Category Archives: Ontology Of Scripture

God’s Wrath in the Theology of Karl Barth: The Theologian’s Theologian

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Karl Barth is often accused (erroneously so) of being a liberal theologian. This mistakenly happens under the neo-orthodox label, as if, at best, maybe a soft form of theological liberalism. And yet, Barth is more critical of theological liberalism than most of the so-called Reformed and Lutheran critics of Barth in the 21st century. Barth was more intimately related to, and formed by the mediating and liberal theologians, in direct ways, much beyond his critics today (and yesterday). The whole premise of Barth’s radical shift was in response to what he finally perceived as theological slop, in regard to the theological liberalism he had been trained under. He realized, famously, from his pulpit in Safenwil, that the theological pablum he had been fed in his university training, was just that. It had no real power, no grist or grit in the face of the fallout produced by WW1. As a result, he famously took such theology to task, initially, in his commentary on Romans (Der Römerbrief), and finally, in his Church Dogmatics.

What I want to highlight in this brief article is how false the aforementioned is. Barth, whilst radically, or consistently, following the Protestant Scripture Principle, brought critique against both theological liberalism, scholasticism Reformed, and much of the medieval harvest, that all, just the same, promoted portraits of God that ran afoul of the simple teaching and witness found in Holy Scripture. In this instance, in the example I am culling forward for this article, you will see how Barth might even sound like a conservative Reformed theologian of today (okay, I’m stretching that—he’s better). Here we see Barth’s commentary on God’s wrath:

To the critics of the term “wrath of God” and especially A. Ritschl (Rechtf. u. Vers., II, § 16 f.) were quite wrong when they said that “wrath” is not a quality or activity or attitude which can be explained in the light of God’s being, or brought into harmony with His love and grace. In reply to this criticism we have to say plainly that the grace of God would not be grace if it were separated from the holiness in which God causes only His own and therefore His good will to prevail and be done, holding aloof from and opposing everything that is contrary to it, judging and excluding and destroying everything that resists it. And grace would not be free grace if it were bound to any single form of its appearance and manifestation, if God always had to show Himself monotonously as “love,” or what we think of as love, if He were not permitted to negate that which has to be negated, if He could not conceal Himself when He is resisted, revealing His grace only in the alien form of unwillingness and wrath. Above all, grace would not be grace, the serious and effective address of God to man, the effective establishment of fellowship with him, if God did not oppose man’s opposition to Himself, if He left man to go his own way unaccused and uncondemned and unpunished, if He ignored the miserable pride of man, if the man of sin had nothing to fear from Him, if it were not a fearful thing to fall into His hands (Heb. 12.29). That His grace would not be grace without His judgment is just as true as the supposed opposite with which it is indissolubly connected, that there is no holiness of God which can be separated from His grace, and therefore no wrath of God—this is something which, unfortunately, A. Ritschl did not even remotely understand—that can be anything other than the redemptive fire of His love, which has its final and proper work in the fact that for our sake, for the sake of man fallen in sin and guilt, He did not spare His only Son.[1]

Let it be known, I don’t care whether or not Barth is palatable to the so-called conservative Reformed and Lutheran theologians of today. But let it also be observed that Barth is no churlish reader and receiver of the Reformed tradition such that he simply discards with what might sound offensive to the Romantic’s and Rationalist’s eardrums. Barth is a Bible reader. As a result, he attempts to do his theology in light of Scripture’s reality (res), Jesus Christ. As the passage illustrates, Barth understands God’s grace (and love) from within the context of God’s Self-revelation as that comes for us in His dearly beloved Son.

This isn’t so much an apology for Barth (in fact I repudiate such things), as it is a call for people to be good theologians. Don’t let foreign limiting factors enter into the theological task, such that said factors delimit the Word of God of being the only source and ground for the outworking of a genuinely Christian theology. In the aforementioned from Barth, we have an example of this type of outworking in the context of his rebuttal of a mediating (liberal) theologian Albrecht Ritschl. And yet, de jure, the basis upon which Barth reads a constructively christologically conditioned notion of God’s wrath, against, in this case, Ritschl, applies catholically across the board and all around to every period of theological development; into the present and forthcoming.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §60 [490] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 131.

On Barth’s Christologically Conditioned Doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy

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Karl Barth is often derided by evangelicals and contemporary Reformed orthodox types for rejecting a doctrine of biblical inerrancy and its underlying fount in a doctrine of Divine-verbal inspiration. This reception of Barth is understandable insofar that Barth does in fact say that he rejects the modern development known as inerrancy. But what shouldn’t be taken from this is that Barth somehow is holding hands with the Teutonic higher critics of the Bible; he is not! In fact, Barth is desirous, in a sense, of rescuing the Bible from the fires of Mordor as those are stoked by the ‘Bible critics.’ I would contend that it can be argued that Barth has a higher view of Scripture, formally, than even those who claim to affirm a doctrine of biblical inerrancy and its attendant understanding of Divine inspiration.

Barth firmly believes that the Post Reformed orthodox theologians were intent on securing the veracity and infallibility of Holy Scripture; this can be seen, as Barth underscores, the ‘Protestant Scripture Principle,’ which became the formal principle of the Reformed reformational theology. Barth was of the mind that the early Reformed theologians were eager in safeguarding the Bible from her early critics within early modernity (as that was fomenting in the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively). But just as the Fundamentalists of the 20th century built a theology upon their reaction to the higher critics of the 19th century, thus allowing the higher critics to set the agenda and categories and questions that “needed to be responded to,” similarly, I would argue that Barth maintained that the earlier and middle Reformed theologians allowed the early and developing rationalists of the time to set the agenda and categories and questions that ostensibly needed to be responded to. As such, in Barth’s mind, even those purportedly committed to the Protestant Scripture Principle, its defenders no less, so allowed their categories to be sublimated by their counterparts, that they ended up denuding the category of revelation itself vis-à-vis Holy Scripture, such that Holy Scripture lost its “Holy” character by being relegated to the level of just another profane book.

Barth writes,

We must not forget that the transition from biblical to biblicist thought does involve the transition to a rationalism—supranaturalistic thought it is in content. Therefore the relationship of theology to the truths of revelation which it has taken from the Bible is no longer the relationship to an authority which superior to man. It has fundamentally the same assurance and control with regard to them as man as a rational creature has in regard to himself, his experience, his thinking and therefore his world, believing that he is the master of himself as subject and therefore of his objects, or of his own relation to them.

As is well known the supreme achievement of the older Protestant orthodoxy was the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of Holy Scripture as developed in the later 17th century and given confessional status in the Helvetic Formula of Concord in 1675. There can be no doubt, however, that this was not merely worked out as a bulwark against a growing rationalism, but that it was itself, not an expression of an over-developed faith of revelation, but a product of typical rationalistic thinking—the attempt to replace faith and indirect knowledge by direct knowledge, to assure oneself of revelation in such a way that it was divorced from the living Word of the living God as attested in Scripture, pin-pointing it, making it readily apprehensible as though it were an object of secular experience, and therefore divesting it in fact of its character as revelation.

The irremediable danger of consulting Holy Scripture apart from the centre, and in such a way that the question of Jesus Christ ceases to be the controlling and comprehensive question and simply becomes on amongst others, consists primarily in the fact that (even presupposing a strict and exclusive Scripture principle) Scripture is thought of and used as though the message of revelation and the Word of God could be extracted from it in the same way as the message of other truth or reality can be extracted from other sources of knowledge, at any rate where it is not presumably speaking of Jesus Christ. But if Scripture is read in this way, the Scripture principle will not stand very long. Secretly the book of revelation is being treated and read like other books; and the question cannot long be denied whether the message we gather from it cannot be gathered from other books either by way of addition or even basically; whether the truths of revelation in the Bible are not of a series with all kinds of other truths; whether in them we do no simply have concretions of what is revealed concerning God and His will to all other men as such and by nature, of themselves, by the dictate of their reason? If Jesus Christ is seen to be the whole of Scripture, the one truth of revelation, this question cannot even be put, let alone given a positive answer. There is no other book which witnesses to Jesus Christ apart from Holy Scripture. This decides the fact that only in Holy Scripture do we have to do with the one and the whole Word and revelation of God. But if we do not see this, it is inevitable that the question of other sources of revelation should be put, and that sooner or later it should be given a positive answer.[1]

Barth is attempting to correct what he sees as a misstep made early on by the scholastics Reformed in their attempt to protect and elevate Holy Scripture; and this, based upon what he takes to be the wrong foundations. As clearly indicated by Barth’s above passage he believes that it is only when Holy Scripture is grounded in and framed by its reality in Jesus Christ that it can maintain its elevated and ‘Holy’ status as the written Word of God for humanity, for the church. Barth’s concern is always to unhitch the holiness of God from our own fallen and abstract speculations, and instead to ground them in the holy and elevated revelation of God’s triune life for the world in the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. His critique of the normal receptions and understandings of the scholastics Reformed up to and including contemporary Reformed and evangelical theology cuts across this whole swath.

Conversely, Barth isn’t out to destroy the veracity or authority of Holy Scripture. Au contraire, he is seeking to provide a truly evangelical basis and theory of revelation for Scripture’s elevated status as the place where its gladhands are securely connected to its reality in the big-Hand of the Father as that is extended to us in the pierced hands of Jesus Christ. I think Barth might, at times, overextend himself when he refers to biblical inerrancy (see his Göttingen Dogmatics and Evangelical Theology: An Introduction), and come off sounding like he rejects the absolute veracity and holiness of the Bible. But even in the short passage we just read from him, it ought to become immediately apparent that this was not Barth’s intention whatsoever. In fact, if Barth’s critique is sound, and I think it is, it is the ostensible stalwarts of a biblical inerrancy and verbal inspiration, the contemporary Reformed and evangelicals among us, who unwittingly lower Holy Scripture’s provenance into the wastelands of the rationalists (Socinians) and higher biblical critics. Barth offers an alternative theory of revelation, inclusive of biblical revelation, particularly as he articulates that in his threefold form of the Word of God (and please understand, dear reader, that the scholastics Reformed first developed what has been identified as a fourfold form of the Word of God—so the heuristic is not a novelty developed by Barth, per se). Give him a fair hearing, and not a distorted one based upon his antagonists. Barth has a higher view of Scripture, based upon his christologically conditioned theory of revelation, than do, ironically, his critics on this very subject.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §60 [368-69] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 11.

God’s Light of Light as the Light of Holy Scripture

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Most Christians, or non-Christians, don’t realize that Scripture has an ontology; that it has an orderliness within the taxis of God’s economy for the world; that is, in subservience to the Logos ensarkos, the Word made flesh. Further, since they fail the prior, this then impacts their biblical hermeneutic, to the point that the Bible itself becomes a wax nose of their own making (a self-projection); instead of being allowed to genuinely be God’s Word to us. The Word that pierces to the heart and marrow; the Logos that contradicts us, as we attempt to read Scripture through our self-adulating categories, rather than through God’s Light of Light; indeed, as the Psalmist says “we see light in His Light,” and never vice-versa.

Discoursing Our Way to an Angelology; Philosophy V the Bible; Thomas V Barth

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Barth attempts to offer a Biblical Angelology. In the process he surveys some of the most primary developments on an angelology, in the history, as those were offered by Dionysius and Thomas Aquinas. Just on that level his treatment is interesting and rewarding. But in the midst of that, since he is slavishly beholden to the Protestant ‘Scripture Principle,’ he also identifies what I also take to be primary to a truly Christian presentation on the angels. As is typical, especially with reference to my own interests, Barth rightly recognizes the role that a prolegomena/hermeneutic will end up having on how a respective thinker will arrive at their veritable conclusion on what in fact angels (and demons) are. This a priori commitment to whatever hermeneutic someone deploys in their attempt to understand the supraphysical verities in God’s world, will in the end determine whether or not said thinker actually has a point of contact with God’s world or not.

In the following passage the reader will observe how Barth believes a philosophical/speculative attempt at developing a doctrine of the angels, as is present in Aquinas’ guiding habit, ends up providing something highly interesting and imaginative to contemplate; but beyond that, for Barth, this speculation only generates a notion of ‘angelness’ that only can get as high as the virtuoso’s genius. That is, Barth believes, for example, in Thomas’ attempt to prove the existence of angels, that insofar that he stays correspondent within his self-referencing universe, that Thomas does indeed offer something on “the angels” that entails a coherence. But that’s what makes it something of interest to Barth, rather than something of substance (pun intended).

It cannot be contested that in a specific sphere and on a specific assumption proof is here given of the existence of a specific object interesting to the one who conducts the proof. It might be asked whether this sphere is real, and if so accessible, and if so able to be marked off in this way and approached with this assumption. It might be asked whether the proof furnished on this assumption and in this sphere is really conclusive and convincing either in detail or as a whole. But if we assume that everything is in order in this respect, and that Thomas has legitimately proved what he really could prove, there can be no doubt that with this assumption (or with the criticism or partial or total rejection of his demonstration) we are merely making philosophical and not theological decisions. Whether there are intellectual substances without bodies, and whether their existence can be proved in this or some other way, may be a question which is interesting and important in the sphere of philosophy. It may be one which can be discussed and even decided in this sphere. It may even be one which is decisive. But it is purely philosophical. On the basis of the Word of God attested in Holy Scripture we are not asked whether there are or are not substances of this kind, nor are we required to prove their existence in some way. If there are, and if their existence can be proved, this does not lead us to angels in the biblical sense of the term. And if there are not, and their existence cannot be proved, this is no argument against angels in the Christian sense. What are called angels in the Bible are not even envisaged in Thomas’ proof of the existence of these substantiae separatae [distinct substances], let alone is anything said for or against their existence, or anything meaningful states about them at all, with the eight proofs. And what Thomas later constructed upon the demonstrated existence of these substantiae separatae is very different from a doctrine of angels in the Christian sense of the term. In his demonstration Thomas has given us philosophy and not theology, and he has done so far more exclusively than Dionysius. He does so occasionally refer to Holy Scripture, and therefore it may be asked whether he does not incidentally and in some sense contrary to his own intention make some contribution to theological knowledge. But fundamentally and as a whole he simply offers us a classical example of how not to proceed in this matter.[1]

In nuce, if the Christian is going to attempt to offer a genuinely Christian doctrine of angels, they will, as Barth so rightly presses, be committed to the biblical categories rather than the philosophical ones. And of course, it is this methodology that funds the whole of Barth’s style of a confessional trinitarian-dialectical christologically conditioned way of doing theology from the reality of the Bible. The Christian philosophers among us would sneer at this; the classical theologians, the ‘Great Traditioners’ in our midst, would mock; how ironic.

Stay Biblical my friends.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §50–51 [393] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 104.

Miscellanies On Barth Reception and the Homoousious as Hermeneutic

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I wrote these for other social media outlets of mine. I thought I’d share them here as miscellanies. 

People reject Barth out of hand simply because they’ve been told that Barth is ultimately a liberal (still). But these same people have never actually read Barth enough to know whether that be true or not. Coming from someone, an evangelical conservative Christian (me), who has both read Barth and Barth literature extensively, and published on Barth, these people are simply living in a willful land of ignorance. Granted, Barth’s 𝑜𝑒𝑢𝑣𝑟𝑒 is extensive. But there are ways into Barth that can introduce you to him without having to read all of him, or even a substantive amount of him. But most will never give him a fair hearing.

One reason Barth is pertinent to theology today is because he elides so much of the pop debates surrounding Reformed and non-Reformed theology; among many other important offerings. He truly offers an 𝑒𝑣𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑐ℎ 𝐞𝐯𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 way forward that is actually true and correspondent with the best of what even a North American evangelical theology has striven for.

There is a hermeneutical logic inherent to the ℎ𝑜𝑚𝑜𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑠 articulated and thought out at the Council of Nicaea (and post). It offers a ‘depth dimensional’ understanding of Holy Scripture that functions well within what can be called the 𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑢𝑠 𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑠. That is, it understands that the Bible has an ontology (a givenness by God), and thus an antecedent context wherein it comes to make meaningful sense in the 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑠𝑜𝑝𝑜𝑛 (face) of God in Christ. It realizes that Scripture is simply a 𝑠𝑖𝑔𝑛𝑢𝑚 (sign) to its 𝑟𝑒𝑠 (reality) in Christ in the triune life. The fact that so many would-be exegetes of Scripture gloss right past this in favor of a higher critical approach, ought to be a warning of what being a theologian of glory looks like rather than a theologian of the cross (seeing the unseen things as seen).

Book Impression: The Bible: A Global History

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Just finished. This is the third book of Bruce Gordon’s I have read over the years (his other books: on Calvin and Zwingli respectively). Overall, a good and informative and interesting read. It appears to me that, Bruce, at points, has imbibed too much of the higher critical palate when it comes to thinking of the supernatural nature of Scripture. His chapter on the Pentecostal appropriation of the Bible isn’t the strongest. But again, overall, I would commend this book to you. It will give you a greater appreciation for the Bible’s reception across the millennia and across the globe.

On a James Whitean and Leighton Flowersian Naked Reading of the Bible

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Thumbnail created originally by Leighton Flowers (Caleb)

I was listening to James White live today on his Dividing Line vlogcast, and what he reinforces over and over is that he is what some are calling a ‘biblicist,’ or what I would identify as a solo Scriptura or nuda Scriptura proponent, as far as the way that he approaches Scripture. In this way, James White and his archnemeses, Leighton Flowers, ironically affirm the same bibliology and its attending hermeneutic. It is both modern, postEnlightenment, and Lockean (i.e., tabula rasa) in orientation. That is, it sees Scripture and its reception in a historicist frame of reference. This frame leaves the history of interpretation (i.e., creeds, confessions, catechisms etc.) in the dust, in regard to how White and Flowers receive Scripture. This ironically lends itself to a modernist-naturalist appropriation of and engagement with Holy Scripture, insofar that the Bible, in such a frame, seems to be a ‘white-slate’ wherein the interpreter has some type of objectivist angle into its exegesis.

The aforementioned is problematic for a variety of reasons. One prominent reason is that it ends up working from a petitio principii (circular reasoning). That is to say, it presumes: 1) My interpretation just is the objective reading of the Bible, 2) my interpretation of the Bible is a five-point Calvinist reading of the Bible, 3) therefore the objective reading of the Bible just is a five-point Calvinist reading (or just replace five-point Calvinist with Provisionist reading in Flowers’ case). What this approach fails to appreciate, for one, is that nobody approaches Scripture as a presuppositionless blank-slate; human agents are subjects, and as such we bring a variety of preunderstandings and unchecked a priori commitments to theological paradigms as we read Scripture. We could call this the “hermeneutical dilemma.” Neither James White nor his compadre, Leighton Flowers, acknowledge this. And thus, all that they are left to do in their respective debates and correspondences is to sling Scripture right past each other; never critically identifying or checking their theological a prioris at the frontend of their respective readings of Scripture.

But like I was noting, James White, today, as he was talking, in this case about Catholicism, made an absolute distinction between reading Scripture and the history of interpretation of Scripture; as if they inhabit two distinct silos. But they don’t inhabit two distinct silos, instead the history and the biblical exegesis are mutually implicating realities; insofar that human agents are subjectively reading and receiving the text of Holy Scripture. Until White and Flowers can admit this, and until all of their acolytes can come to grasp this, this whole “debate” between them, on five-point Calvinism versus Provisionism, will remain a futile endeavor. Unfortunately, they have many followers, respectively, who they are doing a disservice to. They are teaching young and biologically old, in some cases, Christian hearts and minds to read Scripture rationalistically rather than confessionally (and thus Christologically and Trinitarianly).

In closing, let me refer us to Matthew Levering’s sketch on the Whitean and Flowersian reading of Scripture (viz., what he writes indirectly critiques the Whitean-Flowersian combine of biblical interpretation); as far as its intellectual development and background go. Here Levering also offers an alternative approach that is participatorily grounded in a genuinely christologically and trinitarianly conditioned reading of Holy Scripture.

What happens, then, when Scripture is seen primarily as a linear-historical record of dates and places rather than as a providentially governed (revelatory) conversation with God in which the reader, within the doctrinal and sacramental matrix of the Church, is situated? John Webster points to the disjunction that appears between “history” and “theology” and remarks on the “complex legacy of dualism and nominalism in Western Christian theology, through which the sensible and intelligible relams, history and eternity, were thrust away from each other, and creaturely forms (language, action, institutions) denied any capacity to indicate the presence and activity of the transcendent God.” Similary, Lamb contrasts the signs or concepts that can be grasped by modern exegetical methods with the moral and intellectual virtues that are required for a true participatory knowledge and love the realities expressed by the signs or concepts. Lacking the framework of participatory knowledge and love, biblical exegesis is reduced to what Lamb calls “a ‘comparative textology’ à la Spinoza.” Only participatory knowledge and love, which both ground and flow from the reading practices of the Church, can really attain the biblical realities. As Joseph Ratzinger thus observes, the meaning of Scripture is constituted when

the human word and God’s word work together in the singularity of historical events and the eternity of the everlasting Word which is contemporary in every age. The biblical word comes from a real past. It comes not only from the past, however, but at the same time from the eternity of God and it leads us into God’s eternity, but again along the way through time, to which the past, the present and the future belong.

This Christological theology of history, which depends on a metaphysics of participation inscribed in creation, provides the necessary frame for apprehending the true meaning of biblical texts.

In short, for the patristic-medieval tradition and for those attuned to it today, history (inclusive of the work of historiography) is an individual and communal conversation with the triune God who creates and redeems history—and the Bible situates us in history thus understood. (Levering, 23)

Biblical Studies Has Failed the City of God

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I read NT exegetes, particularly in their commentaries on Paul’s theology, and wonder if they ever wonder if they should in fact be doing so from the theo-logic inherent to the homoousion (the notion that Jesus is both fully God and fully human). Most don’t do this, which illustrates the flaw of their discipline-specific training in Biblical Studies. In other words, just as anti-supranaturalism has yeasted the discipline itself—that is to say, to approach the Bible as if it doesn’t have an inner, antecedent, supranatural reality; and that it can be read purely and critically as a historical artifact—it is this spread of a flawed premise that then informs said exegete’s interpretive conclusions, in this case, about what Paul communicates throughout the corpus of his Apostolic communiques. As a result, such exegetes read Paul based upon a series of ad hoc historical reconstructions, and make their conclusions about say, Paul’s soteriology, contingent upon these reconstructions. But this just won’t do. If so, for one thing, we never would have arrived at the grammar of the Trinity that we did in the early conciliar machinations (because they presumed that Scripture was first received as a confessional reality undergirded by God’s gift of Himself to the world in Jesus Christ). The Bible, for the Christian, is first the Word from the Lord before it becomes a Word at all. If this isn’t underwriting the exegete’s method at the most basic level, then their exegetical conclusions will always run awry of the fact that Scripture is first Holy, before it ever becomes Scripture.

To elaborate a bit further: when I refer to the homoousion as the key to a proper exegesis of Holy Scripture, what I mean to be doing with that is to point to its analogical reality when applied to the “hermeneut.” That is to note, that just as the person and work of God are not ripped asunder in the singular person known as Jesus Christ, likewise, a proper reading of Holy Scripture ought never be dissected into a profane historical reading of the text (i.e., higher critical), over against a confessional reading of the text (i.e., churchly). Just as God and [hu]man are inseparably related, yet distinct, in the singular person of Jesus Christ, likewise, a proper reading of Scripture will start with the premise that its ultimate reality has a depth and inner dimension that must take primacy when attempting to rightly divide the Word of God. When an exegete doesn’t do this, I might find some of their conclusions interesting, but beyond that the only depth it might have is the genius that stands behind said readings and historical reconstructions (which in itself, human genius is never enough to pierce the veil of God’s body).

If we were to stay consistent with the logic of my appeal and premise, then we would see such Bible readers and exegetes as adoptionistic rather than orthodox in posture. In other words, just as an adoptionist christology believes that the divine simply “adopted” this guy named Jesus to be His dearly beloved Son, not having the ground of His person as the eternal Logos, per se, the Bible readers I have been considering, would approach Scripture as if it is just this “Holy Book,” and attempt to understand what it is saying without attending to the fact that Scripture’s ontology itself finds its inner reality not in a nakedly natural form, but as it is given for us in the breath of the Holy Spirit in the face of Jesus Christ. This reception of the Bible, one way or the other, changes how people arrive at their respective exegetical conclusions.

Reading the Bible as a Christian: The Outer and Inner Reality of Scripture

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Scripture has an outer logic and an inner logic. Back in the day this was referred to as its outer and inner clarity (perspicuity of Scripture). In some ways the rift between the disciplines of biblical studies and systematic theology pivots on which one of these the practitioner is focused on. That is to say, the biblical studies folks, typically focus on the outer components of the text; i.e., its grammar, philology, sitz im leben (e.g., historical situadedness), composition, transmission, and other “text critical” factors. Whilst the systematic theology folks focus more on the inner-theo-logic of the text; attempting to “lay bare” what is there, and allows the text to make the assertions that it does in its outer realm. But to focus on one or the other is a mistake of “Enlightened” proportions.

As Christians we are to come to the text based on the analogy of the incarnation. That is, we are to recognize that just as the Logos of God came in an outer (and real!) physical body, so too on analogy, the text of Scripture comes with this “two-natures-in-one-person” mode of presentation just the same. As TF Torrance would say, there is a “depth dimension” to Holy Scripture wherein the outer signum (signage) of the text, points beyond itself to its deeper and inner res (reality) in Jesus Christ and the triune God.

To have departments in seminaries and bible colleges that focus on “biblical studies” and/or “systematic theology,” is simply a turn to the Enlightenment way wherein there is continuous competition between the binary of the natural (the outer) and the supranatural (the inner); or the accidents (the outer) and the essence (the inner). This is not the Christian approach to doing biblical studies or theology.