Category Archives: Hermeneutics

A Brief Word on the Biblical Languages and a Theological Ontology

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The biblical languages often come with a perception of objectivity, like math or something. But the biblical languages are, indeed, languages. Language is fluid, and highly contextual. Learning the biblical languages can be very helpful for studying the Bible; but they aren’t definitive in regard to establishing this or that theological doctrine as true or false, per se. The more significant languages to learn are the theological languages; indeed, what could be called a theological ontology. This is not separate from biblical study; indeed, it establishes it, one way or the other, in a supra type of way. It will help the learner know how to deploy the biblical languages most appropriately, within a theological taxis (order vis a vis God). With a proper theological ontology in place, which I always argue is Christ (Logos) conditioned, the biblical languages come to have their contextual meaning; their heavenly meaning, as that has and continues to confront our lives and this world system. There is always an antecedence to the creaturely realm; which of course includes languages, and the total creational order. God in Christ is that antecedence from within the processions of His eternal and triune life. We come to evangelically know that “antecedent” life in and through the missions, the economy of God’s life for the world in Jesus Christ.

The Higher Logic of Dispensationalism: An Antidote in Dogmatics

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Dispensationalism is a product, historically, of the Fundamentalist reaction to the ingress of Liberal theology into the halls of the revivalist and evangelical churches. The Fundamentalist movement, particularly in the late 19th early 20th century, allowed the anti-supranaturalist or naturalist theologians (mainly of German hue) to dictate the terms under which Christian theology felt compelled to develop within. Based on this capitulation, fundamentalist theologians sought to counteract the findings, say of a higher biblical criticism, of the type that saw errors in Scripture, rejected the miracles, rejected the deity of Christ, so on and so forth, by asserting and arguing the obverse. This is where we get 20th century doctrines like biblical inerrancy from; creationism versus evolutionism etc. Fundamentalism is really just a correspondence to its predecessor founded in post-Enlightenment rationalism. It cedes ground to the come of age modernity that the higher critics moved and breathed within.

But, even after such a brief and oversimplified sketch, how does this relate to my initial claim that dispensationalism is a particular product of a reaction to the in-roads that liberal higher criticism had made into the sphere of biblical studies? I think the logic is simple: the dispensationalists, along with the fundamentalists, counter to the terms they were presented with by the higher critics, particularly their manhandling of the text of Holy Scripture, was to say: okay, well look at all of these biblical prophecies that have been and are currently being fulfilled in history and the contemporaneous. Dispensationalism is an apologetic for a doctrine of biblical inerrancy. It ties into the liberal notion of history being purely progressive and linear, thus landing on an absolute futurism, wherein as long as the researcher waits long enough their totalizing theory of reality, including natural history, will bear the fruits of proving this system or that system of thought right or wrong. This is how evolutionists operate just the same; it is the exact same prolegomenon as the dispensationalist thinks from. Or we could bring it back to the Bible and think in terms of inerrancy; with the normal caveat always attending said doctrine: i.e., that the original autographs of Scripture (which we don’t have, but one day might find) are indeed absolutely without factual error. If you listen to early Darwinists, or even neo-Darwinists, or even post-Darwinists, this is the same method. The future, history becomes the final stamp of proof and approval of the validity, the totalizing imprimatur of history’s verification of the explanation of all of reality; we just have to wait long enough, and the proof will finally apocalyptically descend upon us. Dispensationalists, especially popular ones, point people to the fulfillment of prophecy, in a futurist frame, as the sine qua non and proof that Scripture is in fact God’s more sure word of prophecy, indeed.

The dispensationalists aren’t alone in this type of verification processing. There are folks like Wolfhart Pannenberg, who would not fit into the fundamentalist frame, per se, at least not in the North American evangelical sense, who likewise thinks salvation history in terms of a linear progressive reality that is finally proven to be of God by way of the climaxing of history in the resurrection and the attendant second coming of Jesus Christ. Even so, Pannenberg, a German theologian in the heart of it all, in a way, serves as a more sophisticated illustration to what ends up happening in North American fundamentalism. What Pannenberg and the dispensationalists might have in common, though, is that they both, respectively, and from very different vantage points, take the work of the liberal theologians, and higher critics seriously enough to allow said work to set the agenda, to frame the categories that they feel compelled to work within; to respond to; to defeat, but on the higher critics’ terms and categories rather than the positive terms that a robustly confessional theology has set all along, within the ecclesiastical and ‘believing’ frame.

Others within the development of modern history, like Barth, feel the weight of the higher critics as well; but then say: “so what!” That’s a whole other complicated line of thought we will have to visit later. But suffice it to say, following someone like Barth, or TF Torrance, it is better, in my view, to simply move beyond the higher critics (by bottoming out) and allow the reality of Holy Scripture itself, who is the Christ, to set and determine the categories the Christian seeks to think and articulate theology from. If the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the primordial history de-limiting event of all of reality, as it is, then to allow folk, like the higher critics, who are thinking from terms laid down by the old creation to set the agenda and terms for the Christians, is backward thinking that is not befitting a truly Christian Dogmatic way.

We don’t need to “prove” anything about God’s existence, about His ways in history, about His written Word etc.; instead, the world needs to be proven and approved by His life for the world in Jesus Christ. And if this is the case, then the dispensationalists, as a prolongation of the broader fundamentalist way, is on an errand that is highly imprudent coram Deo. We are Christians, if we are; as such, we think “scientifically” only if we think from the triune God given for us in Jesus Christ. He is prior to the higher critics, and all of us. He re-created reality in the resurrection Jesus Christ. This must be allowed to set the ontological, ontic, and epistemological terms by which Christians engage with Scripture and its veritas for the world. The dispensationalists and fundamentalists, whether progressive or conservative, have ceded much much too much to the old-world order.

On Reading Scripture as a Foreigner

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Reading Holy Scripture is an exceedingly dialogical event. That is to say, reading Scripture takes place in the relationship that co-inheres between the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ for us; it is a con-versational happenstance that reposes in the context of God’s eternal and triune life. This entails that as the Christian reads the Bible they are engaging in an organic and inter-personal contact with the very author of said readings. As Jesus said: He would not leave us as orphans, but send us the Holy Spirit; the Comforter, the come-along-sider who will bring us into all truth; who will magnify the words of Jesus, as those are encountered afresh anew in the canonical spectacles of Holy Writ—in the prosopon (face) of Jesus Christ.

What I am intending to impress in this writing is the fact that reading Holy Scripture involves an exercise that comes from outside of us; that unilaterally encounters and confronts us; that brings us into the Heavenly fellowship of the Son of the Father by the Holy Spirit. It is an event, reading and living Scripture that is, that really only works as we read it within a confessional and relational frame wherein, we are given new life, from the vicarious life of God for us in Jesus Christ. This kicks against reading Scripture as an atomistic, scientific, moribund textbook that only the scholars, the intelligentsia can access. A genuinely Christian reading of Holy Scripture takes the Christian reader from the far country of this world, and places them into the home country of the new creation; and it is within this new creation that the adopted child of God comes to see this world for what it is—and more importantly, to see who in fact God is as disclosed and attested to in Scripture.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers the following insights as a way to think about the aforementioned further:

We are uprooted from our own existence and are taken back to the holy history of God on earth. There God has dealt with us, with our needs and our sins, by means of the divine wrath and grace. What is important is not that God is a spectator and participant in our life today, but that we are attentive listeners and participants in God’s action in the sacred story, the story of Christ on earth. God is with us today only as long as we are there.[1]

Our salvation is ‘from outside ourselves’ (extra nos). I find salvation, not in my life story, but only in the story of Jesus Christ . . . What we call our life, our troubles, and our guilt is by no means the whole of reality; our life, our need, our guilt, and our deliverance are there in the Scriptures.[2]

And more, on the necessary strangeness vis-à-vis this world relative to the new reality of the new creation encountered in the fertile and fresh landscape of the Bible:

Does this perspective somehow make it understandable to you that I do not want to give up the Bible as this strange Word of God at any point, that I intend with all my powers to ask what God wants to say to us here? Any other place outside the Bible has become too uncertain for me. I fear that I will only encounter some divine double of myself there. Does this somehow help you to understand why I am prepared for a sacrificium intellectus—just in these matters, and only in these matters, with respect to the one, true God? And who does not bring to some passages his sacrifice of the intellect, in the confession that he does not yet understand this or that passage in Scripture, but is certain that even they will be revealed one day as God’s own Word! I would rather make that confession than try to say according to my own opinion: this is divine, that is human.[3]

For Bonhoeffer, because of the location that the reading of Holy Scripture places him within, in the parousia (presence) of God, there comes a point, within this strange landscape, where regular human intellection loses all sense of gravity. But this is the miracle of the whole thing: Scripture isn’t predicated by the history of its own embeddedness within history; Scripture is predicated as the Holy and ordained place of God’s presence in the sense that its res (reality) is grounded in the free and gracious pre-destination of God to be for all of humanity in Jesus Christ, and all that entails (inclusive of the whole sweep of heilsgeschichte ‘redemptive-history’ as deposited in Holy Scripture). It is within this ‘strange Word of God’ that Bonhoeffer finds rest and relief in the new heavens and earth, as those graciously intrude upon the parameters set by this current world system. For Bonhoeffer, and I would suggest that we follow his lead, there is something about the Bible that transcends a facile and flat reading that might allow it to be subject to the whims and wits that a purported pure critical reading that the book of an abstract nature supposedly has the capacity to illumine (think higher critical readings of Scripture). These things are so, for Bonhoeffer, because the Bible’s antecedent reality is ultimately of an otherworldly reality; namely the triune life of God elect for the world in the humanity of Jesus Christ. That is to say, that Holy Scripture has an ontology; and it isn’t us.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, cited by John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2003), 83.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 85.

What Does it Really Mean to be “Christocentric?”

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Dovetailing with the last post, I wanted to pick up further with Bruce McCormack as he offers what it means to be Christ concentrated or Christocentric in Barth’s hermeneutical and theological deployment. What will be noticed, as McCormack develops this, is that for Barth his arrival at a Christ concentrated focus took time of maturation; viz., it wasn’t an immediate thing in his theological formation. For me, this is why I have so resonated with Barth over the years: to have a Christ concentrated focus, in my eyes, is to have the focus of the Holy Spirit (see Jn 14—16). The Holy Spirit’s ministry is to magnify the work and words of Jesus in the lives of His bride. When the Christian is genuinely of the Spirit, they only see the world, and everything else, through the eyes of Jesus Christ; indeed, as this ultimately magnifies the Father. For me, this is what it means to be a genuinely Christian theologian, or Christian proper: i.e., to think everything from the foundation that always already has been laid for us in Jesus Christ (see I Cor 3.11). This is why when I have come up against other theological approaches, no matter what their periodized pedigree, I have always found most of them wanting. Sure, yes, Jesus’ name is always bandied about among any theologian worth their salt, who in fact professes to be a Christian. But typically, the way Jesus functions for these theologians is as an abstract principle, not as the person that He is for us in the God-world encounter. For many so-called Christian theologies out there, Jesus is appealed to more as an instrument of a theology founded somewhere else (by way of speculative means), rather than from a center in God’s life for us in Jesus Christ (and thus impersonally).

Barth, according to McCormack’s reading and referencing, offers the way I am persuaded towards; in regard, to theological methodology and Christian living. I don’t think these two things should ever be thought apart, only as apiece, mutually implicating and conditioning each other: i.e., our Christian lives, in the vicarious life of Christ for us, as the basis for the way that ‘our theology’ is carried out—whether that be considered as intellection, practically, affectively, or what have you (and these are never really that partitive, as daily life, and all of its components, are a complex). Here is McCormack on Barth’s Christocentrism:

In his 1939 contribution to the ‘How my Mind Has Changed’ series, Barth provided the answer to the first half of our question ‘in these years I had to learn that Christian doctrine, if it is to merit its name and if it is to build up the Christian Church in the world as she must needs be built up, has to be exclusively and conclusively the doctrine of Jesus Christ—of Jesus Christ as the living Word of God spoken to us men and women. . .. I should like to call it a Christological concentration . . .’. “Christocentrism”, in Barth’s case then, refers to the attempt (which characterized his mature theology) to understand every doctrine from a centre in God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; i.e. from a centre in God’s act of veiling and unveiling in Christ (which Barth understood in terms of a highly actualistic, a posteriori Chalcedonianism). “Christocentrism”, for him, was a methodological rule—not an a priori principle, but a rule which is learned through encounter with the God who reveals Himself in Christ—in accordance with which one presupposes a particular understanding of God’s Self-revelation in reflecting upon each and every other doctrinal topic, and seeks to interpret those topics in the light of what is already known of Jesus Christ. Clearly, this methodological commitment marks an advance over the dogmatic method outlined in each of Barth’s prolegomena (including CD I/1 and I/2). It does not in the least set aside that method; but at the point where Barth would seek to correct critically Christian proclamation in the light of a fresh hearing of the Word of God, the “christocentrism” so described provides a further concretization of what Barth thought that criticism would most likely entail. The practical consequences of the employment of this rule—to give just two examples—is that there could be no independent doctrine of creation and providence (i.e. a doctrine of creation which is fleshed out without reference to the covenantal purposes of God which ground God’s creative activity); and no independent anthropology (independent, that is, of reflection upon the true, restored humanity disclosed in Christ). The questions which such an advance raises for a genetic study of Barth’s development are: when did this modification first occur? And what brought it about?

The answer to be given here is that this final adjustment came about in the summer of 1936, under the impress of a lecture given by a Parisian pastor, Pierre Maury, on the subject of election. More than any other influence in Barth’s life, it was Maury who deserves credit for opening the way to that form of “christocentrism” which became synonymous with the name of Karl Barth.[1]

If we don’t stop, slow down, and reflect upon these matters this way, the quick response might be: “of course, the Christian way of doing theology is Christ concentrated.” But in reality, as the above ought to help clarify, there are different ways to be Christocentric (which I have also written about here). In my view, after Barth et al., what it means to be ‘Christ concentrated’ in method really means: to be in a life-giving interchange that is constant, afresh anew, as we encounter our Savior moment-by-moment through the Spirit’s mediation, bringing our mutterings into a doxological and intelligible conversation, dialogue with our triune God. So, in this sense, to do theology is really to simply live coram Deo (before God), being constantly given over to the death of Jesus that His life might be known through the mortal members of our bodies (see II Cor. 4.10). In this type of Christological theology, there is a martyrological underpinning, wherein indeed, the death of Jesus, also becomes our life in Him, as He resurrects and ascends us with Him to the Right Hand of the Father. It is in this cruciformed life that the Christian theologian can genuinely come to start bearing witness to the Lord of life, insofar that this Lord of life is indeed the life of the Lord for us in Jesus Christ. amen amen

 

[1] Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 454–55.

The Prayer-ful Hermeneutic Found in the ‘inner-text’ of Holy Scripture

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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].

ALL Interpreters of the Bible Are Theological Interpreters

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Let me say another word about theological exegesis (I prefer that to theological interpretation of Scripture, as far as the language goes). I’m not sure I made myself as clear as I would like to have in my last post: everyone and anyone who attempts to interpret the Bible does so “theologically.” I don’t think this is appreciated enough, at all! In order for folks to appreciate this properly they might have to reorientate their thinking a bit. No matter what belief system, or belief reality someone is committed to, they bring this to the text of Scripture. So, if you’re a metaphysical naturalist/materialist, a secularist in other words, then you bring those categories to Scripture. This ‘secular’ person is doing “theological” exegesis of Scripture; it’s just that they are reading themselves into it, as they read the true and the living God out of it. This is a form of theological exegesis. I am unsure why I would bear any burden at all in regard to showing how theological exegesis looks. We already have those results, exhaustively presented, as we study the history of biblical interpretation; up to the present. Structuralism died along time ago, which means words, grammar, philology, lexicography etc. provide no inherent meaning for exegetical conclusions; only the greater context, or we might say along with John Webster, the ontology of Scripture does. Just because we might not be able to cognize this, or imagine how these things might be, does not mean they aren’t. If the triune God in Christ is the context not just for Holy Scripture, but for the greater creation which Scripture was presented within, then it must be Jesus Christ who is the ultimate meaning of the text of Holy Scripture. He becomes not the SYSTEM, but the personalist cornerstone of the text’s reality and meaning. As TFT says about Scripture: (paraphrase) Scripture is the signum (sign), Christ its res (reality). This seems abstract to some, but I don’t understand how that is. What seems abstract to me is to bring so-called “critical” categories to Scripture, categories that have been given breath by naturalist rather than supranaturalist lungs, and believe that reading the Bible non-Christologically amounts to a concrete reading of discovering meaning in Scripture. That is like doing math or something. Someone who is good at math feels a sense of control and order because they have a level of mastery in mathematics. But Scripture’s reality isn’t of this world, it is outwith this world and prior to it in the triune God. Scripture’s reality isn’t manageable, it contradicts and confronts us. There are no master’s of Holy Scripture, not if it is living and active. Scripture’s reality masters and sanctifies us, not vice versa. There are secondary tools that come to bear as we exegete Scripture, like language, literary realities, history so on and so forth, but none of those are Scripture’s context; Jesus is (cf. Jn 5.39). Jesus said it Himself, and proved it, that He is the living and active Word, and that the total canon of Holy Scripture has always already had its reality from the context of His life as the eternal Logos; or it only has the capacity to become an idol-factory of its so-called handlers’ craftiness.

In the end, anyone who has ever tried to interpret the Bible has done so theologically. Their “confessionalism” might be of a naturalist orientation (and sad to say that has shaped much if not all of so-called evangelical hermeneutics), nevertheless it ultimately is the confession that “they are Lord.” I hope this helps to clarify my last post even further. Pax Christi

Three Vignettes on Reading Scripture Theologically Among the Evangelicals

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The following are three vignettes on Theological Exegesis or Theological Interpretation of Scripture (TIS) that I just posted today on Facebook. I think, in the main, so many Christians are so far removed from all things theological or actual, when it comes to excavating the reality of the faith once and for all delivered to the saints, that when some do attempt deep dives into such things they simply attempt to apply “common-sense” everyday linguistic and cultural reading theories onto the text of Scripture that Scripture itself resists. Scripture is Holy because its reality is in Jesus Christ. Scripture is Holy because it bears witness away from itself to its reality in Jesus Christ. Just as all of creation’s orientation is toward and from Christ’s reality, so is Scripture’s. Until evangelicals et al. come to recognize this, they will simply fall prey to reading Scripture from strategies that simply leave them in the theological lurch. With that said, I offer up the following vignettes on TIS:

There is an inner-logic to Scripture, and it is based on the analogy of the incarnation. If people, in their “biblical exegesis” don’t reason from there, they are failing to do Christian exegesis of the text. Just knowing Greek and Hebrew grammar, and the ANE and Second Temple Judaic background, isn’t enough to render genuinely Christian readings of the text of Holy Scripture. To say otherwise is to agree with the higher critics of Scripture, who reject Christ out of hand (and their approach to Scripture reflects this).

Theological exegesis or interpretation of Scripture (TIS) is done no matter how positivistically and critically objective someone thinks THEY are. It becomes a matter of what theology is being used as the background towards informing someone’s exegetical conclusions. There are theologies based on naturalistic premises, and not Christian ones, for example. People often mistake their piety towards the triune God for their actual theological premises. They haven’t done the work to disentangle or even begin to understand what in fact funds their preunderstandings as they bring those to the text of Scripture. Much work to be done in this unraveling process. I will say though: appealing to Merriam Webster’s dictionary as your “lexicon” for exegeting Holy Scripture reflects bad theology.

If someone affirms Chalcedonian (one person/two natures) and Nicene orthodoxy (God is three in one/one in three), and its exegetical conclusions about God in Christ, they can’t then turn around and simply exegete Scripture from some sort of abstract “natural” biblical hermeneutic. This is what many fail to understand: when you affirm said orthodoxy you are admitting that Scripture is primarily based in a theological order or matrix. As such, to presume some type of prima facie exegesis of Scripture becomes incoherent if in fact the exegete’s hermeneutical basis is funded by said prima facie approach. In other words, said orthodoxy operates from a commitment to a Christian and confessional approach to Scripture, such that Scripture’s depth dimension and fund in Christ must become its interpretive lens. Jesus said Scripture is all about Him, that He is its centraldogma and reality. Selah

The Pressure of Triune Revelation on the Composition and Reading of Holy Scripture

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The various phenomena referred to in Holy Scripture, is the same phenomena we experience currently in the world. The world of the Bible, not its ANE (ancient near eastern) parallels, is definitive in regard to the way we think about the world. To use extrabiblical data, and read that into the “gaps” of Scripture, is neither safe nor sound. To speculate is to go beyond the things that have been revealed by God (Deut. 29:29). There is an inner-logic to Scripture, but that is biblical not speculative.

This is not to say that gaining an understanding of ANE and Second Temple Judaism, and its nearer antecedents, isn’t valuable towards understanding the cultural and literary milieu Scripture was written in. But it is to say that Scripture is driven by its revealed reality in Jesus Christ; that Scriptural reality, and the Revelation it bears witness to, takes a hold of the cultures and literary elements that make up Scripture, and retexts them with a new meaning from above even as it takes its literary grammar from below (think from the analogy of the incarnation).

Reading Scripture with the Christological and Trinitarian Grammar

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This is from chapter 4 of what I presented for my PhD dissertation to Concordia Academic Theology Consortium. As many of you know I gave back that PhD. I am still working on the dissertation (to refine and add to it further), as it looks like it will be considered for another PhD (possibly) at an accredited school. Anyway, here’s a little excerpt:

. . . I contend that since all orthodox Christians, in every place, operate with these conciliar categories—two natures/singular person—with reference to Jesus Christ, that it is this fortification, these grammatical loci, that fundamentally give hermeneutical shape to the way that even the most low-church evangelicals think Christ. As a subsequent implication then, this tacit Chalcedonian grammar, is, or should be the explicit way Christians interpret all of Scripture (both Old and New Testaments). More crudely put: since the conciliar Christ is fundamental to how orthodox Christians think Christ, and if Scripture is, at a first-order level, intensively and principially in reference to Christ, if Scripture is the sign (signum) to its greater and ontological reality (res), Jesus Christ, then all Christian exegesis of Holy Scripture will be and must be regulated by this sort of catholic (universal) Christological standard. That is to say, if Christians are going to think who Christ is through the Chalcedonian grammar, in an essential, but proximate way (vis-à-vis eschatological reality), eo ipso they will interpret Scripture through this rule insofar that Scripture refers to Jesus and the triune God as its inherent and life-breathing reality.

On the Biblical Hermeneutical Dilemma: The Art and Science of Biblical Interpretation

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We all have interpretive tradition as we approach the task of exegeting Holy Scripture. Some know this, most, in the evangelical churches, don’t. As Christians we are all faced with the hermeneutical dilemma. That is, we are, as the ‘priesthood of believers,’ as the communio sanctorum, tasked with, and privileged by the calling to encounter and know God through the study of Holy Scripture. But precisely because we are believers, in the plural, this leads to said hermeneutical dilemma. That is, we all arrive at Scripture with pre-understandings, and a host of other culturally conditioned expectations that the text itself really isn’t (or shouldn’t be) subject to. So, as Christian interpreters of the Christian scriptures, part of the toiling we must go through, is to learn to identify our pre-understandings, and cultural conditioning, and then critically question if those pre-understandings help to enhance our respective exegeses of the text, or on the other hand, question if (and this is typically the case) these foreign apparatuses might be polluting and distorting our exegetical conclusions. Most interpreters of Holy Scripture don’t ever really get around to this process; we might call it, as DA Carson does, the process of distanciation; viz. the process of distancing, disentangling ourselves from our dearly held, and ingrained presuppositions, to the point that we might indeed come to better critically interpret the Holy text.

Yet, as I have already noted, most won’t go through this process; it can be painful. Don’t get me wrong, I am not referring to what more popularly has come to be called deconstructionism. No, in fact, what I’m after here is at real crosscurrents with this more popular and naïve approach currently under way by many disillusioned (and often young) Christians out there. Distanciation, is really the thickening process for understanding where we come from ecclesially; not to mention, culturally and personally. It is the process of digging down deep, self-examining, and listening to the past doctors of the Church in a way that might disrupt, disorientate what we have often, naively, come to hold as our sacred cows. For some, these interpretive cows might be the dispensational hermeneutic, for others, the covenantal/Ramist hermeneutic, for others an existentialist hermeneutic, and still yet for others, some form of identarian hermeneutic (i.e., feminist/womanist, queer, Black liberationist, so on and so forth). Whatever our pre-understandings entail, it is imperative that we come to understand what those are, and then shed what might be darkening our understanding of the text; and at the same time, taking on those hermeneutics that might, indeed, enhance a more proximate way towards arriving at our exegetical conclusions.

The primary problem of not going through the process of distanciation is that we end up conflating our said hermeneutic with the biblical teaching itself. That is, we end up so absolutizing our hermeneutic (i.e., dispensational; theonomic postmillennial; biblical patriarchal; Lordship salvationist etc.) with Scriptural teaching that we cannot see a critical distinction between the two. In this scenario, it becomes nearly impossible for genuine, and thus Christian engagement to obtain between competing hermeneutical adherents. Once this stalemate hardens, and it does, all we have left is a hard sectarianism, among the various hermeneutical systems, with the result being discord and back biting among purported brothers and sisters in Christ. In other words, these systems, when siloed so intransigently to the biblical text, and its teaching, lead various Christians to actually question whether or not their respective opponents are even Christians at all.

I’m all for the heated, but well-lit debate! But at the end of the day, the Christian needs to be humble enough to recognize that there is no salvific ultimacy tied to any hermeneutic, that indeed has been contrived under the broader banner of a genuinely catholic orthodoxy. This is why I am a proponent of a Christologically conditioned hermeneutic, by the way. Some scoff at the audaciousness of claiming such a hermeneutic, but for my money it is the only hermeneutic that has the capacity to provide the text of Holy Scripture with the proper orientation and context to arrive at the most proximate exegetical conclusions available.