for which you are translating

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note. In this case, for example, it might be wise to say that “bread” was a staple food of the people at the time, as yams are to us. A slightly different note would have to be included when leaven or yeast is introduced.

There is almost nothing to be said in favor of Californian young people using chips and Coke as elements. (I’m afraid this is not a fictitious example.) Unlike the people of the rain forests, they do not even have in their favor that they have never heard of bread. Nor can it be said that chips and Coke are their staples (though doubtless some of them move in that direction). What this represents is the whimsy of what is novel, the love of the iconoclastic, the spirituality of the “cutesy”—with no connections with either the Lord’s words or with two thousand years of church history.

The fact of the matter is that comparisons and analogies are always self-limiting in the Bible lives in equatorial rain forests and has never seen snow: would it be better to change the simile?

Suppose that the only “wool” they have seen is the dirty dun-colored stuff from village goats: could not a “faithful” translation be misleading, while a culturally sensitive translation that is nevertheless more distant from the original might succeed in communicating the point that God speaking through Isaiah was getting across?

Much can be said in favor of this sort of flexibility.

Certainly in the case of “snow,” not a lot seems at stake.

You might want to check out the other seven biblical occurrences of “white as snow” to make sure you are not unwittingly running into some awkward clash or other.

some respect or other. Otherwise, you would not be dealing with comparisons and analogies, but with things that are identical.

But in the case of bread and wine at the Lord’s Supper, the situation becomes more complicated. This is because the elements are tied in with other strands of the Bible, and it is almost impossible to disentangle them. Having changed “bread” to, say, “yams” in order to avoid any cultural imperialism, what shall we do with the connections between the Lord’s Supper and the Passover, where only “unleavened bread” was to be eaten: can we speak of “unleavened yams”?! How about the connection between bread and manna, and then the further connection drawn between bread-manna and Jesus (John 6)? Is Jesus (I say this reverently) now to become the yam of God? And we have not yet begun to exhaust the complications.

So what begins as a charitable effort in cross-cultural communication leads toward major interpretive problems farther down the road. Moreover, Bible translations have a much longer shelf-life than the original translators usually think. Fifty years later, once the tribe has become a little more familiar with cultures beyond their own forests, and it seems best in a revision to return to a greater degree of literalism, try and change “yams” to “bread” and see what kind of ecclesiastical squabbles break out. The “King James Version” of the rain forests has “yams”....

All of these sorts of problems are bound up with the fact that God has not given us a culturally neutral revelation. What he has revealed in words is necessarily tied to specific places and cultures. Every other culture is going to have to do some work to understand what God meant when he said certain things in a particular language at a specific time and place and in a shifting idiom. In some cases, an analogous idiom may be the best way to render something; in other cases, especially those that are deeply tied to other elements in the Bible’s story-line, it is best to render things more literally, and then perhaps include an explanatory

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Analogies Always Have Limits

Principle: Thoughtfully limit comparisons and analogies by observing near and far contexts.

“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). Since he never finally refused to heal anyone who approached him during the days of his flesh, and since he is the same yesterday and today and forever, therefore he will heal all who approach him for healing today. I have had that argument put to me more than once. By the same token, of course, Hebrews 13:8 could be used to prove that since he was mortal before the cross, he must still be mortal today; or since he was crucified by the Romans, and he is the same yesterday and today and forever, he must still be being crucified by the Romans today.

The fact of the matter is that comparisons and analogies are always self-limiting in some respect or other.

Otherwise, you would not be dealing with comparisons and analogies, but with things that are identical. What makes a comparison or an analogy possible is that different things are similar in certain—not all—respects. It is always crucial to discover the planes on which the parallels operate—something that is usually made clear by the context—and to refuse further generalization.

A disciple is to be like his master; we are to imitate Paul, as Paul imitates Christ. In what respects? Should we walk on water? Should we clean the local temple with a whip? Should we infallibly heal those who are ill and who petition us for help? Should we miraculously provide food for thousands out of some boy’s lunch?

Should we be crucified?

Such questions cannot all be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” It is worth observing that most of the injunctions in the Gospels to follow Jesus or to do what he does are bound up with his self-abnegation: e.g., as he is hated, so we must expect to be hated (John 15:18); as he takes the place of a servant and washes his disciples’

feet, so we are to wash one another’s feet (John 13); as he goes to the cross, so we are to take our cross and follow him (Matt. 10:38, 16:24; Luke 14:27). Thus, the answer to the question, “Should we be crucified?”, is surely “yes” and “no”: no, not literally, most of us will have to say, and yet that does not warrant complete escape from the demand to take up our cross and follow him. So in this case the answer is “yes,” but not literally.

The Pastoral Context of the Text Principle: Many mandates are pastorally limited by the occasion or people being addressed.

For example, Jesus unambiguously insists, “Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King.... Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one” (Matt. 6:34-36). Yet, we find Paul going well beyond a simple “Yes” or “No” (e.g., Rom. 9:1, 2 Cor. 11:10, Gal. 1:20). In fact, God puts himself under an oath (Heb. 6:1718). Won’t pedants have a wonderful time with this?

Yet the particular language of Jesus’ prohibition, not to mention the expanded parallel in Matthew 23:16-22, shows that what Jesus was berating was the sophisticated use of oaths that became an occasion for evasive lying—a bit like the schoolboy who tells whoppers with his fingers crossed behind his back. At some point, it is best to get to the heart of the issue: simply tell the truth, and let your “Yes” be “Yes” and your “No” be “No.” In other words, the pastoral context is vital. By contrast, the context of Hebrews 6-7 shows that when God puts himself under an oath, it is not because otherwise he might lie, but for two reasons: first, to maintain the typological pattern of a priesthood established by oath, and second, to offer special reassurance to the weak faith of human beings who otherwise might be too little inclined to take God’s wonderful promises seriously.

There are many examples in Scripture of the importance of pastoral context. Paul can say it is good for a man not to touch a woman (1 Cor. 7:1—the NIV’s “not to marry” is an unwarranted softening of the Greek). But (he goes on to say) there are also good reasons to marry, and finally concludes that both celibacy and marriage are gifts from God, charismata (1 Cor. 7:7—which I suppose makes us all “charismatics”). It does not take much reading between the lines to perceive that the church in Corinth included some who were given to asceticism, and others in danger of promiscuity (cf. 1 Cor. 6:12-20).

There is a pastoral sensitivity to Paul’s “Yes, but” argument, one that he deploys more than once in this letter (e.g., 1 Cor. 14:18-19). In other words, there are pastoral limitations to the course advocated, limitations made clear by the context.

In the same way, what Paul says to encourage Christian assurance to the Romans at the end of chapter 8 is not what he says to the Corinthians in 2 Cor. 13:5.

What particular elements of a full-blooded, nuanced, and even complex doctrine need to be stressed at any particular time will be determined, in part, by a pastoral diagnosis of the predominant current ailments.

Multiple Narrative Contexts Principle: Always be careful how you apply narratives.

Nowadays most of us are familiar with “postmodern” voices that advocate open-ended meaning—meaning, finally, that you or your interpretive community “find” meaning that is not necessarily in the text, and certainly not what the author intended. It is no accident that when these postmodern voices turn to the Bible, they are often attracted to narrative portions. Admittedly, these narrative portions are usually pulled out of their contexts in the books in which they are embedded, and made to stand on their own. Without the contextual constraints, the interpretive possibilities seem to multiply—which is, of course, what the postmodernists want. But narratives are, I think, generically more open than discourse. They have other virtues, of course: they are evocative, affective, image-enhancing, memorable. But unless care is taken, they are more easily misinterpreted than discourse.

In fact, little narratives should not only be interpreted within the framework of the book in which they are embedded, but within the corpus, and ultimately within the canon. Take, for instance, Genesis 39, the account of Joseph’s early years in Egypt. One can read that narrative and draw from it excellent lessons on how to resist temptation (e.g., Joseph refers to sexual sin to which he is enticed by Potiphar’s wife as “sin against God,” not some mere weakness or foible; he avoids the woman’s company; in the crunch, his purity is more important to him than his prospects). But a careful reading of the opening and closing verses of the chapter also shows that one of the important points of the narrative is that God is with Joseph and blesses him even in the midst of the most appalling circumstances: neither the presence of God nor the blessing of God are restricted to happy lifestyles.

Then read the chapter in the context of the preceding narrative: now Judah becomes a foil for Joseph. The one is tempted in circumstances of comfort and plenty, and succumbs to incest; the other is tempted in circumstances of slavery and injustice, and retains his integrity.

Now read the same chapter in the context of the book of Genesis. Joseph’s integrity is bound up with the way God providentially provides famine relief not only for countless thousands, but for the covenant people of God in particular. Now read it within the context of the Pentateuch. The narrative is part of the explanation for how the people of God find themselves in Egypt, which leads to the Exodus. Joseph’s bones are brought out when the people leave. Enlarge the horizon now to embrace the whole canon: suddenly Joseph’s fidelity in small matters is part of the providential wisdom that preserves the people of God, leads to the exodus that serves as a type

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of a still greater release, and ultimately leads to Judah’s distant son David, and his still more distant son, Jesus.

So if you are applying Genesis 39, although it may have some use as a moral account that tells us how to deal with temptation, the perspective gained by admitting the widening contexts discloses scores of further connections and meanings that thoughtful readers (and preachers) should not ignore.

Can I Be Objective?

Principle: Remember that you, too, are culturally and theologically located.

In other words, it is not simply a case of each part of the Bible being culturally located, while you and I are neutral and dispassionate observers. Rather, thoughtful readers will acknowledge that they, too, are located in specific culture—specific language, unacknowledged assumptions, perspectives on time and race and education and humor, notions of truth and honor and wealth.

In postmodern hands, of course, these realities become part of the reason for arguing that all interpretations are relative. I have argued elsewhere that although no finite and sinful human being can ever know exhaustive truth about anything (for that would require omniscience), they can know some truth truly. But often this requires some self-distancing of ourselves from inherited assumptions and perspectives.

Sometimes this is achieved unknowingly. The person who has read her Bible right through once or twice a year, loves it dearly, and now in her eightieth year reads it no less, may never have self-consciously engaged in some process of self-distancing from cultural prejudice.

But she may now be so steeped in biblical outlooks and perspectives that she lives in a different “world” from her pagan neighbors, and perhaps even from many of her more shallow and less well-informed Christian neighbors. But the process can be accelerated by reading med-

cultures and nations for the accumulating corruption of her people? Are the biblical interpretations advanced by “evangelical feminists” compromised by their indebtedness to the current focus on women’s liberation, or are the interpretations of more traditional exegetes compromised by unwitting enslavement to patriarchal assumptions? Do we overlook some of the “hard” sayings about poverty simply because most of us live in relative wealth?

The examples are legion. But the place to begin is by acknowledging that no interpreter, including you, approaches the text tabula rasa, like a razed slate just waiting to have the truth inscribed on you. There is always a need for honest recognition of our biases and assumptions, and progressive willingness to reform them and challenge them as we perceive that the Word of God is taking us in quite a different direction. As our culture becomes progressively more secular, the need for this sort of reading is becoming more urgent. How it is done— both theoretically and practically—cannot be elucidated here. But that it must be done if we are not to domesticate Scripture to our own worlds cannot be doubted.

The Web of Belief

Principle: Frankly admit that many interpretive decisions are nestled within a large theological system, which we must be willing to modify if the Bible is to have the final word.

This is, of course, a subset of the preceding point, yet it deserves separate treatment. Some Christians give the impression that if you learn Greek and Hebrew and get your basic hermeneutics sorted out, then you can forget about historical theology and systematic theology.

Simply do your exegesis and you will come out with the truth straight from the Word of God. But of course, it is not quite that simple. Inevitably, everyone is doing his or her exegesis as an Arminian, or as a Reformed Presbyterian, or as a dispensationalist, or as a theonomist, or as a Lutheran—and these are only some of the predominant systems among believers. Even if you are so ignorant of any one tradition The place to begin is by acknowledging that no interpreter, including you, that you are a bit of an eclectic, that simply means your exegesis approaches the text tabula rasa, like a razed slate just waiting to have the is likely to be a little more inconsistent than that of others. truth inscribed on you.

Do not misunderstand: systems are not evil things. They itatively, self-critically, humbly, honestly, thereby discovfunction to make interpretation a little easier and a little ering where the Word challenges the outlooks and valmore realistic: they mean that you do not have to go back ues of our time and place. It is accelerated by the right to basics at each point (i.e., inevitably you assume a whole kinds of small-group Bible studies (e.g., those that lot of other exegesis at any particular instance of exegesis). include devout Christians from other cultures), and from If your tradition is broadly orthodox, then the system helps the best of sermons and books. to direct you away from interpretations that are heterodox.

Does our Western culture place so much stress on But a system can be so tightly controlling that it does not individualism that we find it hard to perceive, not only allow itself to be corrected by Scripture, modified by the biblical emphasis on the family and on the body of the church, but also the ways in which God judges entire The Tabula Rasa Fallacy [ C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 4 3 ]

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A Plea for Greater

Dogmatic Engagement with the Old Testament oday, to a disconcerting degree, the disciplines of biblical scholarship and dogmatics (or systematic theology) undertake their tasks with too little interaction. I fear that some dogmaticians could not exegete their way out of a paper bag, and, as an Old Testament professor, I know that some biblical scholars could not even spell Arianism. Yet, obviously, these two disciplines desperately need each other. Therefore, I wish to press the case for reintegrating biblical theology and systematics, for leading biblical exegetes and dogmaticians into the same room and forcing them to talk theology together.

Toward this end, as an exegete, I would like to offer six reasons why dogmatics should seek more intentionally to incorporate the Old Testament into its discipline.

For the first three-fourths of the Bible cannot simply be treated as background. After all, in opposition to Marcion (the second century sectarian who rejected the

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Old Testament and its God as imperfect), Paul reminds us that the God of ancient Israel, the Creator of heaven and earth, is “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Consider first the doctrine of God. Do we begin with a Greek philosophical notion of God as the unmoved mover and then on that basis demote the Old Testament’s God-language to merely “anthropomorphic” language? I would argue that if we took the Old Testament’s God-language seriously, rather than immediately dismissing it as metaphorical, we could see it as “incarnational” language. This is the God who locates himself with Israel in space and time and from that position “remembers” the past and “promises” the future.

He makes himself accessible to Israel in certain ways, such as at Zion. He delivers with his strong arm; he hears with his ears and sees with his eyes and speaks with his mouth. This is the God who reveals himself already in the Old Testament in a way that anticipates the Incarnation.

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Second, the Old Testament keeps our feet on the ground. Everywhere it presupposes and affirms the goodness of God’s creation. The ancient Israelites were a down-to-earth people, for the most part, agriculturalists and owners of sheep and goats. They rejoiced in their concrete and physical life. Their hope was not to become deified or divinized but to live in fellowship with YHWH in a fully human way, the way the Creator had made them and intended them to be. To live under their own vine and fig tree, to enjoy the fruits of their fields, to drink the wine from their vineyard, that was the good life. “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

No one steeped in the earthy Old Testament, when taken at face value, would be tempted toward Gnosticism, platonic dualism, Docetism, asceticism, or spiritualism, alternatives that are as prevalent today as they ever were. The Old Testament keeps our Christian

life facing outward toward the concrete needs of the neighbor in the external world rather than turning inward toward the inner world of the soul. It invites us to rejoice in our flesh-and-blood creatureliness, in the way God has created us. In fact, the first article of the creed, to a great extent, depends upon the Old Testament. It was no coincidence that Marcion, under the influence of Gnosticism, wanted nothing to do with either the Old Testament or the “maker of heaven and earth.” Against Marcion, the early church fathers rightly emphasized that it was the Creator who redeemed and that what he redeemed was his own creation and not something alien to him. The work of the new creation presupposes the work of the Creator.

Third, the Old Testament is necessary for the understanding, preservation, and proclamation of the Gospel itself. Without a good understanding of the Old

“A Brief Instruction on What to Lo

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t is a common practice to number the Gospels and to name them by books and say that there are four Gospels. From this practice stems the fact that no one knows what St. Paul and St. Peter are saying in their epistles, and their teaching is regarded as an addition to the teaching of the Gospels, in a vein similar to that of Jerome’s introduction. There is, besides, the still worse practice of regarding the Gospels and epistles as law books in which is supposed to be taught what we are to do and in which the works of Christ are pictured to us as nothing but examples. Now where these two erroneous notions remain in the heart, there neither the Gospels nor the epistles may be read in a profitable or Christian manner, and [people] remain as pagan as ever.

One should thus realize that there is only one Gospel, but that it is described by many apostles. Every single epistle of Paul and of Peter, as well as the Acts of the Apostles by Luke, is a Gospel, even though they do not record all the works and words of Christ, but one is shorter and includes less than another. There is not one of the four major Gospels anyway that includes all the words and works of Christ; nor is this necessary. Gospel is and should be nothing else than a discourse or story about Christ, just as happens among men when one writes a book about a king or a prince, telling what he did, said, and suffered in his day. Such a story can be told in various ways; one spins it out, and the other is brief. Thus the Gospel is and should be nothing else than a chronicle, a story, a narrative about Christ, telling who he is, what he did, said, and suffered—a subject which one describes briefly, another more fully, one this way, another that way.

For at its briefest, the Gospel is a discourse about Christ, that he is the Son of God and became man for us, that he died and was raised, that he has been established as a Lord over all things. This much St. Paul takes in

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hand and spins out in his epistles. He bypasses all the miracles and incidents [in Christ’s ministry] which are set forth in the four Gospels, yet he includes the whole Gospel adequately and abundantly. This may be seen clearly and well in his greeting to the Romans [1:1-4], where he says what the Gospel is, and declares, “Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the Gospel of God which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the Gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord,” etc.

There you have it. The Gospel is a story about Christ, God’s and David’s Son, who died and was raised and is established as Lord. This is the Gospel in a nutshell. Just as there is no more than one Christ, so there is and may be no more than one Gospel....

Yes even the teaching of the prophets, in those places where they speak of Christ, is nothing but the true, pure, and proper Gospel—just as if Luke or Matthew had described it. For the prophets have proclaimed the Gospel and spoken of Christ, as St. Paul here [Rom. 1:2] reports and as everyone indeed knows. Thus when Isaiah in chapter fifty-three says how Christ should die for us and bear our sins, he has written the pure Gospel. And I assure you, if a person fails to grasp this understanding of the Gospel, he will never be able to be illuminated in the Scripture nor will he receive the right foundation.

Be sure, moreover, that you do not make Christ into a Moses, as if Christ did nothing more than teach and provide examples as the other saints do, as if the Gospel were simply a textbook of teachings or laws. Therefore you should grasp Christ, his words, works, and sufferings, in a twofold manner.

First as an example that is presented to you, which you should follow and

Testament, one can hardly understand the apostolic witness, since it so often presupposes and assumes the witness of the Scriptures of ancient Israel. The Old Testament establishes the “lexicon” of the apostolic testimony to the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth in that the very terminology of the Gospel is rooted in the Torah, Prophets, and Writings: Messiah, Son of David, Second Adam, suffering servant, prophet, priest after the order of Melchizedek, king, lamb of God, sacrifice, atonement, justification, kingdom of God, covenant, and so on. I would venture to say that every book in the New Testament is strongly influenced by the language and categories of the Old Testament, including Luke-Acts and the letters written to Gentiles.

The church claims that Jesus is the fulfillment, but the fulfillment of what? Of every sort of human dream or ideal or philosophy? Is Jesus the fulfillment of New Age

spirituality or American egalitarianism or individualism?

Without seeing how the Gospel is rooted in the Scriptures of ancient Israel, one can easily treat it as a waxen nose to be shaped by self-determined needs or by the ideologies and fads that prevail in a given culture. It is not surprising that the Jesus Seminar constructs Jesus as an itinerant Cynic philosopher or an egalitarian social reformer, since the Seminar’s excessive preoccupation with the criterion of dissimilarity in effect divorces the historical Jesus from the Torah, Prophets, and Writings.

For example, the Seminar posits a (Marcionite) historical Jesus who never cited the Scriptures!

We need the witness of the Old Testament lest we have a fulfillment without an older promise or a Christevent that stands isolated from a preceding plan of God. Such a view characterized Marcion, as Jaroslav Pelikan states: “This continuity Marcion denied, in the name of

ok For and Expect in the Gospels” imitate. As St. Peter says in I Peter 4, “Christ suffered for us, thereby leaving us an example.” Thus when you see how he prays, fasts, helps people, and shows them love, so also you should do, both for yourself and for your neighbor. However this is the smallest part of the Gospel, on the basis of which it cannot yet even be called Gospel. For on this level Christ is of no more help to you than some other saint. His life remains his own and does not as yet contribute anything to you. In short this mode [of understanding Christ as simply an example] does not make Christians but only hypocrites. You must grasp Christ at a much higher level. Even though this higher level has for a long time been the very best, the preaching of it has been something rare.

The chief article and foundation of the Gospel is that before you take Christ as an example, you accept and recognize him as a gift, as a present that God has given you and that is your own. This means that when you see or hear of Christ doing or suffering something, you do not doubt that Christ himself, with his deeds and suffering, belongs to you. On this you may depend as surely as if you had done it yourself; indeed as if you were Christ himself.

See, this is what it means to have a proper grasp of the Gospel, that is, of the overwhelming goodness of God, which neither prophet, nor apostle, nor angel was ever able fully to express, and which no heart could adequately fathom or marvel at. This is the great fire of the love of God for us, whereby the heart and conscience become happy, secure, and content. This is what preaching the Christian faith means. This is why such preaching is called Gospel, which in German means a joyful, good, and comforting “message”; and this is why the apostles are called the “twelve messengers.” ...Now when you have Christ as the foundation and chief blessing of your salvation, then the other part follows: that you take him as your example, giving yourself in service to your neighbor just as you see that Christ has given himself for you. See, there faith and love move forward, God’s commandment

is fulfilled, and a person is happy and fearless to do and to suffer all things.

Therefore make note of this, that Christ as a gift nourishes your faith and makes you a Christian. But Christ as an example exercises your works. These do not make you a Christian. Actually they come forth from you because you have already been made a Christian. As widely as a gift differs from an example, so widely does faith differ from works, for faith possesses nothing of its own, only the deeds and life of Christ. Works have something of your own in them, yet they should not belong to you but to your neighbor.

So you see that the Gospel is really not a book of laws and commandments which require deeds of us, but a book of divine promises in which God promises, offers, and gives us all his possessions and benefits in Christ. The fact that Christ and the apostles provide much good teaching and explain the law is to be counted a benefit just like any other good work of Christ. For to teach aright is not the least sort of benefit. We see too that unlike Moses in his book, and contrary to the nature of a commandment, Christ does not horribly force and drive us. Rather ... he teaches so gently that he entices rather than commands.

He begins by saying, “Blessed are the poor, Blessed are the meek,” and so on.

And the apostles commonly use the expression, “I admonish, I request, I beseech,” and so on. But Moses says, “I command, I forbid,” threatening and frightening everyone with horrible punishments and penalties. With this sort of instruction you can now read and hear the Gospels profitably.

When you open the book containing the Gospels and read or hear how Christ comes here or there, or how someone is brought to him, you should therein perceive the sermon or the Gospel through which he is coming to you, or you are being brought to him. For the preaching of the Gospel is nothing else than Christ coming to us, or us being brought to him.... ■

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the newness of the Gospel of Christ. Any continuity or sequence (ordo) was unnecessary, for the coming of Christ had been sudden and immediate.”1 Even the Letter to the Hebrews, which stresses perhaps more than anywhere else the discontinuities between the old covenant and the new covenant, presupposes continuity between the two. If we were to drive a hard wedge between the

eschatological framework for Christian theology. It sets our faith and life into the context of a history that moves toward a telos instead of the context of cyclical mythology. There is a future-oriented thrust throughout the story of Israel. The prophets make this explicit in their announcements of the coming day when God will set all things right. But we see it already implicitly in the narratives, which trace the wanderings of the patriarchs or the march of Israel from Egypt to The Old Testament keeps our Christian life facing outward toward the concrete Sinai, from Sinai to the promised land, and from exile to Zion. needs of the neighbor in the external world rather than turning inward toward Through our baptism into Jesus the Christ, we Gentiles the inner world of the soul. have been incorporated into his Israelites’ history, and thereby we have a share in Israel’s history. And we still have a two, we would end up with something like “old” apples “not-yet” existence, a foot in B.C. time as it were, as we and “new” oranges. Against such a dichotomy, the church needs to continue to stress the soteriological and evanwait in hope for the consummation, the eschatological gelical unity of the two parts of the Christian Bible. For kingdom of God, the glorious coming of the Christ who the church’s faith rests in the good news that comes from has been revealed to us not by flesh and blood but by his the God of ancient Israel, the good news about the fulFather. In short, the Old Testament helps prevent the fillment of the ancient promises and history by Jesus the Christian story from leaving the historical world of space Messiah, the Son of God. and time and flying off into the realm of platonic ideas Fourth, the Old Testament is necessary for underor turning inward to the private and individualistic world standing ecclesiology, particularly the place where of the subjective psyche.

Gentiles live in God’s plan. Gentiles do not form their own Finally, the Old Testament contains certain accents independent people of God, parallel to Israel. On the conthat otherwise might be obscured or overlooked by trary, they are foreign branches from a wild olive tree that Christian theology if we were to use only the New have been grafted into the cultivated olive tree, the Israel Testament. One thinks of wisdom literature, for example, of God (Rom. 11). By being incorporated into Christ, who and its invitation to acquire wisdom in the fear of the is Abraham’s seed reduced to one, they are descendants of Lord, to inquire into the enigmas of life and the art of livAbraham and fellow heirs of the ancient promise (Gal. 3). ing, to investigate with human reason and observation Formerly they were “aliens from the commonwealth of the whole created order from the ways of humans to the Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having ways of ants. The narratives that show the faithful servno hope and without God in the world,” but in Christ ing in the governments of this age, such as Joseph, Jesus they were brought near by his blood (Eph. 2).

Esther, and Daniel, encourage Christians in their vocaGod never gave promises directly to Gentiles as tion as citizens in the earthly city. Or consider the way Gentiles. The only place of salvation has always been that faith delights in the good and righteous law of God, located in Israel, and the Gentiles, if they would be as expressed, for example, by Psalms 19 and 119. While saved, must be brought under the promises made to we affirm with Paul the accusing and condemning role of Israel by the God of Israel. Only YHWH, the God of the law against sinners, we also need to hear this positive side, which, of course, is not absent from Paul himself Israel, deserves the label ’elohim and only in Zion is there (cf. Rom. 7:12, 22; 13:8-10). Furthermore, how many salvation. These particular claims of the B.C. biblical writsuffering Christians down through the ages have not ers were as scandalous in their context of religious pluralreceived great benefit from praying along with the ism as the claims of the apostles are today. The scandal of particularity was not first introduced during the first cenpsalms of lament in the name of the One who suffered, tury A.D. The only hope for Hispanics or Chinese or died, and was raised from the dead? In countless ways, the Christian faith and life would be greatly diminished Germans or Americans is to come to Zion and worship if we were to de-emphasize or neglect the Old the God of Israel, not to build their own Gentile religion Testament in the theological and dogmatic task. ■ or Gentile temple. It says something about our identity that ancient Israel’s psalms hold such a prominent place in the church’s liturgy, for they provide the church with a Dr. Raabe is professor of Old Testament at Concordia Theological God-pleasing “language” for prayer and praise to the God Seminary in St. Louis. An earlier version of this article was delivered of Israel through Christ Jesus. as an address at the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals’ 1998 Fifth, the Old Testament provides the historical and Colloquium in Colorado Springs.

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Interview with Edgar V. McKnight

Post-Modern Hermeneutics MR: To offer a single definition of a single “postmodernism” would be a quite unpostmodern thing to do. Nevertheless, could you give us some insight into the contemporary context of your project.

EM: Your insight about definition is important. The act of defining could be mistaken for a foundationalist move, the attempt to set up some new founding discourse to replace older unsatisfying critical foundations. Postmodernism is

EDGAR V. MCKNIGHT Research Professor and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Religion, Furman University Among Professor McKnight’s many books on hermeneutics is Postmodern Use of the Bible: The Emergence of ReaderOriented Criticism (Nashville: Abingdon, 1988).

too anti-foundational to spend much time in such definition. What is often found is a description of a particular expression of postmodernism (architecture, art, literature, philosophy, science, theology, and so on). But descriptions are dangerous when a particular description is taken to be a definition of postmodernism as a whole and used for criticism of postmodernism in general or for criticism of some other expression of postmodernism. In treatments of my work, for example, descriptions of how a postmodern awareness and sensitivity illuminates biblical interpretation have been taken as attempts to define postmodernism.

The description I would give of postmodernism is colored by my interest in a postmodern literary approach to biblical literature. The term “postmodern” is useful because of its imprecision and convoluted logic and because it allows connections to be made between a number of related movements. In a formal sense, the postmodern is an “advance” beyond the modern, but postmodernism in most of its expressions is not merely a new movement that has succeeded modernism. A dialectical relationship exists between the modern and the postmodern; the postmodern “advance” utilizes the assumptions and strategies of the modern in order to challenge them. “Modernism” may be used in a general way to refer to such things as the ascendancy of reason, the development of science and technology, and secularization, and the feeling that individuals and societies should be ushered toward such norms. “Postmodernism” from such a modernist perspective would be less confident of the values or “ideologies” of modernism.

Postmodernism would look with favor on a modification of systems dependent upon such modernist ideologies and the formation of “systems” that transcend such ideologies. Postmodernism is not anti-modernism, however;

the sentiment of postmodernism is that humans must move beyond the modern.

In my work, I emphasize the positive, constructive, or revisionary aspects of postmodernism—movement away from an obsession with the originating circumstances of biblical texts and movement to concern with the text itself and to ways that contemporary readers may make sense of the Bible. But I caution that this meaning (and even this way of making sense) must not be taken as final. For a foundationalist- or positivist-inclined individual, this caution may result in cynicism and skepticism.

In the skeptical mode, the critic remains above the local (worldly) context where meaning and signification occur in order to fault any and all interpretations as illegitimate domestications and/or to chastise critics and interpreters for their complicity (conscious or unconscious) with linguistic, literary, and cultural “oppression.” This “deconstructive” or eliminative move must be a phase in a comprehensive postmodern approach because of the temptation to universalize both the meaning one finds and the temporal cultural values involved in that meaning. The “domesticating” move that is criticized, however, must be maintained along with the postmodern if one wishes to engage in the business of making sense. One makes local, historically constrained, partial, temporary sense— or one makes no sense at all.

MR: How would you explain a “reader-oriented” approach to texts for those who might be hearing about this approach for the first time?

EM: Reader-oriented criticism approaches biblical literature in terms of the values, attitudes, and responses of actual readers. The contemporary reader, therefore, plays an active role in the production or creation of meaning and significance. Such approaches assume that

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texts and readers are not autonomous and/or complete in and of themselves. The text needs a reader to bring it to completion and the reader is influenced by the text in the process of making sense of the text. In order to appreciate reader-oriented approaches more fully, they may be seen first of all as poetic or literary approaches distinct from dogmatic and historical-critical approach-

art and its attention to close reading of the literary work itself instead of to history, biography, and so on. New Criticism has displaced approaches in the history of criticism that had focused upon the universe imitated in the literary work, the author, and the original audience. A “modern” new-critical literary approach seeks to find order within the works of literature themselves; a postmodern approach sees the r. Horton has written that Lutheran and Reformed congregations, by refusing to ordering within literature as (in part) the result of the creative activity of readers. Readers become politicized, are able to become counter-cultural models for genuine racial (individually and in “interpretative communities”) discern and reconciliation. I want to know where I might locate one of these congregations! actualize the form, conventions, and “ideas” of literary works in light of their competence, es. Then, as literary approaches, they may be differenticontext, and needs. A postmodern sensitivity will guard ated from other sorts of literary approaches—particularagainst equating the meaning and significance found by ly from New Criticism. readers today with the ultimate meaning and signifiPoetic or literary insights focus attention on literary cance. But readers will—and do—make sense, though it conventions, on genre, the literary affinities of the difbe (from some hypothetical point of ultimate truth) ferent units of the literary piece, the unity of the work, pragmatic, ad hoc, and local. It may be seen as a piece of and so on. With narrative, questions such as plot, action, the meaning. The removal of the demand for universal character, and motivation are involved. Literary insights quantification prior to finding local meaning and signifimay be compared and contrasted with theological and cance, in fact, increases the potential for meaning. historical insights. With the ancient dogmatic approach influenced by Platonism, the essential character of the MR: In Postmodern Use of the Bible, you argue that: “A Bible was its nature as a sign of God, a communication postmodern approach exists only in dialogue with modern or critical intrinsically far above the pitch of human minds but assumptions and approaches.” Does that mean that, despite all of the available as a sign. The Bible as divine revelation relatalk of being post-critical, the entrance fee to sit at the table is accepttivized (but did not preclude) historical and literary ance of the conclusions of nineteenth-century German criticism? And insights into the Bible. The critical and historical doesn’t that challenge the claim that your project is postmodern rather approach resulted from a transformation of worldview in the Enlightenment. The historicality of literary docuthan modern? ments and of other cultural phenomena replaced the framework provided by revelation and the theological EM: Postmodern scholars do not accept the specific conconceptualization of the ancient and medieval world. clusions of nineteenth-century German criticism as founCultural documents and artifacts are bound up not with dations for their work. That criticism is part of the “moda preexisting world, of which the artifacts are an exteriern” complex that is found problematic by postmodorization. They are to be understood precisely within ernists. But postmodern scholars do see themselves in the temporally and spatially limited context of their oridialogue with the critical tradition. They are not precritgins. ical or noncritical. The question and the cryptic answer When the Bible is viewed as literature, historical and require fuller explanation. The way that I have used dogmatic factors are not ignored. The historical factors, “postmodern” presupposes some “modern” perspective however, are seen as circumstances of origin, and the disthat is not satisfying in our contemporary epoch but covery of such circumstances is not seen as the ultimate opens the way for—and remains in dialogue with—a goal of study. The dogmatic aspects are not ignored, but “postmodern” perspective. Postmodern approaches are they are coordinated not with an ancient or modern dogindeed akin to premodern (precritical or noncritical) matic system. A contemporary literary approach may be approaches. In a premodern epoch, the cultural and concerned with translating doctrinal emphases into intellectual distance between the biblical world and the terms that are relevant for the modern reader and conreader’s world was small or nonexistent. No distinction sistent with the nature of the Bible as literature. And was made between the world depicted in the Bible and readers may be interested in moving back and forth the real historical world. Readers had little difficulty seebetween literary-critical insights and systematic and ing their own actions and feelings and the events of their dogmatic theology. world in relation to the biblical world. Resources of alleThe background for reader-oriented approaches to gory and typology assisted readers to see the Bible as a literature was the formalist and new-critical view of the whole, as depicting the whole of historical reality. Old independence and self-sufficiency of the literary work of Testament stories referred directly to specific temporal

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events and indirectly (as figures or types) to New Testament stories, events, and realities. But these (both Old Testament and New Testament) also corresponded to the historical experiences of the reader. The biblical world extended to and impinged upon the present, upon the world of the reader of any age. The power of a precritical reading extending from the Old Testament to the readers’ day without any rupture depended in part upon the fact that the world of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the world of Moses and Jesus were not the ultimate reality.

Above and beyond the world extending from Adam to the present was a divine world which alone made sense of this world. The worldview of the ancient and medieval world did not methodologically exclude the sacred but rather made the sacred the standard.

With the Enlightenment, the cultural and intellectual distance between the biblical world and the reader’s world increased, and the historicity of literary and other cultural phenomena replaced the framework of the theological conceptualization of the ancient and medieval world. History became the standard. The realistic feature of biblical narrative was related consciously to historical reference. The role of the biblical stories was to enable readers to uncover the historical sequence of events to which they referred directly or indirectly. Undermined was the correlation between the world of the reader and the biblical world made possible when both were seen as expressions of the preexisting divine world. This diminished the potential of the narratives to allow readers to make sense of themselves in relation to the world of the narrative in a somewhat direct fashion. A gap developed between philological and historical learning on the one hand and religious engagement and theological insight on the other hand.

Postmodern readers are readers who have experienced the intellectual distance between the biblical world and the contemporary world. Postmodern scholars, therefore, will indeed take cognizance of the work of German scholarship of the last century. They will see themselves as involved in the same intellectual enterprise as those scholars. But they will reexamine the presuppositions of those scholars and rediscover how the Bible may speak a word as effective on this side of “modernism” as it was on the other side of “modernism.” I must also admit that my brand of postmodernism is “premodern” in that it opens itself to truths and values that are excluded with a “modern” worldview. The notion of the sacred in my brand of postmodernism, for example, is not automatically excluded by a “modernist” dogma.

MR: You have suggested the parallel between postmodernism and Anabaptist sectarianism in the sixteenth century. Could you summarize the point?

EM: The concept of “church” is vital for appreciating the parallel between postmodernism and the Anabaptists (or Radical Reformers) and their descendants. The

Anabaptists and their descendants may be compared and contrasted with the Catholic and Protestant scholasticism and rationalism prevailing in their origin and history. In overly simplistic terms, the Catholic reading of the Bible was constrained by the church as a known extrinsic institution. The church was a foundational beginning and ending point, emphasizing tradition and authority.

The Protestant reading was constrained by Bible and doctrine. Luther and the other Protestant Reformers stressed the authority of the Bible and the doctrine of justification by faith alone over against the authority and doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy.

The Reformers were interested in getting the doctrine right. If the Roman Catholics were characterized by traditional authority, the Reformers were characterized by a rational-legal authority. The Anabaptists, for their part, felt that the Protestant Reformers had not completed the Reformation. The Reformers’ subservience to the state authorities and particularly their failure to return to what the Anabaptists saw as the New Testament church created the Anabaptist movement in German-speaking countries. The Anabaptists were, of course, concerned with both church and doctrine, but the way they saw themselves as church influenced their reading of the Bible and their concern for doctrine. They existed as church in the present. But that present Christian community was aware of itself as the primitive and the eschatological community. The Bible, then, had contemporary and not mere antiquarian relevance. The Anabaptists were like the Qumran community in that they read the Bible as referring to them and their lives in the present. They were like the Jesus of Luke’s Gospel who indicated that the Scripture he had just read in the synagogue in Nazareth “has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21).

In the Anabaptist vision, Scripture effects a link between the church of the apostles and its own. Texts that are historically set in another time and place are thereby freed to display their redemptive power in the present.

This program of biblical interpretation moves beyond historical questioning and critical understanding of the Bible.

Doing church and reading the Bible are coordinate activities. There was an immediacy and self-authentication in the encounter between believers and the biblical text. The context of a new people of God, directed toward Christian lifestyle and discipleship provided control, direction, and vitality. Political and ecclesiastical controls and barriers were removed. This involves a freedom, a liberty of conscience, that was politically and ecclesiastically dangerous in the sixteenth century. This freedom distinguished other marks of Anabaptist life: biblical authority, mission, discipleship, and community.

MR: In your estimation, what were some of the weaknesses of the magisterial Reformation on these points?

EM: I have suggested a difference between mainline

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Reformers and the Anabaptists that implies differences between confessional approaches and postmodern approaches. But I would probably emphasize not weaknesses on the part of the historical magisterial Reformation but a weakness on the part of the descendants of the Reformation—a reluctance to recapitulate the work of the Reformers in a new day or to move

insights assisted in clearing up questions the devotional approach did not answer. Still later, hermeneutics in the tradition of Schleiermacher and Bultmann provided a way to coordinate critical and creative aspects of interpretation. Against that background, I saw value in formalist and new-critical approaches to biblical texts, but at every formal or structural level a hermeneutic core was evident. So I was prepared to r. Horton has written that Lutheran and Reformed congregations, by refusing to give due weight to the contribution readers make (as individuals and in communities) in the actubecome politicized, are able to become counter-cultural models for genuine racial alization of biblical texts. I end up with a dynamic circle of reconciliation. I want to know where I might locate one of these congregations! interpretation that involves interdependent systems or circles. Praxis or the practice beyond the Reformers. I would state this weakness in the of religion in terms of individual piety, congregational words of John Robinson. Before they left for America, worship and service, and involvement in the larger world John Robinson cautioned the Pilgrims not to fall into the of God’s creation is one circle. Another is doctrine, the mindset of the Lutherans and Calvinists who refused to practice of doctrine, the statement of doctrine, and the move beyond what Luther and Calvin saw. “I beseech theological task of critical examination and revision of you remember it is an article of your church covenant, that statement. History and historical study form an that you be ready to receive whatever truth shall be important system as does language and literature. We made known to you from the written Word of God.” may begin with the circle of literature, but we check our During the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals’ experience of the Bible as literature with our experience Colloquium last year, I was asked about a creed that I with data from other circles. Does the language allow would take as foundational. After consideration, I our reading? What about history and theology? We may answered that for me the confession of Jesus Christ as relate the biblical material to our lives by retelling, by Lord was in fact a foundation for my reading of the Bible. transformation into the various artistic forms, by preachAs a Christian, I do read the Bible against that New ing, or by fitting the Bible into theological conceptualTestament confession. But later creeds and confessions izations. The Alliance will play its part by emphasizing are valuable—not as foundations or as infallible schemadoctrine (creeds and confessions), perhaps as a beginta, but as guardrails. Other guardrails are valuable— ning point in the circle of circles and also perhaps as a including historical-critical study—and the weight that conclusion. I am interested in observing how the circle of these guardrails have depends upon readers and commudoctrine will be related to the nexus of other circles. nities of readers—their values, attitudes, and responses.

I do not have to find the one correct historical meaning before I find meaning and significance for me and my MR: Your work has involved you in a great deal of dialogue with community in the text. I do not have to find the theoevangelical and confessional folks—including your participation in logical position from which all of the Bible makes sense our Alliance Colloquium last summer. As someone coming from a difbefore I find meaning in specific texts. I am freed to find ferent orientation, what would you say to us? and create meaning in my particular location. I am not only freed to find and create meaning, I am also freed to EM: I would not presume to set up guidelines for the bless the interpretation of those whose position is differAlliance—or any other group. But I would say that the ent from my own. The recognition of the role of readers Alliance has a valuable contribution to make within a and, therefore, the possibility of different actualizations more comprehensive ecumenical quest. That judgment of biblical texts relieves me of the drive to insist that all rests upon my own experiences and so perhaps a testiothers find the same meaning and significance that I find. mony is in order—a testimony that may or may not resonate with the experience of readers. I have arrived at a I am able to participate with integrity in different comhermeneutical reader-oriented literary approach to the munities of readers and interpreters. ■ Bible that frees me to read and interpret the Bible with confidence in light of my own history and tradition. The necessity to achieve certainty by means of universal scientific (or theological) validation seems to me too limiting. The certainty that I seek is the result of a fit between different circles or systems involved in interpretation.

Early in my life, a devotional approach within a local congregation was sufficient. Later, historical-critical

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| Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt

A Few Lashes for the Bible Belt

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preachers eventually accommodated themselves to the southAmerican history, took the unusual step last April of honoring a book focusing on ern culture. While retaining the evangelical substance of their message, they adopted more America’s religious past. Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt, by University of restrictive roles for women in the church and the home, and began to defend the pecuDelaware historian Christine Heyrman, explores how liar institution of chattel slavery. Southerners, finding Evangelicalism emerged as the dominant religious faith their basic cultural values no longer under assault from in the American South. Heyrman focuses her research these religious interlopers, embraced evangelical on churches and ministers in the Baptist, Methodist, Christianity and planted the roots of today’s Bible Belt. and, to a lesser extent, Presbyterian denominations, Heyrman received widespread accolades in addition from the years following the American revolution until to the Bancroft Prize. The reviewer for the Boston Globe, the mid-nineteenth century. Her basic thesis apparently unconcerned about sacrilege, gushed that “the might be summarized as “the South book has much of the beauty of the Psalms and the wischanged Evangelicalism more than dom of the prophets.” The New York Times applauded her Evangelicalism changed the South.” diligent research and described Southern Cross as a “wonHeyrman argues that evangelical “misderfully told and beautifully written story.” 1 sionaries” sent from northern churches to the South in the middle of the eighteenth century Perhaps not surprisingly, Heyrman is concerned with encountered significant resistance from the the contemporary applications of her research. She first Anglican hierarchy and the entrenched southbecame interested in Evangelicalism in 1976, the “year of ern culture. The evangelicals, she believes, inithe evangelical,” when Jimmy Carter’s public discussion tially had rather progressive attitudes toward of his faith corresponded with a resurgence in “born race and gender roles. They vociferously again” Christianity.2 Even more currently she finds the opposed slavery and encouraged integrated worPromise Keepers Movement intriguing, having written ship. They permitted expanded roles for women an op-ed piece on it in the New York Times and, more probin church and in society. They employed an emolematically, offering her observations on Promise tional worship style and appeared to show little Keepers in the epilogue of Southern Cross. concern for social refinement or deference to Heyrman leaves no doubt where she stands on the Southern Cross: authority hierarchies. All of this, Heyrman argues, debate over the “Southern Man” contested in song The Beginnings was virtually anathema to the entrenched southern culbetween Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd: the “Southern of the Bible Belt ture of slavery, patriarchy, and rigid social mores. Not Man,” or more precisely southern men and the culture

by Christine Heyrman surprisingly, while the evangelical message initially they created, are the villains. Heyrman argues that evanenjoyed some success among southern women and rural gelical Christianity only received widespread acceptance University of North lower classes, southern white men came to massively and adherents in the South when it adapted itself to the Carolina Press, 1997. resist the influence and even the presence of these evanstifling social mores of the prevailing power structure gelical carpetbaggers. wholly controlled by white southern men. Like so many Rather than abandoning their mission entirely, other of today’s “new social historians,” Heyrman is Heyrman concludes, the evangelical ministers merely obsessed with power relations in history—which groups adapted their message. In the face of southern remonhad power, which groups were powerless, how the powstrance toward such radical social values, evangelical erful sought to control and/or exploit the powerless. As he Bancroft Prize, commonly regarded as the most prestigious award for scholarship on

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with many methodologies and interpretive themes, this one has merit. Yet, the focus on power relations eventually serves to obscure rather than illuminate the full story.

The acclaim of the Bancroft Prize committee, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times notwithstanding, this reviewer found Southern Cross significantly flawed. The considerable insights of Heyrman’s research and argument are obscured by her imprecise definitions, questionable conclusions, and sometimes unsettling animus toward the subjects of her book.

To begin with, Heyrman fails to offer a specific definition of just who were the “evangelicals” that her book focuses on. Admittedly, the theological/historical definition of “evangelical” continues to inspire fervent debate in many quarters today, but Heyrman’s inability to even broadly define her subjects severely undermines any generalizations or insights she may later offer. At the beginning of the book, she attempts to distinguish “evangelicals” in the early American South as “those who spoke the language of Canaan,” which she describes as a metaphor for a certain type of “new awareness” following a conversion experience—also only vaguely defined.3 Throughout the rest of the book, however, she uses the term “evangelical” interchangeably with “Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians,” or other times just “Methodists and Baptists.” This only begs the question—were all Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians also “evangelicals,” even if they did not have such a conversion experience? What about Anglicans in the South who did have a conversion experience—were they “evangelicals”? Such questions should not be dismissed as mere academic quibbling, for the very thrust of Heyrman’s argument rests on the dramatic accommodations that “evangelicals” made in order to dominate the South, and yet she does not seem sure just who these evangelicals were—and were not.

Nor does Heyrman’s evidence itself fully satisfy. In order to demonstrate the purportedly profound changes that evangelical cler-

somewhat lesser scale than earlier years. It goes without saying that evangelical churches still generally refrained from ordaining women or permitting them significant roles in church government. In short, Heyrman hardly demonstrates the paradigmatic shift in women’s roles on which her argument supposedly rests.

She encounters similar difficulties in supporting her contention that evangelicals dramatically altered their views on slavery. Some eighteenth-century evangelical preachers had courageously denounced slavery, and integrated worship was not uncommon in many eighteenth-century churches. Heyrman finds some evidence that as Methodists and Baptists began to proliferate in the South, churches became more segregated and pastors more muted in their criticism of slavery. However, she presents no evidence that these early nineteenth-century evangelical preachers actively endorsed slavery. Yet one would have expected evangelical clergy to vocally support the South’s distinctive institution of chattel slavery if indeed evangelicals sought so desperately to ingratiate themselves to southern culture. (To be fair, by the mid-nineteenth century it appears that some clergy were endorsing slavery, but Heyrman’s thesis only addresses alleged changes in the early nineteenth century.) Once again, her evidence, while not nonexistent, is underwhelming.

This overdeterminism—offering strong claims backed by scanty evidence—points in turn to one of the most disturbing aspects of Southern Cross, and that is Heyrman’s sometimes thinly veiled contempt for the subjects of her book. She declares that the South “had long been a culture steeped in misogyny,”4 describes preachers who “crowed over their success” in subduing boisterous women parishioners,5 brazenly refers to serious doctrinal debates among Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists as “the sober fanaticism of hair-splitting religious controversy,”6 accuses preachers of “exploiting the filial anxieties of younger white men,”7 and summarily concludes that the most important goal for ministers was “vindicating their mastery within the public sphere”8 (emphasis added).

Heyrman simply does not like these people, seeing them as hateike so many other of today’s “new social historians,” Heyrman is obsessed with ful, manipulative, deeply irrational, and power-hungry. She concludes Southern Cross with an power relations in history—which groups had power, which groups were awkward epilogue describing (and lamenting) what she perpowerless, how the powerful sought to control and/or exploit the powerless. ceives as the present-day patriarchal authoritarianism of the gy made to ingratiate themselves to the southern culture, she focusPromise Keeper’s movement and conservative evangelical churches. es on the roles of women and African Americans. Concerning the At its worst, then, Southern Cross lapses from academic history into former, Heyrman describes evangelicals in the late eighteenth centuan ideological polemic, obscuring what could otherwise have been ry as encouraging expansive roles for women in church life and govan innovative interpretation of religion and culture in the American ernance, whereas by the early nineteenth century evangelicals in the South. Of course, readers of modernReformation may have little South had regressed and severely restricted women’s church particiaffinity for a southern Evangelicalism characterized by emotionalism, pation. However, while she relates some anecdotal accounts of pietism, and revivalistic fervor rather than a confessional understandwomen sharing testimonies or exhortations in eighteenth-century ing of the doctrines of grace and the centrality of the Church. But church meetings, she concedes that she finds virtually no evidence readers of modernReformation, and all thoughtful Christians, ought that evangelicals in any denomination adopted policies of ordaining to have an interest in accurate, judicious, and insightful works of hiswomen, permitting women to preach, or even allowing women to tory. On these counts, Southern Cross disappoints.■ actively participate in church governance. In the later years of the eighteenth-century and early years of the nineteenth-century, William Inboden Heyrman continues to find occasional anecdotal evidence of women Graduate Student in History testifying or exhorting in church or prayer meetings, although on a Yale University

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The Tabula Rasa Fallacy

[ C O N T I N U E D F R O M PA G E 3 2 ]

Scripture, or—in the ultimate case—overturned by Scripture. This is also why a devout Presbyterian and a devout Baptist are not going to sort out what Scripture says about, say, baptism and church government, simply by taking out a couple of lexica and working over a few texts together during free moments some Friday afternoon. What is at stake, for both of them, is how these matters are nestled into a large number of other points, which are themselves related to an entire structure of theology.

And yet, if this is all that could be said, then the postmodernists would be right: the interpretive community determines everything. But if believers are in principle willing to change their minds (i.e., their systems), and are humbly willing to bring everything, including their systems, to the test of Scripture, and are willing to enter courteous discussion and debate with brothers and sisters who are similarly unthreatened and are eager to let Scripture have final authority, then systems can be abandoned, modified, reformed.

The number of topics affected by such considerations is very large—not only the old chestnuts (baptism, the significance of holy communion, the understanding of covenant, Sabbath/Sunday issues), but more recent questions as well (e.g., theonomy, the place of “charismatic” gifts). For our purposes, we note that some of these manifold topics have to do with what is mandated of believers today.

Let us take a simple example. In recent years, a number of Christians have appealed to Acts 15:28 (“It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us....”) to serve as a model for how the Church comes to difficult decisions involving change in disputed areas—in the case of Acts, circumcision and its significance, and in the modern case, the ordination of women. Is this a fair usage of Acts 15:28? Does it provide a definitive model for how to change things formerly accepted in the Church?

But believers with any firm views on the exclusive authority of the canon, or with any sophisticated views on how the new convent believers were led in the progress of redemptive history to re-think the place of circumcision in the light of the cross and resurrection, will not be easily persuaded by this logic. Has every change introduced by various churches across the centuries been justified, simply because it was blessed with the words “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us”? Does the Church now have the right to change things established in and by the canon in the way that the early Church changed things established in and by the Old Testament canon, as if we were similarly located at a strategic turning point in redemptive history? The mind boggles at the suggestion. But what is clear in any case is that such issues cannot properly be resolved without thinking through, in considerable detail, how the parameters of the interpretive decisions are tied to much more substantial theological matters. ■ Dr. Carson is professor of New Testament at the Divinity School of Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois. Among his more than twenty books, The Gagging of God (Zondervan, 1996) most directly considers the challenges of contemporary interpretation.

E N D N O T E S Knowing What You’re Looking for in the Bible by Michael Horton 1 The Christian Faith, trans. by James Clark (East Lewes, Scotland: Focus, 1992), 41.

2 Richard Gaffin, Jr., Resurrection and Redemption (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1978), 22.

3 Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale, 1974), 1.

4 Ibid.

5 H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 44-5.

6 bid., 53.

7 Johann Baptist Metz, “A Short Apology of Narrative,” Concilium, 85 (1973), 88.

Recovering the Riches of Premodern Exegesis by Mickey L. Mattox 1 Stephen E. Fowl, ed., The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), introduction.

“But That’s Your Interpretation” Realism, Reading, and Reformation by Kevin J. Vanhoozer 1 Elizabeth Castelli, Stephen Moore, and Regina Schwartz, eds., The Postmodern Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 14.

2 John R. Searle, Mind, Language, and Society: Philosophy in the Real World (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 19.

3 Stephen Fowl, Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Inquiry (Malden, Mass.: Blackwells, 1998), 34.

4 Ibid., 55.

5 Ibid., vii.

6 Ibid., 81.

7 Jeffrey Stout, “What Is the Meaning of a Text?”, New Literary History 14 (1982), 112.

8 Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), xi.

9 Fowl, 60.

10 Ibid., 119-26.

11 For a fuller exposition of this and other points in this section, see my Is There a Meaning in this Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), especially chapter 7.

The “Death of the Author” This entry is taken from Stuart Sim, ed., The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought (Cambridge, England: Icon Books, 1998), 221.

1

The Tabula Rasa Fallacy by D. A. Carson For further discussion of additional points on this particular interpretive challenge, see my “Must I Learn How to Interpret the Bible?”, modernReformation, May/June 1996.

2 Ibid.

1

A Plea for Greater Dogmatic Engagement with the Old Testament by Paul R. Raabe 1 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1971), 78.

Reviews: Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt Quoted in “History prof.’s book earns prestigious Bancroft Prize,” University of Delaware Update, Vol. 17, No. 27, April 16, 1998.

2 Ibid.

3 4.

4 173.

5 198.

6 247.

7 245.

8 252.

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James Montgomery Boice

The Druids Are Coming

K

en Myers is the interviewer and power behind the Mars Hill Audio Journal, and a number

entertainment-based world that some people at least are rejecting. of years ago he was the speaker for the pastors’ seminar of the Philadelphia Conference We need to do serious teaching about God and the Bible.

Paul did this in approaching on Reformation Theology. I was present for his lectures, and I remember an answer he the pagans of his day. He did not assume they knew anything about the God of revelation, gave to a question about the emergence of a new spiribecause they did not, and he certainly did not try to copy tuality in America, something even the secular media the pagan religions or beguile people into the kingdom by have been talking and writing about. He said that it was market-driven strategies. In Athens, Paul began by proa “good news/bad news” situation. “The good news is claiming God as the Creator and Sovereign Ruler over histhat there is a new spirituality. The bad news is that the tory to whom we are responsible. He proclaimed him as Druids are coming.” the Judge who commands sinful human beings to repent.

A witticism like that sticks in my mind, which means Paul taught that we should seek God out and worship him. that I have thought about it many times since. And I agree: It was only after substantial teaching of this kind that he the Druids are coming!

Every kind of fantastic religion is JAMES began to preach Jesus Christ, and even then he spoke of out there, from the paganism of the ancient world to the MONTGOMERY him first as the One appointed by the Creator to be our paganism of the new.

That may be bad.

But the more I BOICE Judge. He said that God “has given proof of this to all men think about it the less I think of it as a truly bad situation. by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31).

The reason for the proliferation of so many diverse Pastor, Tenth Presbyterian If we follow Paul’s approach we will be faithful in our religious cults is that there actually is a newly emerging Church teaching, rather than popular by our entertaining. And we hunger for the spiritual. The reason for the hunger is that will start at the beginning! We will teach about God, about the barren rationalism of the last two hundred years has the moral law, about responsibility to God, and about collapsed, and people are beginning to ask rightly if repentance and the Gospel, which is the real good news. there might not be something beyond what we can see Not long ago I was given a video of a four year work and touch and measure. They have been taught that “the among the Taliabo Indians of Indonesia. Two couples spent cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be,” as Carl Sagan said on the “Cosmos” television series. But they sense four years learning the Taliabo language, and it was only at that we are actually more than atoms operating in a the end of the time that they gathered the Indians to hear the mechanical, predetermined way and are seeking for Bible’s story. They began with the Genesis account of creation, whatever missing spiritual element there might be. the fall, the flood, and the calling of Abraham. They recountThe heart is deceitful above all things, and a search for ed the history of the Jewish people. Only then did they come “god” apart from God seeking the individual is actually a runto the story of the Savior who was crucified but raised again ning away from God. It is the kind of suppression and subto life. The people listened to the entire narrative, and at the stitution that Paul describes in Romans 1:18-22. But people end, when Jesus’ death and resurrection were proclaimed, are always doing that in one way or another. What is differthey committed themselves to him in massive numbers. ent in this situation is a new, serious openness to things that We need to follow that pattern today, because our culare beyond human ability to measure, explain and control. ture is as pagan as the Taliabos. The Druids are here. But This creates an opportunity for those who know God we have a better story than they do. We have a true one. through Jesus Christ and the Bible. It creates new possibiliWe need to teach it to those who need to hear. ■ ties for evangelism. But we need to approach our responsibility in the right way, not aping the pagans with their senDr. Boice is the president of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals suously designed appeals, still less replicating the empty, and senior minister of Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia.

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