For some reason I continue to listen to this popular level voice, Leighton Flowers, as he attempts to critique and offer an alternative to classical Calvinism. I just listened to one of his newish videos (pertinent discussion starts in and around 28 minutes) where he interacts with a Calvinist friend of his. In this video he reveals his hermeneutical approach, which is pretty clear after you’ve listened to him for awhile. He sees the ecumenical church councils, for example, like Nicaea-Constantinople, Chalcedon, so on and so forth as ‘inspiring’ but not derivatively ‘authoritative,’ insofar as they aren’t scripture in themselves. In fact Flowers tells his friend that he sees the [Holy Spirit “inspired”] conversation he is having with his friend as potentially as ‘authoritative’ as these councils. So, as I have noted before, Flowers, in the name of sola Scriptura (but he is really solo Scriptura) has swallowed an Enlightenment rationalism ‘whole-hog,’ wherein he sees himself as the interpretive center in isolation from past doctors of the church. And yet, with this dissonance (that he doesn’t experience, as he should), he presumably affirms the definitive language of Trinitatis (Trinity), and the Christological grammar that developed in the conciliar age. For some reason he doesn’t have the capacity to make the connection between that grammar as fundamentum to everything he thinks about who God is in Christ, and how that implicates the way the Christian, historically and into the present, has interpreted Holy Scripture. He operates out of an anthropological ground like we might find in John Locke’s theory on tabula rasa.

In order to offer a correction, that Flowers himself will not take (he claims to be humble and teachable in a good ole’ boy sort of way, but he isn’t), let me offer up an excellent word on these things from theologian, par excellence, John Webster. You will note that what Webster says, following, stands in stark contraposition to what this chap, Flowers maintains. Here is how John Webster sums up his discussion on the relation of ‘The Word’ (Jesus) to biblical interpretation (hermeneutics). Webster has been arguing against the usual modes of hermeneutical consideration, as anthropology; and through a ressourcement of Barth, he is presenting a ‘way’ that provides for a thick dogmatically oriented mode of hermeneutical theory.

To sum up: because God in Jesus Christ speaks, because Jesus is God’s living Word, then the ‘hermeneutical situation’falls under the rule: ‘We do not know God against his will or behind his back, as it were, but in accordance with the way in which he has elected to disclose himself and communicate his truth’. Once this is grasped, then doctrines begin to do the work so frequently undertaken by anthropology or theories of historical consciousness in determining the nature of the hermeneutical situation, thereby making possible the ‘formed reference’ which is the basic mode of theological depiction.[1]

In other words, modern hermeneutical proposals that seek to propound a theory of biblical interpretation that aren’t first given shape by a direct encounter with the Word (Jesus), dogmatically, will always fail to encounter Jesus for who he actually is because the interpretive event is not dominated by him, but them. This hermeneutical error not only applies to Flowers, but many other so-called biblical exegetes who have swallowed the higher-critical mode of a naturalist biblical hermeneutic. As Barth underscored in his Göttingen Dogmatics, we can only rightly do biblical and Christian theology Deus dixit, after ‘God has spoken.’ This necessarily entails that we can only do theological exegesis of the biblical text from the grammar, or implicates of God’s life for us in the mysterium that is the Theanthropos, the Godman, Jesus Christ. This is the only genuine Christian way for reading Scripture; i.e. through the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. It is in this foundational and fertile ground wherein the Divine Meaning can be ascertained aright; “for no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (I Cor 3.11).

If the Christian is going to be part of what has been called the communio sanctorum (‘communion of the saints’); if they are going to live in the vibrancy of the Church catholic; they will realize they are not a ‘clean-slate,’ that they are not a hermeneutical island with ‘me-and-my-Bible’ in hand. They will repudiate anthropologies that suffer from turn-to-the-subject[ivism], as the rationalist mode (like the one Flowers operates with) suffers from, and instead will recognize that as they were ‘born from above,’ they were born into a holy communion that is grounded in the very triune life of God Himself. The Christian will recognize that we all interpret Scripture from a particular tradition, one way or the other; since tradition making is as inevitable as being a creature with extension into time and space, and all that entails. A misguided Christian might think they are able to read Scripture de nuda (nakedly), but what they will really be doing is reading Scripture from a naturalist tradition that has no Christian confessional grounding whatsoever. When the Christian attempts to operate this way with Scripture, they are bound to come to exegetical conclusions that reflect their deepest and most innate (natural) desires. In other words, because of anthropological, and thus epistemological definition, they will really only be able to read Scripture homo in se incurvatus (from an incurvature upon themselves); they will only be able to read Scripture, from this vantage point, out of  categories that have been constructed from self-projection (see Feuerbach for this critique)—the history of higher criticism and Jesus Quest illustrates how this trajectory concludes. No amount of good ole’ boy piety or piousness can overcome this sort of hermeneutical dilemma. Sorry Leighton.

[1] John Webster, “Hermeneutics in Modern Theology: Some Doctrinal Reflections,” Scottish Journal of Theology, 328.