Category Archives: Hermeneutics

What Hath the Biblical Critics To Do with the Confessors?

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Last night at work, as I’m prone to do, I was praying and thinking about—for some reason—the role that non-Christian biblical exegetes and commentators can have for the confessing Christian reading of Holy Scripture. When I was writing my Master’s thesis on I Corinthians I used a few commentators who would fit the higher critical non-confessional mold of a biblical exegete; one of these was Hans Conzelmann. He helped me work through some issues that the “evangelical commentators” weren’t. I think such critics can actually provide a fresh view of things without the oft ecclesial accretions that might attend the Christian confessional readings. Of course, the critics have to be critically received, and their limits must be recognized. Even so, there is still some value yet in engaging with such readers of Scripture; only to be constructively and critically received and deployed within the genuinely confessional Christian frame of mind.

I think the above sentiment is something Karl Barth affirms, particularly in his deployment of second naivete. That is to say, the critics only have value insofar that they do; limited by the horizontal vistas they work from. In the end, Barth would say that the critics out-critic themselves by attempting to go beyond the boundaries that they might be useful within. When the critics think and work from naturalist presuppositions, and they are engaging with a supranatural text, they end up seeing things from a muted frame of reference. In reduction they show that Holy Scripture is in fact too kerygmatic, too saga oriented (as Barth would say) for their framework to be of ultimate assistance. Even so, they do see certain things that confessional Christians might miss because of sectarian or other prior religious sociological commitments that might themselves impose upon their reading of Holy Scripture.

On a concluding and sobering note: Conzelmann died in his sins in 1989. He wasn’t critically aware of his limitations, and as such, ended up denying the reality of Holy Scripture; who is, Jesus Christ. Maybe one practical way of using such “exegetes” in our own critical ways, is to pray for them, if they are still alive, and ask that the Lord would open their eyes to the reality and power of God in Christ. That’s the sobering thing, at the end of the day a person can be the most educated genius in the world, and yet, if they don’t bow the knee to Jesus as Lord, the second they die, they will have realized they made a horrific and eternal mistake.

Learning to Read Scripture as if Jesus is its Meaning and Context: Along with Athanasius and the Fathers

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We all interpret. Whether it be while driving down the street, and stopping at a stop sign, or reading the various sections of a newspaper. We bring readerly expectations and conditions to our daily lives that inform how we arrive at our interpretive conclusions. But for some reason when it comes to biblical interpretation many people in the churches place that into a special mystical, even magical category; as if said people can simply open the text, read it, and receive it as is without interpretation. But this is false of course. We are all faced with interpretive dilemmas, particularly when it comes to the text of Scripture.

At the very beginning, when a confessing Christian opens the Bible to read they are approaching it from an a priori (prior) interpretation, and thus confession (as orthodox Christians). They are approaching Scripture from the context that it is Holy and the place where God has ordained to speak to His people, and to the world. That is, based on an interpretation of the Bible that not all share, of course! Atheists don’t approach Scripture as if it is the triune God’s Word for humanity. The atheist, clearly, approaches Scripture through a negation, through skepticism, through unbelief; and so because of their approach (interpretation) they visit its reading with different readerly expectations than an orthodox biblical Christian does.

Once it is has been established that Christians read Scripture itself from a confession, based on an interpretation, it should be easier to persuade the reader of what I hope to throughout the brief body of the following post. Confessional Christians ought to read Scripture through God’s interpretation and reality for Scripture in His Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. This is what the early church fathers presumed; viz., that Scripture was about Jesus, and the triune God He revealed. They further believed that because of this Christological condition of Scripture that it required that as the church, as God’s confessional people, that they attempt to interpret Scripture with reference to articulating its reality in the who of Jesus Christ and the triune God. This motivation was propelled with greater urgency in the face of many of the early heretics who were present within the church’s walls (think Arius, Eunomius, Pelagius et al.) And so through a series of various circumstances church councils were convened in order to develop and codify grammar wherein who Jesus was, as both God and Man, could be articulated in such a way that would ally the heretics and edify the faithful at the same time. We see these conciliar articulations, and thus theological grammar develop in such key councils as: Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon, so on and so forth. These councils led to what came to be understood as the limiting grammar for how to think of the singular person of Jesus Christ as both fully God and fully human (i.e., the hypostatic union and homoousios). For our purposes what I want to press is the way the fathers went about interpreting Scripture in this instance.

To help us wade into this massive locus let me introduce us to a thought Peter Leithart has on the reality of theological interpretation of Scripture. He points to Athanasius as a particular and early example of a church father who definitively engaged in the type of biblical interpretation I have been calling our attention to previously. He writes:

Theological interpretation of Scripture thus involves respect for the premodern interpretation, attention to the doctrinal tradition of the church, recognition that Bible scholarship takes place within the church and exists for the edification of the church, and acknowledgment that interpretation is not a clinical scientific enterprise but a form of piety and properly preceded and followed by prayer, praise, and worship. Athanasius is among the precritical interpreters of Scripture whom contemporary theological readers of Scripture seek to emulate. Lessing’s ditch was unknown to him, as was Benjamin Jowett. Of course, so too was the Nicene tradition to which Reno appeals. Athanasius does appeal to the authority of the “fathers” at Nicaea, but he is one of the key formulators of the Nicene tradition, rather than an heir of it. His biblical interpretation is therefore of peculiar importance, since by following his lead we can discover some of the paths by which he moved from Scripture’s narrative, law, gospel, and epistle to the metaphysical claims inherent in Nicene theology.[1]

Leithart recognizes the inherent reality of interpretation of the biblical text as we approach it as confessional Christians; that is, that we do so from an already vantage point that we have definitionally as Christians. He points us to Athanasius, the great stalwart for christological orthodoxy at the Council of Nicaea in 325 ad. Athanasius understood, 1) that Scripture’s reality was funded by Christ (cf. Jn 5.39); 2) that Scripture itself, while funded by the reality of Christ, didn’t explicitly, but only implicitly taught what we have come to know as dogma or sacra doctrina today; 3) thus, Athanasius knew, as Leithart underscores, that in order to speak explicitly about the divinity and humanity of Christ together, just as sure as Scripture is oriented by both realities singularly, there would have to be some sort of intelligible grammar developed in order to make clear what was, explicitly present in the text, but left in implicit and inner-theological ways. He along with many others, as they were engaging what came to be understood as heretical christologies, gave the church the theological grammar the orthodox churches deploy to this day. As such, when confessional Christians think about Jesus, and the triune God in the 21st century, if they are orthodox, are thinking from these early theological grammars developed by the fathers with reference to who Jesus is vis-à-vis the triune God. This shouldn’t be taken for granted (as it so often is!)

My basic point in this post is to confront the idea that people simply read Scripture as if tabula rasa; i.e., as blank slates who re-create and re-interpret the biblical interpretive wheel as if magic fallen from the heavens as fairy-dust. Orthodox (little ‘o’) Christians are part of a continuous history established by God in Christ, just as sure as He has established His church. That is, we receive by listening to the past. For many Christians in the 21st century they are only interested in receiving from the Post-Enlightenment past, thus, and again, reading Scripture from rationalist, naturalistic lenses wherein their personal experiences and rationality becomes the standard by which Scripture is interpreted. But in fact, confessional Christians, as Leithart noted for us, read along with the ‘faithful’ from all periods; particularly as that has been funded by the conciliar past, and the christological and theological proper grammars developed thereat.

My hope is that the reader walks away from this post with the recognition that there is more going on with the text of Scripture than simply knowing the languages (while very important), or understanding literary and narratival theory, or simply understanding biblical grammar and philology. All of that is important towards being a good exegete of Scripture, but what is most important is to approach Holy Scripture as if it is Holy; which is to say, to approach Scripture as from the confessional standpoint that the early Christians and church fathers did. That is, to approach Scripture as if its ultimate context and thus determinative for meaning is indeed Jesus Christ and the triune God. If we don’t read Scripture this way, just as the fathers did, then we will imbue ‘our’ meanings and contexts into the text, and allow our ‘responses’ to determine its meaning and theological conclusions. We will make Scripture an instance of self-projection wherein it fits our desires and wishes (which would help Feuerbauch with his case), rather than allowing it to be enflamed with God’s voice, as we encounter it with each page turned; wherein the Spirit brings the risen Christ’s face into ours and says both Yes and No. But I would argue that the orthodox Christian cannot and should not read Scripture apart from its orthodox frame as presented by the conciliar fathers. We can receive the limits they presented, and positively and constructively build off of those, but they should never be left behind. If we are going to be catholic (universal) Christians, we will affirm said orthodoxy, and the type of confessional and devotional heart and mindset that was formed by that, and allow who Christ is as the meaning of the text to inform the way we proceed in our exegesis and thus conclusions about what the text is saying for us today—and we will receive that from the Right Hand of the Father as that has been given formation, afresh anew, through the corridors of the church’s history. We will Listen to the Past as Stephen Holmes has so sagaciously alerted us to.

We will close with someone who understands the significance of engaging the ‘drama’ of Scripture in the way I have been describing previously:

In sum, the Gospel is ultimately unintelligible apart from Trinitarian theology. Only the doctrine of the Trinity adequately accounts for how those who are not God come to share in the fellowship of Father and Son through the Spirit. The Trinity is both the Christian specification of God and a summary statement of the Gospel, in that the possibility of life with God depends on the person and work of the Son and Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity thus serves both as an identification of the dramatis personae and as a precis of the drama itself. “He is risen indeed!”[2]

[1] Peter J. Leithart, Athanasius, 28.

[2] Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, 43-44.

Being a Christocentric and Grammatical Historical Reader of Scripture

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There is a prima facie or straightforward reading of Scripture that finds its context from the context of the whole of Scripture, and its reality in Jesus Christ. But just because we might want to say that we have a Christocentric method of interpreting Scripture, this does not allow for the interpreter to simply read Christ into the text in ways that He never intended. In other words, we still must pay attention to the plain grammatical and historical markers of the text insofar that these bare witness to Christ and His teaching throughout. I am only suggesting that often times people will claim to be doing a Christocentric reading of Scripture, when in fact what they are really engaging in is an allegorical reading of Scripture informed by their own theological imaginations.

Balthasar. God and Scripture

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I thought this quote, while speaking to another issue (Barth and Balthasar’s disagreement over key theological points), is apropos in regards to how Protestant Christians approach the scriptures, interpretively. It is interesting that we can look at the same scriptures, and come to such different conclusions — on certain points of dogma and theological emphasis. This quote from Balthasar (quoting something else, see the biblio info) helps state the reality of this conundrum:

The battle is so serious because neither side can seriously deny that it is really the same object we refer to, but at the same time we can find no way to find unity over its right concept. . .. The dispute is therefore so pressing and urgent because we see the same reality in different ways, even if we dare not say that, by God’s eternal and unfathomable decree, the same reality is looking at us in such different ways. Thus, because we see so differently (aliter), we also end up seeing, at least partially, something different (alia). And thus, the dispute over the How (quale) comes to affect in fundamental ways all the secondary divergences over the What (quantum) . . ..[1]

This principle applies to many situations. Given a concern of mine, on interpretive traditions, this could be applied to that reality. So, in other words, “How” we understand God (our Doctrine of God), will inestimably, shape “What” our interpretive conclusions will be when we come to the text of scripture. This is so, because if scripture discloses God one way, and we have already conceived Him to be another way; then we most certainly will fail to see Him at all, when we actually try to read scripture. A consequence, if we presuppose a certain schema about God (i.e., that He is the unmoved mover of Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle) that is foreign to the God of the Bible; and then we develop methods of interpretation that are consonant with this preconceived notion, we are most certainly going to be reading “our” God into scripture — instead of reading Him “out” of it.

Scripture is to point us to Someone beyond itself, but if we don’t allow scripture to impose its own categories and objectives upon us; then we are doomed to find that we are only looking at our own reflections as we peer into it as a mirror of “our” souls. If we have a fundamental disagreement on Who God is (in other words, does our metaphysic predetermine who God is before we get to Him in Christ, or do we start with our knowledge of Him at the cross of Christ as the second person of the Trinity), then it is only natural that we will have a fundamental disagreement on how we should read this God off of scripture. Make sense . . .

Certainly, we all, as historic-orthodox Christians believe God is triune; but do we really allow scripture and the Revelation of Christ to shape what that means (and thus follow an interpretive model that places its center (Christ) at the foreground of our interpretive approach); or do we come to scripture, artificially seeking a God who will fit our preconceived notions of what “we” think God should look like (e.g. His “glory,” not foolishness, but “wisdom” per I Cor. 1:17ff). Certainly, nobody is immune to this problem; but I would suggest that much of Protestant Christianity (not just Protestant), especially Classically Reformed-Fundamentalist-Evangelicals (picking on them, because this is my own background), has followed a “method” (or mode) that has caused an articulation of God that is at odds with the one we meet in Christ-at-the-Cross.

 

[1] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Die Theologie und die Kirche [Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1938]. Collected articles, 1920-1928.

*Post originally posted on August 29th, 2009 at a now defunct blog of mine.

 

On Exegeting Holy Scripture Christologically

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The following comes from a post I wrote on August 13th, 2012 that I posted at another (now defunct) blog of mine. It was in response to another blogger’s series of posts on theological exegesis (he is a biblical studies guy). The following was a comment on one of his posts engaging with someone else in that thread. I still like most of what I wrote here. One thing I would add is that I think all of the Literary, Grammatical, Historical tools can and ought to be deployed, even within the Christological exegetical approach I am describing below. In other words, I am not interested, per se, in a figural or “allegorical” reading of the text; and yet, many these days seem to be attempting to recover that as well (even the Baptists!) I think a Christological exegetical (see some things I’ve had to say on this with reference to Calvin’s and Luther’s approaches) approach can appropriate text-critical advances, so on and so forth, as those might serve helpful in illuminating the meaning of Holy Scripture vis-à-vis its reality in Jesus Christ. I will have to elaborate on that further later. But for now, I give you the following:

[…] the theologian—worth their salt—ought to be working at and from a grammar that is demanded by the theo-logic present in God’s life Self-revealed and thus interpreted in Jesus Christ (cf. Jn. 1:18). But of course, this is always an open-ended dialectical and spiraling process; and it ought to be no other way, since we know, given the theo-logical implications of God’s Triune life that he is dynamic (V. static) relational, and a God of love who acts in grace (primarily known and exemplified in and through the Incarnation). So, I don’t want to collapse the barometer for the meaning (of scripture) into a textual linguistic socio-cultural community (a la Lindbeck), but I see (riffing on the patristic ‘rule of faith’) the analogy or lens or purpose of scripture shaped in and through the life of God revealed in Jesus Christ. I know that seems ethereal, and probably abstract, but what I don’t think is abstract—but instead concrete and particular—is the enfleshing of God in Christ. The theologian’s task is to lay bare the web of beliefs that necessarily flow from this reality; and I take, for example, the so-called ecumenical councils wranglings and wrestlings with this, early on, as exemplary of how Christians ought to seek to provide grammar for the theo-logic and christo-logic that scripture is presupposing upon in its occasional writings (which as Torrance would say is its ‘Depth Dimension’). So unlike, Brian (and NT Wright), I am not ready to look at the Patristic era and the theology “started” there as if it is part of some sort of “salad bar” wherein I can choose if I want to take some of this or that; no, I believe that we must listen to the teachers of the Church (the past) as if Jesus Christ himself gave them to her for her edification. But of course, I see this kind of “always reforming” principle as something that is an ongoing reality, and thus even the grammar provided in the Patristic era (as formative as it is!) is open to further clarification and critique (but not simple abandonment) as we continue to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ, as we are moving toward attaining (finally!) the unity of the Faith. I am not interested in merely repristinating the past (we have the post-Reformed orthodox … and the Eastern Orthodox for that), but I am interested in engaging the past insofar as the rich and deep heritage provided therein fosters a depth relation to and understanding of our Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ. So my question to Brian was in fact really noting something, ironically, that I don’t think anyone can ensure; but then, I do think if we are going to be theological realists (which I am, or ‘critical’), and if we are going to do Theological Science (as TF Torrance does it, which also serves as a title for one of his books)—meaning that our categories and emphases for inquiry will be defined as the object of our consideration imposes ‘himself’ (or itself) upon us (Torrance calls this an ‘epistemological inversion’)—then the ground for arbitrating what is true and sure will indeed, and once again, be the theo-logic that is present from the revelation of God in Christ.

So, I know that much of my post is repetitive. The moral of my comment and belief can be summed up thusly: The revelation of God in Jesus Christ is the rule of faith by which all of the occasional writings of scripture (given the reality of all of their various types, genres and forms etc.) ought to be framed; because they all (even given their particularities and idiosyncrasies) trade on the same kergymatic reality of God’s life in Christ (or they all presume upon a theological reality about who God is, and that reality is only understood, according to scripture, through the explanation given in Jesus Christ cf. John 1:18).

 

Reading the Bible Christologically with Reference to PT Forsyth

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I was taught to do Bible study by reducing the various sections of Scripture to propositions; even the Hebrew poetic sections. So the primary goal of biblical interpretation according to the way I was taught in Bible College and even Seminary (to a point) was to conclude with a principle to every passage of Scripture, or every paragraph (pericope) of Scripture that I read. It would go something like this (inductive Bible study): 1) Observation, 2) Interpretation, 3) Principlization, 4) Application; maybe you have been taught to study the Bible this way too, it is quite popular. And as far as it goes, it can be helpful, but at the end of the day it isn’t all that satisfying; at least not to me.

Beyond all of that, a by-product of reducing all of Scripture to a galleria of propositions is that we end up having a host of competing interpretations of these propositions as we place them into our prefabricated systematic systems of theology; which would help explain how we end up with so many tribes of interpretation out there, and so much dissonance among various Christians (and confusion among young Bible students … i.e. people get confused about the legitimacy of any passage of Scripture given the array of interpretations on the same passages of Scripture among the so called professional exegetes and commentators).

I think there is a better way to proceed; a way where we don’t reduce Scripture to propositions, but allow it, instead, to bring us into encounter with the purifying fire of God’s lively life in Christ. Isn’t this what Jesus said Scripture was ultimately about, Him (Jn. 5.39)? Scottish theologian P.T. Forsyth has some refreshing thoughts on this, as reported by Angus Paddison:

As can be seen from our explorations thus far, Forsyth first and foremost locates Scripture in relation to God’s activity, an action best regarded as ‘not merely a gospel of definite truth but of decisive reality, not of clear belief but of crucial action’. This plea that we attend to a lively activity of God – rather than a series of propositional truths about God – explains Forsyth’s resistance to dry freezing Scripture and regarding it as little more than ‘an arsenal of Christian evidences’. Scriptural reading is to resist having commerce with stupefied orthodoxies. Christian faith is not ultimately faith in doctrines but rather a faith in those realities and powers which Scripture and doctrine attempt to articulate. The power of Jn 3.16 is not that it is a message about God’s love for us; it points to God’s love enacted for us. Finely-wrought doctrinal systems are prone to misunderstand faith as an intellectual assent to truths articulated, rather than the soul’s ‘direct contact with Christ crucified’. Biblical readers who domesticate the Bible into systems of orthodoxy are liable to forget that it is the theologian’s ‘hard and high fate to cast himself into the flame he tends, and be drawn into its consuming fire’. To be ‘biblical’ is therefore to apprehend that Scripture’s core

is not a crystallization of man’s divine idea, it is not even a divine declaration of what God is in himself; it is his revelation of what he is for us in actual history, what he for us has done, and forever does. (PTF)

Being biblical is a matter of apprehending correctly God’s redemptive activity into which Scripture has been drawn and is now located.

No belief is scriptural simply because it be met with the Bible. We do not believe in the contents of the Bible, but in its content, in what put it there, and what it is there for. For it is a means, and not an end. We believe in the Gospel, the Gospel of God’s Grace justifying the ungodly in Christ’s cross and creating the Bible for that use. (PTF)

Scripture is located by the gospel, before it is located by us.[1]

I can hear you now: ‘Are you saying that we shouldn’t use propositions when we are attempting to explicate or understand the teachings of Scripture?’ No, that’s not really what I am saying, nor is it what Angus Paddison or PT Forsyth is saying; instead what is being communicated is that Scripture is much more, not less than propositions. And in fact, that Bible reading’s ultimate goal should be to know God in worshipful encounter, with the realization that he is the living God, the living Word in Christ for us. In other words, he actually ‘is risen,’ he actually lives, and he speaks! As the evangelist says ‘he speaks, and his sheep know his voice;’ this is the primary role Scripture plays, as a place where the redeemed come to know their Redeemer in lively encounter.

I think this will sound too abstract for some, but for me it is like cold crisp water rolling down into my parched soul. It has made Scripture something exciting, and given it its rightful place before God as his instrument to administer his life to ours in and through the domain of his life in Christ.

[1] Angus Paddison, Scripture a very Theological Proposal (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 18.

*repost from 8 years ago.

Avoiding the Confessional/Conciliar Reduction: The Scripture Principle

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Matthias Grebe offers a good word on the potential problem of being hyper-confessional/conciliar (my phraseology), to the point that said confessions and conciliar determinations come to reduce and coopt the possibility for thinking with greater depth and criticality in regard to the implications of Scripture’s attestation to its depth reality in Jesus Christ and the triune God. So Grebe:

The varied understandings of key texts can obstruct consensus in theology. And yet, theology is best done in conversation. When this dialogue does not take place, the stronghold of various doctrines and opinions (often safeguarded by a small minority who thereby position themselves as the ‘gatekeepers of orthodoxy’) becomes a difficult one to penetrate with new ideas. This has both positive and negative implications. Though it means that certain doctrines are retained and defended in order to maintain orthodoxy, this might also mean that in some circles there is almost no scope for revision, correction, or challenge. Once a particular doctrine is perceived as being scripturally informed (and is thus widely embraced as ‘orthodox’), it can become a pillar of a certain theological framework, even if the scriptural foundation is disputed. By this point, however, the doctrine might be established so strongly in the tradition that it eludes all challenge simply because such questioning is immediately interpreted as a direct attack on the integrity of Scripture. The result of this approach is that, within the particular tradition, self-examination, critical engagement with outside opinion, and genuine re-engagement with Scripture are sometimes forgotten. As we shall see, this has occurred with the doctrines of election and the atonement.[1]

It is this that makes Protestantism, at its best, what it is; viz., the so-called ‘Scripture Principle.’ And yet, in a variety of denominational locales, particularly in North America, but abroad as well, even in Protestant environs, it is the confessional/conciliar-reduction that has come to be privileged over the reality (res) of Holy Scripture as the lens by which we come to know and think God afresh anew. None of what Grebe is detailing entails a rejection of the ecclesial determinations, in regard to the Christological and Theological Proper grammars they developed for the Church. But it is to suggest that the Christian understand that theology is ultimately one that lives and breathes from its ‘eschatological reserve’ in its reality in Jesus Christ. As such, if Scripture’s reality is indeed Jesus Christ in toto (cf. Jn 5.39), then in order to think afresh, in regard to a burgeoning knowledge of God in Christ, the Christian’s mode ought to be one where the ordained locus of God’s most intense Self-witness (Holy Scripture) is given pride of place to continuously test what fallible people beforehand have previously said, in their own limited ways, about said God. This is not to discount the so-called ecumenical councils, instead it is to amplify them as we continue to dialogue between ourselves, them, and the living God, as we one and all fellowship together in the triune life through the lively mediation of the risen Christ who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

If our forebears grounded their ‘ecumenical’ thinking in the explication of Holy Scripture, which they did, then to continue this heritage, even as its reality is not dead, but Risen!, we would be at our best to constantly be testing to see if these things be so. And if they be so, as the patristics attested in their own way and grammar, then its reality, who is eternal life, can only be plumbed further and deeper as we all grow together, one and all, in the one faith delivered to the saints. I see this as what Grebe is after, and I concur.

[1] Matthias Grebe, Election, Atonement, and the Holy Spirit (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014), Kindle ed. Loc. 136, 141, 144, 148.

On Barth’s and Paul’s Purported ‘Christian Universalism’ in Sachkritik

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Karl Barth is often said to be a proponent of Christian universalism. The logic is that Barth’s doctrine of election, whether he likes it or not, commits him to affirming some form of a Christian universalism (i.e., the notion that all people of all time will eventually freely submit to the reality that Jesus Christ is Lord; even if that finally only happens in hell itself). But Barth adamantly rejected this supposed necessity of his theological trajectory. As Douglas Campbell writes:

Barth has often been accused of universalism, but he steadfastly denied it (see the final paragraph of CD III/2), and we owe it to his intelligence and subtlety to at least examine his claims in this relation. One of his key points was a denial of any overriding of human freedom by God, although he defines that topic very carefully. This stance certainly excludes crude forms of universalism (and I myself endorse this exclusion). Another key point was his recognition of God’s freedom, which certainly seems fair as well. God acts freely, and so we cannot really circumscribe God’s activity in advance. Barth did point toward the legitimacy of hope, and even prayer, for universal salvation. However, he stopped short of predicting it. (Part of Barth’s repudiation is explicable in terms of his rejection of a form of universalism understood in a “hard” Origenist fashion, as seen also in Maximus the Confessor, which overrules divine agency. These theologians claim that salvation of all must follow on the successful theosis of all—a Pelagianizing account of universalism that Barth was quite right to reject.)

Having said this. [sic] I am not sure that his development of the notion of the ultimate victory of God at length in CD IV/3 did not lead him to a theological location where the denial of universalism would in fact lead to the denial of key christological warrants, even after taking human freedom fully into account. And his christological account of election can also be invoked here in relation to God’s freedom (II/2). God’s freedom is not freedom per se but his free love towards us, which is definitively enacted in the Son prior to the foundation of the world. So perhaps some Sachkritik in relation to Barth himself is in order at this moment.[1]

Before we engage further with the implications that Campbell draws out for us in regard to Barth’s rejection (or not) of Christian universalism, let us address a methodological matter. Maybe the reader has never heard of Sachkritik. In order to offer some insight into this (which has greater development here), I. Howard Marshall writes this on what Sachkritik entails:

I shall continue to refer to the method by this German name, but it will be helpful to note that the possible English equivalents for it include ‘content criticism’, ‘theological criticism’, ‘critical interpretation’, ‘material criticism’ and ‘critical study of the content’.7

It will not surprise you in the least that among the heroes of our tale, or, if you prefer it, the villains of the piece, we must mention R. Bultmann. Here is a comment on his Theology of the New Testament by Markus Barth, who asks how a conscientious exegete can develop a systematic exposition of Paul’s theology that contradicts part of the source material:

[He can do so] only when he feels himself called to Sachkritik on Paul, ‘just as Luther used it, for example, on the Epistle of James’. The victims of Bultmann’s Sachkritik include some Pauline statements on the Holy Spirit, the resurrection, the second Adam, original sin, knowledge. Naturally the hostile crumbs swept to one side by Sachkritik include the statements about creation, predestination and the incarnation of Jesus Christ which Bultmann has demythologized. In any case Bultmann is convinced that he is putting the ‘real intention’ of Paul over against the actual words of the text.… When Bultmann attributes the use of juridical, mythological, cosmological, mystical and idealistic concepts to a ‘superstitious understanding of God, the world and mankind’, he expresses as clearly and simply as possible the criteria for his Sachkritik.

Now we must be clear as to what is going on here. It is not quite the same as the attitude expressed in the words: ‘I want to be free to disagree with Paul.’ In that wish there is expressed a contrast between what Paul said and what I think, and if we disagree, so much the worse for Paul. That is a question of Paul’s authority over against my own authority. We’ll come back to that in a moment. Rather what has been expressed is a contrast between one part of Scripture and another which stands in contradiction to it, or between what a writer actually says and what he really means. According to Tom Wright, we find an example of this in the procedure adopted by proponents of universalism.

The proponents of universalism admit very readily that their doctrine conflicts with much biblical teaching. What they are attempting, however, is Sachkritik, the criticism (and rejection) of one part of Scripture on the basis of another.

That is to say, critics observe or search for places where there are doctrinal contradictions in Scripture and then have to decide which passage they are to follow in preference to the other.[2]

Essentially, as Marshall clarifies further, what the above reduces to is the following: “. . . The result of such analysis is inevitably to force a judgment as to which texts are to be taken as expressing the real intention of a writer or the main thrust of the scripture and how they are to be interpreted. . . .”[3]

All of the aforementioned to note that Sachkritik is a modern (German) development that took place in post-Enlightenment biblical studies. The quest, as it were, is for the exegete to properly identify what the total intention of the biblical author is in light of their whole corpus rather than simply focusing on various texts here and there. That is, there might be something in the thought of the author of Holy Scripture, that is in their respective teaching, that seems to contradict their broader teaching when their whole corpus is taken into account. It is the total teaching that then serves as determinative of how the exegete ought to understand the particular (potentially contradictory relative to the total), and place that into the total teaching of said biblical author. The criteria for this endeavor takes us too far afield to develop further for our purposes. Suffice it to say: What Campbell is referring to in Barth, and the Apostle Paul prior, is how we ought to understand these authors from within the ambit of their total teaching on a particular theological topic; in our current case that involves a doctrine of Christian universalism.

With the above noted let’s return to the question at hand: should Barth be understood to finally be teaching a doctrine of Christian universalism when his total oeuvre is considered? Campbell, seems to think that just maybe we ought to conclude that if Sachkritik is applied to the total theology of Barth, as developed his Church Dogmatics, that Barth’s theology must necessitate in the affirmation of a Christian universalism. But Campbell doesn’t finally take the step of absolutizing this for Barth, even by way of engaging in a Sachkritik.

Prior to Campbell’s thinking on Barth, he has been engaging in an exegesis on Paul’s theology with particular reference to his thinking on eschatological doctrina, such as annihilationism and Christian universalism. Campbell shows that in one sense Paul seems to teach a doctrine of annihilationism; at least as the inner-logic of his teaching is teased out. But when Paul is used to interpret Paul, as Campbell suggests ought to be an interpretive employment we ought to take seriously, as Campbell argues, what we end up with is a Paul who sounds a lot like Barth’s own ending; again, according to Campbell. For Campbell, the Apostle Paul’s total teaching ends up having a christological universalism latent to it. In other words, according to Campbell, Paul’s total theology, even when recognizing that he also has an apparent teaching of ‘annihilation’ present (when it comes to the final judgment), reduces to the notion that all of creation (cf. Rom. 8 etc.) will finally be redeemed. And yet, as with Barth, because of various other passages and teachings in Paul, Paul doesn’t end up with a decisive or absolute Christian universalism. Campbell sees this in a corollary with Barth’s own conclusions; that is, Campbell, I would suggest, sees Barth’s teaching and thinking on these things, largely reflective of the Apostle Paul’s own inner-theological teachings on a doctrine of last and final things in regard to salvation. But this is a sachkritik reading of the Apostle (if not of Barth as well). Some might sense in sachkritik an antecedent in what Luther called an analogy of faith, or what we might call an analogy of Scripture. That is, the deployment of the clearer teachings of Scripture as the means by which we interpret the less clear. I think it would be right to see this, in principle, as an antecedent to sachkritik even if sachkritik finally took shape under different (modern) pressures.

Conclusion

After all of the above is considered what do I think? I agree mostly with Campbell. I don’t think Barth ought to be understood as endorsing a dogmatic Christian universalism; at most I think we see a very hopeful and prayerful Christian universalism in Barth’s theology. I also tend to agree with Campbell on Paul’s teaching in this regard; even if we didn’t have time to directly deal with his development on that, per se. I would always fall back to the Barth of CD III (as Campbell reads him), and emphasize a doctrine of Divine freedom as determinative of all things; including the notion that it could be a possibility that it would be in keeping with God’s purview (and character) to have made a way for people, all people, post-mortem, even while in the gruel of hell, to finally, by the Spirit, bow the knee and confess Jesus as Lord. But I don’t take this dogmatically, and my hopefulness in this is only informed by the fact that God is God and I am not; as such He could surprise us this way, and not be found to have contradicted His Word to us now and then. But this is up to God, and as far as we know now, a doctrine of dogmatic Christian universalism imposes a determination upon God that God Himself has not committed Himself to, per se. If we are going to be ‘good’ sachkritiks the total canonical teaching of Holy Scripture teaches a final judgment of the (spiritually) dead that appears to be a final and unending judgment of the type that the devil and his minions will experience. Jesus taught this, and so I think it is best to temper any notion of a purported dogmatic Christian universalism by the reality that God is God, and thus the only free agent who finally determines these things. But as it stands now, based on the teaching of Scripture, unless of course we are going to step in and read Scripture from a canon within the canon, a dogmatic Christian universalism is not on the table. That is, unless the exegete has already decided a priori that the total teaching of Scripture does in fact presuppose a dogmatic Christian universalism, and then use that presupposition as regulative for how they arrive at their respective exegetical conclusions on these matters. I don’t think that is warranted; again, because of God’s freedom over against ours as His subjects.

 

[1] Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 440.

[2] I. Howard Marshall, “An Evangelical Approach to Theological Criticism,” Themelios (Vol. 13:3): na.  

[3] Ibid.

The Sermon on the Mount as the Postscript of the Covenant of Grace

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Covenant theology in confessional Reformational theology is its hermeneutical key. Karl Barth, a Reformed theologian, doesn’t stray from this key, but as is typical with Barth he reformulates Covenant (or Federal) theology such that Jesus Christ becomes the key, the regulative ground and condition of the covenant itself. Indeed, rather than operating with two aspects of the covenant—i.e., the covenant of works, covenant of grace—as classical Covenantal theology does, Barth retextualizes this framework by reducing the two covenants into one; viz. the covenant of grace. For Barth, the covenant of grace is the supralapsarian (before/above creation)/fall) basis, the inner reality of creation’s concrete expression, as God in pre-temporal reality pre-destined Himself to be for and with us in His election of our fallen humanity for Himself; and thus, as corollary, in this election we also, as humans, in Christ’s elect humanity, come to experience the exalted status of what it means to be human before God in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is God’s covenant of grace, His free election to be God with us, rather than against us; it is this election that has consequences not just for us, but as we have been called to be priests of creation from Christ’s priesthood, it has consequences for all of creation’s redemption and re-creation (cf. Rom. 8:18ff). But it is this framework that Barth reifies, this covenantal framework, and it becomes one conditioned not by a naked heilsgeschichte (‘salvation-history’) shaped by the abstract decretum abosolutum (absolute decree of predestination), but by the concrete reality of God’s inner-triune life that has freely been given for the world in Christ.

It is the aforementioned framing that Barth takes up in discussion on the Sermon on the Mount vis-à-vis the covenant of grace. There is a biblical specificity to the way Barth attempts to explicate theological reality, and the following is an example of that. It isn’t polemical, but a constructive way to think about the implications of the Incarnation and how that impacts the way we think all things biblical. If nothing else this ought to illustrate how Christological Interpretation of Scripture (CIS) looks, particularly as that gets fleshed out in a foundational way in regard to the way that Barth sees the promise/fulfillment motif in Jesus Christ as the grundaxiom of biblical and Christian reality. He writes:

The Sermon on the Mount, too, is primarily and decisively a notification, a proclamation, a description and a programme. Its imperatives, too, have primarily and decisively the character of indicating a position and laying a foundation. The position indicated and the foundation laid are the kingdom, Jesus, the new man. And these are not three things, but one and the same. The kingdom is the new man in Jesus. Jesus Himself is the kingdom of the new humanity. The new Adam is Jesus the Bringer and Herald of the kingdom. Proclaiming this threefold unity, the Sermon on the Mount proclaims the consummation of the covenant of grace, and therefore the telos of the Law and the Ten Commandments. It proclaims the position which in the Ten Commandments was determined and promised to Israel, but only determined and promised and not given. The Sermon on the Mount, like the New Testament as a whole, defines and describes it as something now given. If the Ten Commandments state where man may and should stand before and with God, the Sermon on the Mount declares that he has been really placed there by God’s own deed. If the Ten Commandments are a preface, the Sermon on the Mount is in a sense a postscript. The history of the covenant of grace has reached its goal and end. It does not continue in the history of the Church at whose beginning there stands the declarations of the Sermon on the Mount. For time does not continue after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It can only move away from this its centre—moving to its already appointed end. For its end is determined by the fact that it has been given this centre. The Church is the community of God in this time which moves away from this centre to its appointed and already invisible end. The covenant of grace as such has no further history in this time. The only question now is whether the Church will live or not live in the fulness of life already granted to it, in recognition or non-recognition, gratitude or ingratitude, in face of what God has finally and once for all accomplished for man, in the freedom which God has decisively accorded to man, or the bondage from which he has been finally and conclusively released, and which has now become a complete anachronism. The Sermon on the Mount, as a postscript, as a document of the completed covenant of grace and its concluded history, defines and describes the freedom which is given to the people of God in its new form as the Church, and which is to be proclaimed by the Church to the whole world.[1]

For Barth (and I’d suggest for the Apostle Paul) Christ is the new creation (cf. II Cor. 5:17). This isn’t an abstract notion we have been called simply to affirm, but a concrete reality to be understood and lived from. This is what we see Barth explicating in his exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount. Here Barth is engaging in a canonical exegesis, he is using the Pauline motif of new creation, within a Christological frame, to interpret the dominical teaching of Jesus deposited in the Sermon on the Mount. When Barth refers to the Sermon on the Mount as a postscript, he, in context is referring to the promise of the protoevangelium (Gen. 3:15). He is thinking in terms of his teaching on new time, in corollary with Christ in His humanity as the new creation. It is God’s choice, prior to the foundation of the world, to be for and with us in Christ, as the inner reality of all reality, that is finally consummated for Barth in the death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. As such insofar that creation has Christ as its telos (purpose), as its res, all time has been brought to its end; that is in the sense that it has finally come into its glorified intention. For Barth, eternity and time are not in competition, but in fact the former, in God’s election in Christ, is the latter’s basis. It is this basis, the new time founded in the new creation of Christ’s resurrection and ascension that God’s community of people, the Church, finds their reality. As such we no longer are scrapping out an existence under the old strictures, only looking forward to the kingdom of God coming, instead we are now living in the reality that the kingdom has indeed already come, and yet will finally come in consummate form. But it is this consummate form that Barth wants us to press into and live from as if it is already the reality; this is the new time of the kingdom, and the center of all reality, as such. The Sermon on the Mount is the postscript insofar that its reality, as a summary of all the Law and Prophets as now fulfilled in Jesus Christ, is indeed indicating the finality of Kingdom Come!  

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2 §36-39 [688] The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 175.

On a Genuinely Christian Theology of History and Apocalyptic Theology

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Samuel Adams in his book The Reality of God and Historical Method: Apocalyptic Theology in Conversation with N. T. Wright offers many important insights in regard to ‘apocalyptic theology’ in contradistinction to NT Wright’s ‘worldview’ or what I would call ‘naturalist’ approach to biblical studies and theological reflection. One aspect I want to highlight from Adams’ book (his published PhD dissertation written at the University of St. Andrews) is his point about a theology history (we might also classify this as a theological ontology and its implications for historiographic method and conclusion). What he writes, as the reader will see, doesn’t just contradict Wright’s naturalist approach, but it implicates any historiographical work that appeals to a natural theology in regard to its own historiographical methodology. For my money this implicates the current work being done in the name of ‘theology of retrieval’ by many evangelical Reformed types. I have made this same critique in years past, in regard to the reality of the prior assumptions that so-called ecclesial historians, such as Richard Muller, bring to their work of re-constructing the Protestant history of the 16th and 17th centuries as that developed in what has come to be called Post Reformed orthodoxy. What the reader will see, as Adams so concisely details, is how we all bring informing theological matrices to the task of re-constructing the “recorded” history. As such it is best to be upfront about this, and as a matter of first order importance, be transparent about what particular ‘theology of history’ we are bringing to our historiographical reconstruction. This way we won’t lead our readers to think that we are simply presenting them with the ‘naked facts’ of history. We won’t allow our readers to confuse, potentially, our theological frameworks for the so-called ‘reconstructed’ history, as if the history we are culling comes with its own inherent sacrosanct imprimatur. Adams writes:

From the outset the issue has been the reality of God and the theoretical implications of that reality for the work of historiography—historiography, that is, in the service of theology. A theology of historiography, as I have argued, is not divorced from a theology of history because historiography must assume a narrative, a story, in order to make sense of historical “data.” Bare facts do not exist outside of the complex webs of human interpretation. The stories that make up history are never metaphysically or theologically neutral. Therefore, it is methodologically dishonest not to begin with a theology of history, even if that theology is informed to a large extent by historical events. There is no way out of this circularity, nor should there be. But there is a way into this circularity. This is what is referred to (perhaps ambiguously) as the “apocalyptic event,” the breaking-in from outside that both sets anew the agenda for the story and also maintains at all times a transcendent corrective/critique. This somewhat abstract and theoretical way of speaking of the theology of history is only a conceptualization of the concrete reality of the incarnation and the relationship of the Father’s action in sending the Son, becoming Jesus of Nazareth, living, bearing witness to the kingdom, dying, rising and ascending. This is the reality of God that is given in history but cannot be contained by any one prior telling of history, except to say that the final meaning of all history is revealed in the life, death and resurrection of this same Jesus of Nazareth.[1]

Robert Dale Dawson, as he writes on a doctrine of resurrection in theology of Karl Barth, offers an insight that dovetails nicely with Adams’ point about the analogy of the incarnation as the basis for developing a genuinely Christian theology of history:

A large number of analyses come up short by dwelling upon the historical question, often falsely construing Barth’s inversion of the order of the historical enterprise and the resurrection of Jesus as an aspect of his historical skepticism. For Barth the resurrection of Jesus is not a datum of the sort to be analyzed and understood, by other data, by means of historical critical science. While a real event within the nexus of space and time the resurrection is also the event of the creation of new time and space. Such an event can only be described as an act of God; that is an otherwise impossible event. The event of the resurrection of Jesus is that of the creation of the conditions of the possibility for all other events, and as such it cannot be accounted for in terms considered appropriate for all other events. This is not the expression of an historical skeptic, but of one who is convinced of the primordiality of the resurrection as the singular history-making, yet history-delimiting, act of God.[2]

Rather than naively assuming that human beings just do have the natural or latent capacity to read history in brute investigative ways, as Adams and Dawson both underscore, respectively, for the Christian telling there is no such natural historiographical capaciousness available. This, in particular, as Adams develops, implicates the type of methodology that NT Wright deploys in his biblical studies mode vis-à-vis Pauline theology; more generally his point, along with Dawson’s, particularly as that relates to the development of Church history, implicates any historiographical work, insofar that that work has prior commitments (those of the historian) informing the re-constructional work of said historian.

The aforementioned tells us at least two things: 1) all interpreters, whether historians or not, bring a priori ideological and ideational commitments to their interpretive work, 2) as Christian interpreters we necessarily work from the new creation of God’s historical life for the world in Jesus Christ. The latter point ought to inflect the prior insofar that Christians, even historian ones, principially, always are bearing witness to the reality of Jesus Christ. If the historian, or interpreter in general, claims to be presupposition-less when approaching their task as a historian, as Muller, and other retrievers of historical theology often claim, or imply, the discerning Christian ought to challenge this with the fact both Adams and Dawson point up, respectively. That is, nobody is a tabula rasa, we are all shaped by some ideation; if we claim to not be, it is this this mode itself, of being naïve to our ideational forces, that becomes the ideological construct that ends up informing our respective tellings of theological history. As such, one consequence, as already mentioned, ends up being that the historian’s prior theological framework becomes conflated with the way they re-construct the history. And when this reconstruction is grounded in a natural theology, as if the Church or Biblical historian is ‘doing theology’ in their historical reconstruction, the historian’s natural theology becomes the very history they are ostensibly reconstructing. But it is this very point that ought to be up for consideration prior to the narrativizing of Holy Scripture’s history, if not the history of the Church and its respective interpretations and dogmatizing.

The final reduction: every interpreter is befuddled by their own ideational sitz im leben. We ought to admit this, and then recognize that God has provided the world with a new history to think “history” from (we could think geschichte and historie at this point) within. That is, the Christian ought to recognize that the ground and grammar of all interpretation, for the Christian, has been provided for and delimited by the God’s new creation as actualized in the resurrection/ascension of Jesus Christ. This is the “ideological” frame the Christian exegete, whether that be of the Bible, Church history, Ethics so on and so forth has been provided with, and is provided with afresh anew, apocalyptically, by the irruptive reality of the Theanthropos, Jesus Christ, who is the reality, the telos and goal, from beginning to end, of all of creation; and thus, all of world history and its developments.

[1] Samuel V. Adams, The Reality of God and Historical Method: Apocalyptic Theology in Conversation with N. T. Wright (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2015), 271.

[2] Robert Dale Dawson, The Resurrection in Karl Barth (UK/USA: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 13.