Here is more on what I am thinking in regard to approaching biblical interpretation christocentrically (‘Christ-centerdly’). I am using a distinction that David Gibson uses in his PhD dissertation on Barth and Calvin, that helps him nuance how both Calvin and Barth were both christocentric in approach, but christocentric in their respective ways. It is this nuance, in its respective articulation that is helping me to form my own kind of christological approach to exegetical practice. That said, I am still on the way in this regard, and so throwing posts out here like this help me along my own path of development in this regard.

Here is how David Gibson describes the differences between Calvin’s and Barth’s respective christocentric approaches to biblical interpretation:

[…] Calvin’s hermeneutical approach to the biblical text is christologically extensive: although he reads the whole of the Bible’s plot-line in connection with Christology and finds the gospel which the text reveals to be inseparably connected to Christology, he does not always read every aspect of election through a christological lens. Underlying this approach is Calvin’s doctrine of revelation. Calvin has a conception of revelation which never exclusively identifies the Word of God with the person of Jesus, but sees revelation more extensively as also a property of the biblical text. This is different from Barth. His hermeneutics of election may be described as christologically intensive: he both finds the text to speak about Christ at those moments where Calvin speaks more generally about God or the decree, and finds the text to speak about election where Calvin would find the text to speak only about Christology. Likewise, we will see that driving this hermeneutical approach is a doctrine of revelation which  more intensively identifies revelation with Jesus the Word of God than does Calvin. [emboldening mine] [David Gibson, Reading the Decree: Exegesis, Election and Christology in Calvin and Barth, 16.]

My proposal, instead of placing Calvin against Barth, or Barth against Calvin in their respective christoformed hermeneutics is to instead posit that both approaches should be viewed as present in a thick and theologically rich account and understanding of exegesis. So the extensiveness of Calvin and the intensiveness of Barth can both be present if we take as a bridge of sorts, the vicarious humanity of Christ. What I see in this Gibsonian distinction is a dogmatic distinction between soteriology (so Calvin’s christocentrism), and christology (so Barth’s christocentrism), but if I am going to constructively engage with this, I think the better way forward (instead of emphasizing disparity between the two) is to work from an analogy of the vicarious humanity of Christ. In this way, a hermeneutic can be formed that is Christologically shaped with soteriological expression. Meaning that we can be both intensive in principle (Barth), de jure, and extensive in exegetical practice (Calvin), de facto. And one of the matrices that I think is helpful here, for drawing these together Christologically, is what Matthew Levering identifies as the ‘linear-historical’ and ‘participatory-historical’; and yet even more specific than Levering’s development of his helpful identification, what regulates the relation between the particularity of the text (Calvin’s extensive approach) and the universality of the text (Barth’s intensive approach) finds rapproachment  through the unio personalis of the person of Jesus Christ so that within his person we have God-ward and man-ward movements all taking place within the conversation of His hypostatically united life for us (pro nobis). And by the Spirit we participate in this movement and conversation—so our hermeneutic.

Anyway, my time and thus thinking have to break off right here. Alas, this is a blog, and so it always stays unfinished. More later.