Category Archives: Theological Exegesis

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.

The Answer is Jesus: John 3:16 in its Theological Depth Dimension

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I take this to be something of a paraphrase of John 3:16 by Karl Barth (even though he doesn’t identify it as such, explicitly):

Basically, the doctrine of the concursus [trans. accompanying] must be as follows. God, the only true God, so loved the world in His election of grace that in fulfilment of the covenant of grace instituted at the creation He willed to become a creature, and did in fact become a creature, in order to be its Saviour. And this same God accepts the creature even apart from the history of the covenant and its fulfilment. He takes it to Himself as such and in general in such sort that He co-operates with it, preceding, accompanying and following all its being and activity, so that all the activity of the creature is primarily and simultaneously and subsequently His own activity, and therefore a part of the actualisation of His own will revealed and triumphant in Jesus Christ.[1]

This might be said to be the supralapsarian backdrop to what finally actualizes in the economy of God’s life for the world in Jesus Christ. Indeed, aren’t such inklings what are required of prima facie teachings as we find in John 3:16. As TF Torrance would say, there is a “depth dimension” to Holy Scripture. That is to say, Scripture itself is hung together by something deeper than itself; i.e., than its syntax, philology, grammar, history, so on and so forth. This is what is going on in Barth’s development on a doctrine of God’s concursus vis-à-vis His creation, us. It is this type of theologizing above, from Barth, that something like the Dominical teaching found in John 3:16 moves and breathes from. Essentially, at bottom, what Barth is saying is that, “the answer is Jesus, what’s the question?”

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §49 [105] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 107.

ALL Interpreters of the Bible Are Theological Interpreters

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

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

Three Vignettes on Reading Scripture Theologically Among the Evangelicals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading Scripture with the Christological and Trinitarian Grammar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our ‘Lost Time’ in the ‘New Time’ of the Saga of Jesus Christ: How Saga Functions in Barth’s Usage

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Barth is often depicted as a liberal or “neoorthodox” theologian who repudiates the inerrancy of Holy Scripture, which alone anathematizes him for the evangelical. Barth is often presented as an enemy to conservative orthodox Christianity, with his neo-Kantian, reified Hegelianism ripping to shreds any hope of giving the evangelical churches anything wholesome and genuinely biblical to cogitate upon. Barth, in many sectors of the evangelical and Reformed churches, is considered as enemy of the state to the health and well-being of historically orthodox Christianity. Barth is often demonized, caricaturized, and flambéed just at the point that someone moves their lips into position to pronounce his name.

But what I want people to understand is that Barth is none of these negatives I just noted. When you actually spend time with him and his theology the reader will quickly realize that the fears I’ve been listing are unwarranted and have almost no teeth to them whatsoever; save Barth’s repudiation of inerrancy (which his reasons for repudiating this “doctrine” isn’t the same reason the “Liberals” do, but instead based upon his theory of revelation, which I would argue is more attuned and evangelical than inerrancy as a doctrine allows for in regard to a doctrine of Holy Scripture). In line with this desire to show that Barth isn’t the anti-Christ that so many fear, I wanted to share a snippet from him on the way he thinks about Scripture, and how what he calls saga actually fits better with the evangelical desire to see Christ magnified and prime over all our considerations as thoughtful Christians. I want people to come to the realization that Barth offers a genuinely Protestant way to be Protestant without succumbing to what I consider the trojan horse of Catholicity (big “C”), as that continues to make in-roads into the evangelical theologies being recovered today.

As we pick up with Barth, the context we meet him in is on his theory of time/eternity and God. As I alluded to above, he gets into his thinking on saga (v myth think Bultmann), and how that relates to historical personages and events as deposited in the salvation-history we canvas throughout the pages of the both the Old and New Testaments. I will close with a parting word, after the quote, and leave a link to another post I once wrote on this same topic vis-à-vis Barth. Barth writes:

At this point we recall once more the extraordinary significance of chronology in the Old and New Testaments. The whole of the patriarchal ages in Genesis, the rise of the prophets, the various historical co-ordinates of the place of Jesus Christ at the beginning of the Gospels according to Matthew and Luke are presented with a rare exactitude. In this, use may have been made of antiquated Oriental number-symbolics or number-mysticisms, whereby arithmetical error, whimsies and impossibilities may have crept in. But the wonderful thing to be noted here in the Bible Is not the correctness or incorrectness in content of the temporal figures, but their thoroughgoing importance as time data, which is but underlined by incidental number-mysticism and other liberties. There is not a suggestion that revelation and its attestation might have been localised just as well elsewhere or anywhere in historical space. How important it was for the early Church, too, to be able to date the incarnation of the Word, is shown by the passus sub Pontio Pilato [suffered under Pontius Pilate], already in the oldest forms of confession. Revelation is thus and not otherwise localised. In the event of Jesus Christ, as in the various events in anticipation and recollection, it is as genuinely temporal and therefore as temporally determined and limited as any other real events in this space of ours. It is also—think for a moment of the story of creation—described temporally real, where according to the measurements of modern history this description can only be “saga” or “legend.” The Bible also says the same where it transmits parables in the Old and New Testaments. Myths, on the contrary, i.e., narrative expositions of general spiritual or natural truths, narratives which although savouring perhaps of saga do not claim to be narratives, but are to be understood only when stripped of their narrative character, so that the eternal core is liberated from the temporal shell—myths do no occur in the Bible, although mythical material may often be employed in its language (Church Dogmatics I, 1, 373 f.). The dialogue between God and Satan at the beginning of the book of Job “took place on a day” (1.6) corresponding to the day on which subsequently the earthly misfortune burst upon Job. Also Job’s question of God (10.4): “Hast thou eyes of flesh, or seest thou as man seeth? Are they days as the days of men, or they years as man’s years?”, is in the sense of the text certainly not to be answered with a simple negative. In view of the time concept we must not try to avoid the way of Holy Scripture’s “privileged anthropomorphism” (J. G. Hamann, Schriften, ed. F. Roth, vol. 4, 9). Year, day, hour—these are concepts which cannot possibly be separated from the biblical witness to God’s revelation, which in the exposition of it cannot be treated as trifles, if we are not to turn it into a quite different witness to a quite different revelation.

Having said that, we must, of course, go on to say that the time we mean when we say Jesus Christ is not to be confused with any other time. Just as man’s existence became something new and different altogether, because God’s Son assumed it and took it over into unity with his God-existence, just as by the eternal Word becoming flesh the flesh could not repeat Adam’s sin, so time, by becoming the time of Jesus Christ, although it belonged to our time, the lost time, became a different, a new time.[1]

Let the emboldened section serve as commentary on the un-emboldened section. That section lets us understand, better, what Barth is on about. When he refers to saga, he is referring to a real-life historical event as recorded in the biblical witness, and to real-life historical personages; but he is wanting us to read that from the frame of the ‘new-time’ that Christ is for us. In other words, it is saga precisely at the point that historicism and the form criticism of his day could not actually access the “history” of Holy Scripture precisely because such history is only modulated and refracted as it is seen in the Light of the risen Christ. We see here, in Barth, an emphasis on ‘eschatological-time’ breaking in and throughout the witness and canonical formation of the scriptural witness; through its narration of various events and people in those events as they find teleological (purposeful) concreteness in the flesh and blood reality and event of God’s life for the world gifted to it in Jesus Christ.

Saga was the only category, in this context, he could see working to depict the history-delimiting reality that God’s life serves for the creaturely world as its inner and forward grounded reality. As is typical for Barth, his deployment of saga is a reification of that term from its normal usage in literary theory/studies. Nevertheless, it functions in a similar manner; in the sense that the history of God in Christ for the world appears to the profane eyes as just that: legend or saga. But of course, for Barth, this is only because Christ’s reality has not been received by the eyes of faith, but rather the mind of unbelief. Even so, for Barth, saga certainly operates with the general literary characteristics of its normal usage, yet it is reified insofar as what ironically appears as a normal saga, on the superficial, ends up being a saga of epigrammatic portions; the likes of which only those in union with Christ can come to see as greater than the sagas of fictional story or legend. Yet again, saga, for Barth is embedded in a greater theological web of revelation, election, and covenant that puts him onto such a word to help him explicate what he is really trying to say in contrast to many others of his time; others, who indeed, ended up reading Jesus as myth, based upon other optics such as existential encounter provides for the individual knower—albeit cut off from the concreteness of the Christ event and tethered only by the floating brains of those seeking an encounter unencumbered by the solidity of an accessible history. Barth’s usage and appeal to saga is a subversive exercise shaped by his own location and theological formation. Nonetheless, in my view, it has wonderful trajectory as it supplies the evangelical with a way to view the history recounted in Holy Scripture through the reality of Jesus Christ (a real history pre-determined by God’s supralapsarian election to be for the world rather than against it Jn. 3.16).

Here is a link to another post that I once wrote on this topic: Click Here

 

[1] Karl Barth, CD I/2 §14, 52. The first long section is Barth’s ‘small print’ and the emboldened section is a regular sized font section.

A Screed on the Relationship Between the Biblical Exegete and Theologian

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When people say that theology isn’t really biblical studies, they fail to understand what theology is doing. Good theology is engaging with the inner theo-logic of the text of Holy Scripture and its reality in Jesus Christ. It’s engaging with the underlying notions that allow the Scripture writers to write and assert what they do about God. It’s identifying the theological ontological ground that sees Scripture in its taxis or order vis a vis as an instrument of the living and triune God. Good theologians are engaging with the Holy, as such, they unswervingly trust that God is a good communicator precisely because God became human in Jesus Christ. The theologian understands that the Bible is living and active because its reality in Jesus Christ is such. The theologian, like Jesus, understands Scripture is all about Him; every jot and tittle. So, when someone says that they are into biblical studies, and yet only engage with the surface presented by the grammar, syntax, literary designs, history, so on and so forth, they have actually failed to engage with the Scriptures more accurately. Biblical studies folks, because of the suppositions typically funding their respective discipline, aren’t ever making contact with the substantial reality of Holy Scripture; they aren’t touching the Holy, only the profane. Good theologians are really the best of biblical exegetes. But of course many theologians aren’t good. Many theologians get caught in the same web that their counterparts in biblical studies do; they get reduced to the content of their own fanciful imaginations and speculations, never touching down in the reality of the Text. These are bad theologians. The theologian doesn’t want to be an Apollos, they want to be a Priscilla and Aquila, who understands the reality of Scripture more accurately. An actual biblical studies person, who is a Christian, would never attempt to enter the holiness of Scripture without being in constant prayer and confession of their sins; they would never think they could read the Bible critically without the reality of Scripture first reading them critically. This necessarily entails that a good biblical studies person is ultimately a good theologian who is grounded in the confession that Jesus is Lord. It is from this holy ground that the Christian can more accurately engage with Scripture. Don’t be an Apollos, be a Priscilla and Aquila.

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.