Depth Dimenson, that is the language TF Torrance uses when referring to an engagement with Holy Scripture’s deep context. He reifies the sacramental language of thinking Scripture as the signum (sign), and its res (reality) as Jesus Christ and the triune God that Christ mediates to the Church and world. The reification comes for Torrance as he thinks all things from the patristic homoousious and/or the double consubstantial (both fully God and human) person of Jesus Christ. It is from this analogy that Torrance thinks the relationship between Scripture’s broad canonical context, and the meaning that funds that context in Jesus Christ. So, for Torrance, the depth dimension of Scripture is none other than the Christ. It is within the context and space of God’s life for the world in Jesus Christ wherein Scripture, for Torrance, gains critical gravitas; meaning, that, for Torrance, Scripture’s inner-theo-logic must become the informing frame by which exegetical and interpretive conclusions are arrived at as the biblical exegete attempts to interpret Holy Scripture. If this isn’t the context, the fund for Scripture’s meaning, according to TFT, then all that one is left with is a literary piece of Ancient Near Eastern and Second Temple Judaic relevance. Scripture outwith the frame of its Christ conditioning, for Torrance, merely becomes an interesting piece of archaeological and artifactual history that the likes of an Indiana Jones might risk his life for, but not much more.

This type of theme, as being detailed above, is also present in Karl Barth’s approach to Holy Scripture (surprise!)—not to mention in much of the tradition of the Church. It is a confessional hermeneutic that starts with a confessional doctrine of Scripture wherein the belief is that Scripture is indeed God’s Holy Word. For Barth (and TFT et al.) of course, Scripture has a layered “ontology” as it finds its order first and foremost in God’s eternal Logos, Jesus Christ. Scripture is living and active precisely because of its deep reality in Jesus Christ and the triune God (which is just as true for all of creation, cf. Col. 1.15ff). Without belaboring these points further, let me refer us to Bruce McCormack’s rendering of how this all looks in the thought of Karl Barth.

Now because the ratio fidei (the Credo) is not identical with the ratio veritatis (the Word), conformity with the ratio veritatis will not be a simple matter of reading and understanding the outward text of the Creed. Revealed truth has an ‘inner text’ which must be grasped if the outward text is to be rightly understood. What is required is a special movement of thought which goes beyond mere reading. The outward text has to be read in relation to the inner text. But the inner text is not readily accessible. If the reader is to penetrate through the outer text to the inner text, she must be grasped through the reading of the outer text from the other side. It is not in mastering the object but in being mastered by it that the interpreter achieves a true comprehension of the ontic ratio of the object of faith, and the intellectus that is sought takes place. That means that the attainment of the ratio intellectus that is in conformity with the ratio vertatis hidden in the ratio fidei depends upon a divine decision, and therefore upon grace. That means further that the way to be taken in knowing God begins in prayer and faith.[1]

For those who know the Protestant Reformed history vis-à-vis the Scripture principle they will immediately recognize the type of riff that has been taken by Barth (as distilled by BLM) with reference to the thinking on the perspicuity of Holy Scripture (as that pertains to its inner and outer clarity). Neither Barth or Torrance is thinking too far away from the Protestant Reformation, in fact as Reformed theologians, they are constructively receiving it, and pollinating it with the categories and emphases of the conciliar past; that is, they are receiving the categories of the Protestant Reformation, and reifying them, as we already know, within a Christ concentrated frame. But no matter what they are doing, the point remains that for them, and for many others in the annals of church history, the biblical exegete has no point of reference to interpret Scripture from unless they are doing so from the fact that Scripture’s “depth dimension” is founded upon its ‘inner text’ who is Jesus Christ.

But the above stumbles some, especially the analytically typed. This is why I emboldened the last clause of the passage from McCormack. A depth dimensional reader of Scripture is doing so as a prayer, and from the tilt of the faith of Christ for us. That is, the depth interpreter is reading Scripture in dialogue with its reality as they are participants with Him in the triune life of the living God. This picks up on the Calvinian theme of faith as knowledge of God, and a knowledge of God in a Christ concentrated frame is a con-versant and growing knowledge as the disciple, the biblical interpreter is in constant discussion with the reality of Holy Scripture. It isn’t as if the genuinely Christian exegete is engaging with a relic to be bridged from now to back then. The genuinely Christian exegete knows the “bridge” of all of history, all of salvation reality, all of supranatural reality in the risen and ascended Christ. The Christian exegete speaks to the reality of Scripture, and allows that reality to confront and contradict them, as needed, as the Christian is being transformed from glory to glory. We have a speaking God who continues to speak to us in these last days by His Son. The depth dimensional interpreter takes full advantage of this access we have to the living God through the veil of the broken and glorified body of Jesus Christ. This is its concrete reality, not the secondary means of engagement that the exegete uses with reference to the literary, grammatical, historical components of Scripture. Those are components which have no orientation, and no meaningful place, without Scripture’s ontological reality as founded in Jesus Christ. Selah

[1] Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 430 [emboldening mine].