An oddity of philosophical / theological history: the great minds, whom we now remember, often developed their ideas in contradistinction from, not principally a preceding great mind who founded a school, but that school’s later and lesser lights who took their founder’s insight too far — whom we do not now remember.
This essay was originally written for Professor Kavin Rowe’s Spring 2023 seminar on New Testament Theology. I am posting it without edits or revisions other than reformatting; while I do not see the substance as needing any significant revision, there are no doubt minor word choices I would make differently if writing today. No doubt, also, I would expand on some topics more — particularly the Christian understanding of history — if I were writing to a less restrictive page count than Professor Rowe imposed upon us! But such a restriction was an immensely useful exercise, and I am a sharper thinker and writer for it. — TBC
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New Testament Theology is the synthetic, canonical interpretation of the New Testament according to the principle of faith, from the perspective of faith, for the purpose of faith. Without the perspective and purpose of faith there is no canonical collection to be called “the New Testament” in the first place — to say nothing of the writings in that collection — and without the principle of faith there is no defending the concept of “theology” (or “canon”). A definition of the discipline without faith is implausible — perhaps even impossible.
Obviously, all three of these prepositional phrases — according to the principle of faith, from the perspective of faith, for the purpose of faith — must be elucidated, as must be the terms “synthetic” and “canonical” along the way. Accordingly, that task will occupy the bulk of this essay. In the concluding pages I will outline the shape of the constructive proposal implicit in the above definition.
I.
Interpreting the New Testament according to the principle of faith is the most important element and depends on making the movement of faith or trust. Every act of interpretation presupposes an act of trust. Trust can never be reduced to an abstract affirmation of “the facts” but is always, inescapably, trust in a person. The question is therefore never “what do you believe?” so much as “whom do you trust?” — and New Testament Theology consists essentially in interpreting the New Testament according to its own answer to this question.
In a sense the great achievement of twentieth-century science and philosophy is to demonstrate the inescapability of trust in all knowledge. What Ernst Troeltsch identified in historiography as the principle of criticism — the necessity of making probabilistic rather than binarily definitive judgments about past events — was shown within decades of Troeltsch’s death in 1923 to go, like Bertrand Russell’s turtles, all the way down. Starting in 1927, Werner Heisenberg’s famous “uncertainty principle” showed the limit to precision and completeness in observation to be unavoidable — part of the quantum mechanics revolution demonstrating an inescapable randomness and indeterminacy at the deepest layer of physical reality. By 1931 Kurt Gödel had definitively proved his “incompleteness” theorems demonstrating that no mathematical-logical system could be constructed so perfectly as to not require at least one axiom underivable from within that system. And Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation, articulated in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), that the meanings of words depend substantially on their function within certain “language-games” spelled the death of a logical-symbolic understanding of language. Karl Barth spoke more rightly than he could have known in 1921 when he insisted on being more critical than the critics.
Postwar philosophical and sociological developments extended the scope of this fundamental principial uncertainty to all of daily life and thought. The hermeneutic tradition in philosophy extending back to Schleiermacher through Dilthey and Heidegger reached its apex in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960), which definitively exposed the Enlightenment’s scientistic “prejudice against prejudices” as a methodological fantasy in the humanities. No interpretation is possible without the interpreter bringing him or herself into the “fusion of horizons” which constitutes the act of interpretation. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) similarly upended the notion of linear “scientific progress” as a modernist myth: “settled” science does not evolve like the Ship of Theseus, seamlessly replaced bit by bit until it is entirely updated and overhauled, but rather occasionally finds itself shipwrecked on new kinds of data and in need of total reconstruction using new materials. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s influential The Social Construction of Reality (1966) described the extent to which the first-person experience of reality is influenced by “society” even as that same society is acted on by persons — a line of reasoning startlingly confirmed in subsequent decades by experiments in neuroscience demonstrating “intersubjectivity”: I really am something like the sum of the five people with whom I spend the most time.
All these insights, of course, can be and have been horrendously misapplied, particularly in the Nietzschean-Freudian style of certain postmodernists, who took them as license to unleash a sweeping relativism of values and adopt a suspicious posture toward all claims of truth. This application, however, is exactly wrong. What they really represent — particularly germane, and suggestive, for questions of theology — is the indissolubility of trust within knowledge. If no text can be “objectively” interpreted, if no interpreter can avoid being influenced by persons and social constructs, if the experience of reality is itself in a way dependent on how one seeks to observe it — then it becomes supremely important whom one chooses to trust or take to be reliable. I cannot choose by fiat how I construe reality, nor can I verify every point of my construal by direct experience; my life is too fragile and potentially short for that. Accepting that there is no singularly, objectively “right” way to construe reality does not guarantee that I cannot hit on a wrong way to construe reality, with potentially tragic results. I have never been hit by a car, nor seen anyone else hit by a car; my construal of reality is lacking (a radical empiricist, or someone wishing for my death, might say) key data; I must nevertheless trust my parents, my friends, and my fiancée who implore me to heed the danger of vehicular homicide and stay attentive while out on my road bike, rather than performing an experiment (on) myself with potentially deadly results. To wrong ways of construing reality, reality itself responds with cold, hard, frequently painful resistance.
There is therefore finally no alternative between a hermeneutic of suspicion and a hermeneutic of trust — and while the hermeneutic of trust may still get me killed if I trust foolishly, the hermeneutic of suspicion is all but guaranteed to lead to my destruction. So why should I not admit to myself whether or not I trust the New Testament and — if yes — embrace a comprehensive hermeneutic of trust for it? Trust “the New Testament,” I say, but I am really trusting a whole array of persons. Some of them translated and edited the Bibles and Greek New Testaments in which I read the text. The trustworthiness of their product depends in turn on a long history of ecclesiastics and caretakers who recognized these books as texts in and through which God speaks, and who collected them together as the definitive, normative textual corpus of the word of God. Those churchmen (and women) trusted both that the apostles, or their trusted assistants and associates, had written these books, and trusted the authors themselves to have written faithfully — to have been trustworthy witnesses to what they had seen and heard, to what God wanted them to write. Text-critical history can with real confidence establish the most probably original form of the text, for errors do creep in and persist even among persons of good faith; it can tell us all sorts of interesting and potentially useful things about the history of those texts’ transmission; it can even provide good evidence that certain persons are not trustworthy tradents — but it cannot finally determine whether an author is positively trustworthy.
At bottom — as at the top — is the person of Jesus. Deciding whether I trust the apostles’ portrayal of Jesus presses inexorably the question of whether I trust Jesus himself: for the Jesus of apostolic history demands to be received as the Christ of faith. A Jesus of suspicious, critical historical reconstructions may make less-sweeping claims — or no claims at all. The Jesus who emerges from a hermeneutic of trust does not and cannot make less than the absolute claim of faithful allegiance. “Choose this day whom you will serve…”
Interpreting the New Testament according to the principle of faith means that I first accept the absolute claim of this Jesus on my faith and trust, and then accept the claims of the apostolic writers about the immediate material implications of my faith in Jesus. It means that I interpret their writings on the presumption of coherence and sensibility, rejecting interpretations that assume they did not know what they were talking about or failed to communicate their meaning effectively. It means also that I interpret them synthetically, not seeking to make points of different emphasis or expression between writers (e.g., Galatians 2 and James 2) into principles in ultimate and irreconcilable tension — adherence to one of which must become the real badge of faith — but rather to discover a capacious, inter-canonical coherence between their writings. It similarly means that when seemingly intractable problems of history emerge from the text, I seek the maximally charitable and trusting interpretation. It means that I accept the possibility of divine causality as the simplest explanation for the miraculous, rather than bracketing it because, like Lessing, I (alas) no longer experience such miracles in daily life. Most of all it means that I accept, as a presumption of my exegesis, the whole chain of reasoning that runs from “he is not here; he is risen, just as he said!” through “God has made him both Lord and Christ” to “I am the first and the last, and the living one” — an inescapably theological chain of reasoning; which is to say that in doing New Testament interpretation I should and will always find myself at least embroidering a corner of the glorious garment of New Testament Theology.
II.
Interpreting the New Testament according to the perspective of faith, therefore, means situating myself in the community of interpretation that is formed by faith in Jesus: the church. This is true in two dimensions (if not more). For one thing, if I adopt a hermeneutic of trust toward the Jesus who speaks to me in the pages of the New Testament, I will discover that his proclamation of the kingdom (Matt. 4:17) led immediately to gathering a band of disciples around him (Matt. 4:18ff) to listen to his teaching (Matt. 5:1ff) and live according to it (Matt. 7:24ff). There is no individualistic response to “repent and believe the good news” that satisfies how Jesus expects my faithful allegiance to be expressed. For another thing, if I understand myself to be interpreting “the New Testament,” I am immediately under the rule — the κάνων — of the church. The community of Jesus’ followers has selected — or better, recognized — in advance for me that set of writings which enjoy authoritative status in it, and given it the name “the New Testament.” They did so according to the principle of faith: on the basis of trust in Jesus and the apostles who wrote about him. The enduring existence of this community, formed by faith and operating according to the principle of faith, is the only reason to interpret the New Testament as a “New Testament” rather than as the (no doubt very interesting) “early Christian literature” which William Wrede preferred to interpret. In combination, the Christian community and the New Testament canon in which it functions authoritatively form the perspective of faith.
At this point, some — paradigmatically Wrede — might object that the Christian community is far too much of a mess, historically and contemporarily, for the ecclesiastical judgment of canonicity to have any enduring value. The so-called “process of canonization” was a polemical and exclusivist exercise from the beginning, meant to draw sharp boundaries between “orthodoxy” and “heresy” that are historically unjustifiable. Furthermore, the “canonical” literature itself underwent a process of development and alteration as the post-apostolic communities sought (and created) authoritative guidance on issues that could not have been foreseen by Jesus or his apostles. How can such a self-evidently flawed rule remain not only valuable but indeed authoritative?
These standard objections are in part answered — or at least responded to — by the principle of faith. A posture of suspicion will always be inclined to interpret any evidence of the church’s messiness as warrant for the church’s invalidation, as much when it comes to the first as in the twenty-first century. Many of the scholarly judgments about the development and alteration of the canonized writings rest — at some level in their own genealogies — on maximally suspicious interpretation of odd details in the texts, presuming that the various redactors and editors were simultaneously so brilliant as to hide their work from subsequent generations and so incompetent as to leave self-evidently contradictory and messy texts for nineteenth-century historical critics to discover. (The notion that pre-Enlightenment exegesis was wholly “pre-critical” and naïve is undermined by reading Origen, Jerome, or Augustine and seeing them employ — sometimes advance upon — the critical tools of their days. The difference is in the first place a hermeneutic of suspicion rather than trust.)
But equally important is the institutional analogy to the principle of faith: the perspective of faith. Any community that orients itself around reading has judgments about what texts are central to its life and thought, as well as what kinds of readings are acceptable and appropriate. The question is how implicit or explicit those are. And though the history of the canon is as messy as that of the church, the judgments about central texts and acceptable readings appear to emerge quite early and straightforwardly. The “rule of the truth” identified by Irenaeus at the end of the second century was not a criterion for canonizing the New Testament writings; rather it was a kind of aural lens through which the church focused its habits of listening to divine truth, and through which it listened to “early Christian literature” to discern the voice of God instructing them in a living and active way. Here is the place for the crucial insight of Brevard Childs that the canonical process included the transmission, even editing, of the canonical writings, precisely because those who transmitted them did so in response to hearing the living voice of God speaking in them. The rule of the truth and the canonical writings formed a hermeneutical spiral that invited deeper recognition and better comprehension of both as true and canonical. The church is the community that lives in — lives out — that hermeneutical spiral.
Of course, in the present situation there is not one “church.” The prayer of Christ in John 17 that all his followers would be one has so far been answered only in a mystical sense if at all. Which church am I to trust to provide the perspective of faith from which I interpret? While no answer seems likely to be truly satisfactory this side of the eschaton (one thinks of Robert Jenson’s remark about the “impossibility” of doing theology in the situation of a divided church), a few principles seem to flow from the above. Trust the providence of God placing one in a particular tradition. Trust a church that seeks basic doctrinal and ethical conformity with the generations that recognized the canon of Scripture: orthodox Trinitarianism, Chalcedonian Christology, the basic pattern of New Testament ethics. Trust a church that seeks to submit itself to the New Testament and live out what it hears the voice of God speaking. Most of all, trust a church that preaches Christ, the crucified and risen One.
Interpreting the New Testament from the perspective of faith means that I am freed to begin my investigation of the canonical writings with the deposit of theological teaching laid down in the rule of the truth. It means that I accept the church’s historic judgment about ruling out — and ruling in — certain categories of readings on explicitly theological grounds; Marcion’s read of Paul is right out. It means joyfully identifying my scholarship as from (and for) the church, rather than some other, less cosmically significant community of interpretation. The beginnings of New Testament Theology are in the basics of Christian theology, not in some other discourse; and the basics of Christian theology are found in the Christ’s church.
III.
The third phrase flows directly out of the second. Interpreting the New Testament according to the purpose of faith means not only situating my interpretation in the church but for the church. What is the church’s task in interpreting the New Testament? It is listening to the voice of God in order to be given life and governed by it. It is the unfolding of the sacred text for the upbuilding of the members of the body in faith.
The Kantian ideal of the disinterested scholar, excising her own interests when coming to a text in bold pursuit of the truth wherever it might lead, was in its best form a noble fiction. Even a valuable fiction, perhaps; there can be no doubt that the historical-critical posture uncovered real insights into the text and history of Scripture, with which all who seek to be intellectually honest must reckon. Yet far more often the fiction was exposed within a generation or two as a vicious lie. The “life of Jesus” research of the nineteenth century produced (in the memorable image of Albert Schweitzer) a succession of scholars staring down deep wells, seeing their own faces dimly reflected, and triumphantly declaring that they had discovered the real Jesus — Who looked, after all that labor, just like them. The enormous philological and linguistic scholarship that produced Kittel’s Dictionary turned out to be not only based on disastrously misguided semantic theory (memorably skewered in James Barr’s 1961 The Semantics of Biblical Language) but also shot through at numerous points with the pernicious strain of racialized anti-Judaism that infected German biblical scholarship from at least the late nineteenth century right up to 1945. Because it is done by human beings and not by God, scholarship usually turns out to have an “interest” — especially when it is declared most energetically, as in the classic historical-critical mode, that all interests have been put aside.
What use then for the historical-critical method in Christian scholarship, or indeed in New Testament Theology? The proper analogy is the one St. Augustine recommended with respect to pagan philosophy: the Egyptian goods asked of Israel’s neighbors on the night of the Exodus. Carried — baptized, even — through the Red Sea, the precious metals and beautiful things can be righteously put to the task of building and beautifying the Tabernacle. The Bezalels and Oholiabs of the Christian academy are free to use whatever materials and tools they find God commanding them to use in their work; God even promises that His Spirit of wisdom and understanding will guide them. But the Egyptian gold can also be molded into a deadly idol. Wrede and Troeltsch were merely being honest: if Moses delays in coming down from the mountaintop, Aaron is ready to submit to a very different spirit and replace New Testament Theology with the history of religious ideas found in early Christian literature. “Look, I threw the gold into the fire, and out came this calf!” is the time-worn protest of scholars affecting shock that their deliberately faithless investigations of the New Testament have produced the dissolution of faith in the pews. That idolatry is nonsensical and self-defeating is, historically speaking, no proof against its indulgence.
Interpreting the New Testament for the purpose of faith means that I pursue biblical scholarship that serves the people of God — and God Himself. It means that I seek interpretations and angles on the text that glorify God and are, to use the patristic language, “fitting” of God’s character and attributes. It also means that I avoid tearing down and plucking up the faith of my brothers and sisters in the church by my scholarship, seeking rather to build up and to plant — understanding myself as at best God’s worker and craftsman; they are God’s field and building. Likewise, it means that I interpret with an eye to the practical effects of similar interpretations that have come before — which necessitates knowing the history of interpretation and accepting that it is possible that earlier, churchly interpreters may have understood the text better than me despite my being “up to date.” It means, I submit, that I accept something like the medieval understanding of multiple senses of Scripture, rather than restricting my investigations to a probably nonexistent singular sense — even as I seek to keep myself and my interpretations more rooted in the “plain sense” than at least some medieval exegetes were willing to do. New Testament Theology necessitates an expansive understanding of the interpreter’s task along some lines; historical and grammatical exposition will not be sufficient, and no scholar has the self-control necessary to stick exclusively to those tasks anyway. Better to expand the task along such lines, then, that explicitly seek to serve and strengthen the church.
IV.
All this has so far resulted in only principles of interpretation. What would a work of New Testament Theology produced according to this proposal, functioning on the principles we have outlined, actually look like?
It would first of all be shaped canonically: not seeking to track a theological idea’s development from historically earlier to later sources, but from canonically earlier to later texts. Start with the teaching of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Look from the differing angle of the Gospel of John. See how the Spirit-empowered followers of the Way apply and teach about it in the Acts of the Apostles. Watch how the apostles and their friends — Paul, James, Peter, Jude, John, the writer of Hebrews — discuss it in their letters. Observe finally how it is transfigured in the Apocalypse. To be sure, there is (as Childs recognized) a necessary place for discussing the historical development of the ideas, but let it be done within the context of each text, rather than as a control on which texts are discussed and in which order. Leave the “history of religious ideas” to the departments of religious studies, which are better-versed in that sort of thing anyways; let scholars — theologians — of the New Testament be unapologetically theological.
Then, with the differing canonical perspectives on that theological idea expounded, they should be synthesized. Let coherence emerge between the differing perspectives; not a root coherence that best explains the historical development of the various perspectives, but an apex coherence that best draws their gaze up to a single focus. Such a coherence may not be explicitly found in any of the New Testament texts, nor be plausibly identifiable as what any of the New Testament writers might have specifically thought they meant. Its discernment may require the Scriptural imagination of the theologian or the application of insights from the history of interpretation and theology. (It may even take prayer to discern.) None of this should be cause for theological concern: “For now we see in part and we prophesy in part…”
As the Pauline dictum suggests, New Testament Theology may ultimately be an eschatological discipline. The promise of the historical-critical method was originally that the one true meaning of the text and an accurate, coherent history of development could be arrived at and universally agreed upon, so that a more solid foundation might be laid for Christian reading of the New Testament than was supplied by the New Testament itself. That turned out to be a pipe dream which eroded its own foundations. Turning away from this dream in pursuit of the above vision of New Testament Theology may be better-founded — upon divine promises rather than human self-assurance — but the kind of apex theological coherence described above will certainly be impossible to achieve in a manner that satisfies everyone. This should be no counsel of despair, but rather a spur to perpetual, eager investigation of the canon’s theological import: “For when the perfect comes, the partial shall pass away… Therefore, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”
We may… assert that the ontological judgments of the early ecumenical creeds were the only satisfying and indeed logical outcome of the claims of the [New Testament] read together with the Old. That is to say, for a Christian faith that upholds the unity of the Bible and the continuing authority of the [Old Testament], the one God is Trinity in himself, affirmed on the basis of his economic expression. There is no other way to justify the claims about and worship of the fully human Jesus Christ within an OT framework. It is likewise with the Spirit: given the authority of the OT, to recognize the “personhood” of the Spirit in coordination with the claims of the NT regarding the Spirit’s inseparability from Jesus Christ in worship and in presence is to affirm that the Spirit, too, is of the “same essence” as the Father and the Son. For the church to turn its back on the creeds is to turn its back upon the OT. So, too, to turn its back upon the OT is to loosen entirely the restraints that operate in the creedal formulations of the Trinitarian nature of the one Lord God. To speak about the one Lord God of the OT as Father, Son, and Spirit requires that this one God is in fact triune and, conversely, that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are of one and the same essence with respect to their reality, which, in turn, is the ground of worship.
— C. Kavin Rowe, “Biblical Pressure and Trinitarian Hermeneutics,” reprinted in Method, Meaning, and Context in New Testament Studies, 147
I personally believe that [the doctrine of the Trinity] has constantly stimulated the course of thought in the West as a challenge and invitation to try and think that which continually transcends the limits of human understanding.
— Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful (and other essays), 5
The great philosopher’s comment — near the outset of his classic essay in aesthetics, “The Relevance of the Beautiful” — hints at the challenge of articulating in a theological/philosophical register something which can only truly be “understood” through being loved, through being worshipped. Here I want to draw attention to a few of the features of my previous articulation of — not the doctrine of Trinity exactly, but its raison d’être.
At least these five factors, as one constructs them, will impinge upon the particular shape and articulation of one’s Trinitarian construction: a two-Testament approach to biblical interpretation; a philosophically informed hermeneutics; a sense of the biblical relation to history; a Christologically informed account of nature and creation; an understanding of the church and its worship. I am certain there are more. (I have not even mentioned where most Protestant theology has begun the task since the sixteenth century: the doctrine of revelation!) But the complexity of the task suggests that the particularities of the doctrine will thus inevitably be, in a sense and to a degree, contingent.
The doctrine of the Trinity is the theological/philosophical apparatus necessary to talk sensibly about and hold together an apparent paradox as truth:
In other words: the Church is right to worship Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as God alone, and in that worship they are (despite appearances!) in essential continuity with Israel’s worship of the One God YHWH. That is what the doctrine of the Trinity is seeking, in a theological register, to articulate.
Part I: Jesus the Human
Part II: True Humanity, Creation, and Sin
Part III: The Shape of True Human Life
Obviously 3–5, 6–9, and 10–12 would be key individual units of argumentation. Having now made the sketch, it occurs to me that as a whole that section would map, albeit imperfectly, onto the traditional “threefold office” of Christ: 3–5 corresponds straightforwardly to the royal office, 6–9 (somewhat less straightforwardly) to the prophetic office, and 10–12 to the priestly office. Of course, the traditional order is prophet, priest, king, so maybe some reordering is called for. But the value of this order, I think, is that it anchors the whole testimony about humanity in the status with which it is created, the status that produces the subsequent vocations. That may be the wisest apologetic move, since most people (at least in the ex-Christian West), Christian or not, now come programmed with an intuitive sense of the dignity and worth of every person. That sense often lacks controls, but it may be the most natural starting point.
EDIT: Thinking more about this, it seems really important to have established multiple ways to talk about sin when we come to Part III and the different “ethical” topoi. Irresponsibility, idolatry, and sacrilege are far from perfect terms for Sin I, II, and III (for one thing, they aren’t all alliterative!), but they get at the need for multiple axes of evaluation. Some things that defy a Christian view of the human person in the realm of medicine, for instance, are not sacrilegious exactly… but still idolatrous and irresponsible. I want better terms for these categories. But one needs some such categories.
This is what I mean, in yesterday’s post, by “Do not rule out any kinds of questions and observations from the conversation, even ones that (initially) seem unsuited to Bible study or insufficiently sophisticated.” Ask the questions that little children would ask; ask the questions that those on the outs from elite society would ask. This is, notably, difficult for those formed by elite society! The whole enterprise of contemporary Western elite education is meant as much to inculcate the habits of mind and speech proper to the ruling class in its next generation as to render that class accessible to the lower socioeconomic strata. Note well that this last sentence is not a criticism, per se, of contemporary Western elite education; indeed it’s a sentence that could hardly have been written without it. (The various so-called critical theories mostly exist, not principally for the powerless to critique the powerful, but for the already powerful to engage in the discipline of self-critique.) Nevertheless the ruling strata are always peculiarly able and constantly tempted — by Mammon, mostly — to drown out the voice of the Word by virtue of those habits of mind and speech. Wherefore it is a most useful and spiritually edifying exercise to treat them, as frequently as possible, as rubbish. Change, at least for the hour of Bible study, and become like a little child; ask questions of the text (of Jesus!) that the tax collectors and the prostitutes would ask, and follow their lead into the kingdom. With such people Jesus prefers to feast.
William Baird’s three-volume History of New Testament Research is enormously helpful as a description of the, well, history of New Testament research; he gives short summaries of key figures' careers and works, followed by descriptions of their key contributions to the history of scholarship. I am less enthused by his evaluations. Commenting, in the first volume, on the “Pietists” Francke, Bengel, and Wesley, he writes: “When they conclude… that the Bible is not to be interpreted like any other book, the Pietists align themselves with the past and not the future” (90). It is hard to know what to make of a judgment like this, which contextually it is clear Baird intends as a criticism. Obviously, as a matter of the progress of history (within the horizon of the 16th to 19th centuries), this is true; these writers would have been horrified by the dictum of Jowett’s which Baird quotes (strangely without quotation marks!). But whether the progression of that history, within that 400-year horizon, was good is another matter entirely; and indeed the third volume of the work opens with a discussion of the work and influence of Karl Barth, whose career derived its initial impetus from forcibly rejecting many of the evaluative assumptions that had evolved during that historical progression. Surely there are valid hermeneutical critiques, even criticisms, of Francke, Bengel, and Wesley to be made — but is a vague appeal to the past and the future the best that can be done?
Historical researchers always have before them the temptation of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” It is in their best interest never to take it.
Brevard Childs:
The church’s continual struggle in understanding the literal sense of the text as providing the biblical grounds for its testimony arises in large measure from its canonical consciousness. On the one hand, it recognizes that textual meaning is controlled by the grammatical, syntactical, and literary function of the language. On the other hand, these formal criteria are continually complemented by the actual content of the biblical texts which are being interpreted by communities of faith and practice. The productive epochs in the church’s use of the Bible have occurred when these two dimensions of scripture constructively enrich and balance each other as establishing an acknowledged literal sense.
— Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, 724
Five points, both historical and theological, to render credible the preaching of New Testament slavery texts:
Brevard Childs:
The early church’s theological reflection on the God of Israel did not turn on certain isolated Old Testament passages from which to find a warrant for a developing christology, but rather it turned on the issue of the nature of God’s presence within the life of Israel in all its historical specificity. The God of the covenant who had bound himself to a people in love, had revealed himself as both transcendent and immanent, seen and unseen, the God of the Patriarchs and of all nations. The church confessed to know a totally sovereign creator who yet chose to reveal himself in the forms of his creation, who entered time and space in order to redeem the world. In short, the church’s reflection on God found itself inexorably drawn into Trinitarian terminology in order to testify to God both as the revealed and revealer, the subject and object of self-manifestation.
— Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible, 369.
Of course, I’m not actually against citation, in the sense of needing to show your work and avoid plagiarism. But what I am against is citation as a substitute for persuasive argument or citation as demonstration that one is In the Know about the scholarly canon for a field.
Is your case dependent on previous scholarship? Of course it is. So tell me that you’re dependent, but spell out the nature of your dependence. The best practice here is to re-present to me, in your own words, the part of their argument that influenced or persuaded you, as clearly as possible. If you can’t clearly draw the lines of dependence, at least give me your own articulation of your position and mention, in the footnotes, “Here (and throughout) I am undoubtedly dependent on $AUTHORNAME; cf. $WORK, $PAGENUMBERS.” This gives me the ability to evaluate the strength of your foundations myself, and the opportunity to be persuaded that you are right. Citing, however, someone else’s methodological work — even if it is a standard work in the field — without re-presenting the relevant aspects takes those opportunities for persuasion and evaluation away from me. I simply have to take for granted that you have a) read and represented $AUTHORNAME properly and b) that $AUTHORNAME is a trustworthy guide to these issues.
And what if I have no access to this author’s works? What if I don’t yet have the technical background to evaluate either of the above questions? In this case, the unexplained citation functions to shore up the boundaries of the guild, with your place within and mine without: “If you haven’t read $AUTHORNAME on this, I really don’t know how to talk to you.” It’s a gesture in the direction of an Important Book as an appeal to authority — in the logical fallacy sense. Of course there is always authority. But as a writer, especially in a scholarly mode, it is critically important that you a) assess what authorities you are placing yourself under and b) show your readership why they are good authorities. There is a way to cite Important Books that invites the novice reader into the scholarly conversations whose terms have been set by the Important Books, rather than shutting them out of the conversations until such times as they have read and understood the Important Books.
Scholarship is always iterative and cumulative. Even Socrates — a figure of practically immeasurable importance! — is, in a sense, just the first philosopher to have his teachings recorded in a large, well-preserved corpus; not the first person ever to think in quite the way that he did. Everyone is, like Newton, standing on the shoulders of giants. A major contemporary biblical scholar (to take the field I know best) will cite in perfunctory fashion a great authority of the previous generation, a pioneer of the field. Okay, I say to myself: I am a novice in this field; if I want to understand, I must row back up the stream of influence. I read the great authority, and find that he (in biblical scholarship it is practically always a he) is himself claiming dependence on a prior pioneer. I climb further and see that there are competing interpretations of the prior pioneer’s legacy, and that the great authority may have subtly transmuted his forerunner’s thought to be more congenial to his project. And repeat ad infinitum — well, not truly infinitely; but if I can ever make it to the source of this large river of impressive, learned scholarship, which has become its own canon of authority, what I may find as the wellspring is — in a surprising number of cases — a wild speculation in a footnote by a nineteenth-century German biblical scholar. And I find that this scholar’s own methodological presuppositions are practically impossible to assess without understanding Hegelian philosophy, and that the core biblical insight that launched a thousand dissertations had actually been inspired by a remark of Hegel’s. Which then requires its own understanding — and I cannot understand Hegel.
Did my original major contemporary biblical scholar, not herself presupposing Hegelianism, take care to know what meat she was chewing and what bones she was spitting out? Quite possibly. But if she did not bother to show me the foundations and persuade me that they are solid, a great part of my own assessment of her work is foreclosed in advance. I am increasingly sensitive — allergic — to sloppy appeals to external authority in biblical and theological scholarship. Show me your hermeneutical presuppositions in your exegesis, yes; but also tell me what they are and why you presuppose them. And if you implicitly protest, by citation rather than explanation, that the telling would take too much time and too many pages, and really I should just read your other book — or this journal article you wrote, or your mentor’s journal article or book — to understand them… then I’m increasingly inclined to put your book down, and I will probably not cite you in the future.
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is a great and important philosophical work, of course; but nobody had ever told me that it was funny. Savagely funny, even. The discourse of Johannes de Silentio skewers at every point those self-consciously modern persons who are “unwilling to stop with doubting everything but [go] further” (5). I am helpfully informed by the endnotes that this refers to certain Danish Hegelians — and given the role of Hegel’s philosophy in the more technical part of the book, that is a perfectly defensible historical reading; but the irony with which the text is saturated cuts at those in every generation who hold that they have acquired full “proficiency in doubting” (6) from their very beginning. The work, for all that Kierkegaard is genuinely interested in exploring the philosophical problemata of Genesis 22, uses humor as its sharpest surgical tool to cut away the audience’s layers of self-conscious Rationality and Skepticism and expose the comical, self-deluding pretense that Reason is ever able to surpass Faith and “go further.”
You would hardly know any of this from the scholarly introduction, the myriad references and summaries in other philosophical/theological works, or the Wikipedia article. These generally fundamentally — and I presume not inaccurately — historicize it, one way or another: as Kierkegaard wrestling with and justifying his decision to break his engagement to Regine Olsen, as a riposte against the Hegelian treatment of ethics, or the like. But the historical element cannot be permitted to take the sting out of the irony that is so essential to its effect as a work of philosophy, classically construed as an enterprise in convincing the reader that (as in Rilke’s poem) “you must change your life.” The humor is that unparaphraseable, unextractable aspect that makes it great.
It seems utterly clear to me that, for instance, the last lines of the Exordium before the “four paraphrases” are pure irony: “That man was not an exegetical scholar. He did not know Hebrew; if he had known Hebrew, he perhaps would easily have understood the story and Abraham” (9). For what follows are, judged by the rest of the work, four failed exegetical paraphrases of the story: proof that the story is not “easily understood” by any means, proof that no rationalization adequately captures the movement of faith.” Lest anyone be tempted to think that the simple man in the Exordium was merely lacking in learning, was not actually entering more closely than the Hebrew scholars into the experience of faith and of Abraham, Kierkegaard demonstrates — with brilliant mockery — that the basically paraphrastic resources of the “exegetical scholar” are insufficient to the task. The proverbs about the mother and the weaned child that conclude each paraphrase offer a kind of demonstrated rebuttal to the possibility of paraphrasing, of explaining and principlizing, such a story; exactly what Johannes de Silentio goes on to demonstrate in the rest of the work. What matters is the reader’s confrontation by the text of Genesis 22 — by the incomprehensibility, the miraculousness, of Abraham’s faith in God; what matters also, mutatis mutandis, is the reader’s confrontation by the text of Fear and Trembling — to feel one’s own pretenses to complete rationality caught, exposed, even flayed.
UPDATE: I forgot about this passage, which — rich irony! — captures this dynamic marvelously:
There is a lot of talk these days about irony and humor, especially by people who have never been able to practice them but nevertheless know how to explain everything. I am not completely unfamiliar with these two passions; I know a little more about them than is found in German and German-Danish compendiums. Therefore I know that these two passions are essentially different from the passion of faith. Irony and humor are also self-reflective and thus belong to the sphere of infinite resignation. [51]
Brevard Childs:
[The] history of interpretation serves as a major check against all forms of biblicism in showing the distance between the biblical text and the interpreter and the degree to which the changing situation of the reader affects one’s hearing of the text. This observation should not lead to cultural relativism, but to a profounder grasp of the dynamic function of the Bible as the vehicle of an ever fresh word of God to each new generation. It is a strange irony that those examples of biblical interpretation in the past which have truly immersed themselves in a specific concrete historical context, such as Luther in Saxony, retain the greatest value as models for the future actualization of the biblical text in a completely different world. Conversely those biblical commentators who laid claim to an objective, scientific explanation of what the text really meant, often appear as uninteresting museum pieces to the next generation.”
— Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible, 88
Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is a refreshingly ambitious, generally idiosyncratic, and colossally erudite work, but its brief (ten out of 462 pages) treatment of the Reformation is not one of its high points. This is, I think, signaled by his citing Friedrich Schleiermacher’s comparison of Reformation and Enlightenment as sharing the animating principle “everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed” (315) — a very Enlightenment perspective on the Reformation, always seeking to ally the Reformers to a cause which the Reformers would not have recognized! McGilchrist is selective, as he must be in a book of this length, and focuses on the change in hermeneutics of image vs. word (and the accompanying spasms of iconoclasm); but here I think the simplicity of that heuristic betrays his reading of the period as a whole. It’s a phenomenological reading which is straightforwardly read up into the theological frameworks of the Reformers, rather than engaging the right-to-left-to-right intellectual motion that would actually incorporate (aufgehoben?) the animating theological concerns of the period. The only substantive discussion of Reformation theological concerns is a paragraph which makes Luther sound almost like a proto-Heidegger in his concern for the outer authentically presenting the inner (needless to say, this is not how Luther conceived of his theological revolution).
In general, the Reformation is blamed for all that is left-hemispherical in this period, when it is far from clear that the “real” culprit (if such can actually be identified) in accelerating left hemisphere dominance during the sixteenth century is not in fact the habits of mind and scholarly methods of Renaissance humanism. Erasmus was as fond of the sensus literalis as Luther or Zwingli, and before the century was up Richard Hooker was retrieving “participation” as the essential doctrinal category. (Frankly, I think the preceding twenty pages on the Renaissance, which are often uncritically laudatory, would probably have benefited from interacting with C.S. Lewis’s hilarious excoriation of so-called Renaissance humanism in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.) Somewhat bizarrely, the doctrine of transubstantiation is conscripted to his Reformation narrative as a left-hemisphere rationalization and hyperspecification of the right-hemisphere Eucharistic mystery; but this, being a creature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he cannot possibly blame on the Reformers or the Reformation, and thus he is forced to say that “At the Reformation this problem re-emerged” (316). That it did, and yes, the memorialist view of the Lord’s Supper looks awfully like left-hemisphere rationalization; but it is, crucially, an equal and opposite reaction against an existing and well-established of left-hemisphere rationalization. The replacement of presentation with re-presentation in Christian theology significantly antedates 1517, which suggests that “Reformation” as popularly understood is the wrong category. The most significant omission from McGilchrist’s description (does such an omission rise to the level of an outright error?) is the whole phenomenon of the Counter-Reformation, which radicalized the standardization and schematization of scholastic theology in Rome no less than took place in Geneva, for all that the Roman church hung onto images.
To be clear: many of McGilchrist’s critiques of the Reformation churches and theology are worth pondering. I find the Reformed iconoclasm of the period profoundly distasteful (St. John of Damascus was right about images, people! it’s time to admit it!), and the schematizing, diagrammatizing tendency in second-generation Calvinist theology (Perkins, Beza, etc.) is an undoubtedly striking exemplum of left hemisphere thinking! But I am unconvinced by McGilchrist’s sweeping diagnosis that the Reformation “reversed” the “cardinal tenet of Christianity:” that “the Word is made Flesh” became “the Flesh is made Word.” As Athanasius teaches in the evergreen On the Incarnation, the Logos became sinless flesh so that our sinful flesh might be restored to its original glory as logikos. Flesh and Word are, ultimately, made for one another. The truly “cardinal” tenet of Christianity is not, after all, the Incarnation of the Word (which runs it a close second) — it is the resurrection of the Word’s crucified Flesh, and the promise of resurrection to all flesh that is infused with the Word’s power.