Category Archives: Theological Exegesis

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.

The antiPriest’s Mediation of Christ’s Atonement for the World

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This shall be a permanent statute for you: in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall humble your souls and not do any work, whether the native, or the alien who sojourns among you; for it is on this day that atonement shall be made for you to cleanse you, you will be clean from all your sins before the LORD. It is to be a sabbath of solemn rest for you, that you may humble your souls; it is a permanent statute. So the priest who is anointed and ordained to serve as priest in his father’s place shall make atonement: he shall thus put on the linen garments, the holy garments, and make atonement for the holy sanctuary, and he shall make atonement for the tent of meeting and for the altar. He shall also make atonement for the priests and for all the people of the assembly. Now you shall have this as a permanent statute, to make atonement for the sons of Israel for all their sins once every year.” And just as the LORD had commanded Moses, so he did. –Leviticus 16.29-34 [NASB95]

συνήγαγον οὖν οἱ ἀρχιερεῖς καὶ οἱ Φαρισαῖοι συνέδριον, καὶ ἔλεγον, Τί ποιοῦμεν, ὅτι οὗτος ὁ ἄνθρωπος πολλὰ ποιεῖ σημεῖα; ἐὰν ἀφῶμεν αὐτὸν οὕτως, πάντες πιστεύσουσιν εἰς αὐτόν, καὶ ἐλεύσονται οἱ Ῥωμαῖοι καὶ ἀροῦσιν ἡμῶν καὶ τὸν τόπον καὶ τὸ ἔθνος. εἷς δέ τις ἐξ αὐτῶν Καϊάφας, ἀρχιερεὺς ὢν τοῦ ἐνιαυτοῦ ἐκείνου, εἶπεν αὐτοῖς, Ὑμεῖς οὐκ οἴδατε οὐδέν, οὐδὲ λογίζεσθε ὅτι συμφέρει ὑμῖν ἵνα εἷς ἄνθρωπος ἀποθάνῃ ὑπὲρ τοῦ λαοῦ καὶ μὴ ὅλον τὸ ἔθνος ἀπόληται. τοῦτο δὲ ἀφ’ ἑαυτοῦ οὐκ εἶπεν, ἀλλὰ ἀρχιερεὺς ὢν τοῦ ἐνιαυτοῦ ἐκείνου ἐπροφήτευσεν ὅτι ἔμελλεν Ἰησοῦς ἀποθνῄσκειν ὑπὲρ τοῦ ἔθνους, καὶ οὐχ ὑπὲρ τοῦ ἔθνους μόνον ἀλλ’ ἵνα καὶ τὰ τέκνα τοῦ θεοῦ τὰ διεσκορπισμένα συναγάγῃ εἰς ἕν. ἀπ’ ἐκείνης οὖν τῆς ἡμέρας ἐβουλεύσαντο ἵνα ἀποκτείνωσιν αὐτόν. –ΚΑΤΑ ΙΩΑΝΝΗ 11.47-53

Therefore the chief priests and the Pharisees convened a council, and were saying, “What are we doing? For this man is performing many signs. “If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and nation.” But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all, nor do you take into account that it is expedient for you that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish.” Now he did not say this on his own initiative, but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but in order that He might also gather together into one the children of God, who are scattered abroad. So from that day on they planned together to kill Him. –John 11.47-53 [NASB95]

Abstract: John, the evangelist, deploys dramatic irony in order to emphasize the depth dimensional reality of Jesus’ prophetic-priestly office juxtaposed with the priesthood of the Jewish nation. The contrast between what the office of the priesthood was intended for, and what it had become by time Jesus comes to fulfill its final office, cannot be starker. The Evangelist, John, uses the corruption the office had slidden into, as a foil to magnify its final and consummate reality in Jesus Christ. John emphasizes the prophetic role of the high priest as a means to demonstrate that no matter the corruption that had taken hold within the systems of God’s covenant people, that God’s plan in Jesus Christ would not be thwarted. Indeed, the high priest still operates as a functionary of God’s mediatorial framework as that was set in motion by God way back in the Levitical (and Aaronic) priesthoods as noted in Leviticus 16.29-34. Even in the face of the fulfillment, of the telos of God’s prophetic-priestly framework, the high priest, Caiaphas, ironically, doesn’t realize what he is doing. He makes a genuine, even kerygmatic proclamation that it would be better for Jesus, the true prophet-priest of Israel, to be sacrificed for the many. The following analyses are intended to substantiate the ironic prophetic role the high priest, Caiaphas, played in the unfolding of God’s providential plan for the world.

Thesis: It will be suggested that the prophet-priesthood of Jesus, as the prophet-priest’s reality in the nation of Israel, deepens the irony of Caiaphas’ malformed operation insofar that what the prophet-priesthood was always already intended for, what it was protologically shaped by, was its prophetic-priestly reality (res) as that was pre-destined by the eternal Logos’ election to become human, to become the man from Nazareth to begin with. That outwith that antecedent reality, Caiaphas’ capacity to ‘prophesy’ in the functionary of the high priesthood of Yahweh and the nation of Israel, would have no telos; and of course, would not exist to begin with.

 

Lexical Analysis–Koine Greek

Lexeme: προφητεία // Jn. 11.51:: ἐπροφήτευσεν [aorist active indicative third person singular] ‘he prophesied.’

3. foretell the future, prophesy (Sib. Or. 3, 163; 699 al.), of prophets and men of God in times past: Mt 11:13 . . . prophesy about someone or someth. (2 Ch 18:7) Mt 15:7; Mk 7:6; 1 Pt 1:10 . . . prophesy with reference to someone B 5:6. Also . . . 5:13. Foll. By direct discourse 12:10. . . . foll. By dir. disc. Lk 1:67 (John the Baptist’s father); also . . . someone Jd 14 (Enoch). Of the high priest (cf. Jos., Bell. 1, 68f= Ant. 13, 299f; s. also 282f; CHDodd, OCullmann Festschr., ’62, 134-43.—According to Diod. S. 3, 5; 6 the Jews considered the ἀρχιερεύς to be an ‘messenger of God’ [my trans.]. . . . Whatever is revealed to him he communicates to the people in their assemblies . . . J 11:51. . . . Of the writer of Rv. . . . Rv 10:11. . . .[1]

Background Analysis

11:47-48. The Pharisees and chief priests called together literally a “*Sanhedrin,” probably referring here to the supreme court of Israel or those of its representatives who are available. Their concern is a legitimate one validated by history: those perceived as political *messiahs threatened their own power and Judea’s stability, inviting Roman intervention; the Romans accepted only one king, Caesar. *Josephus testified to this concern of the priestly aristocracy, and one reason Josephus Caiaphas maintained his office longer than any other high priest of the first century (A.D. 18-36) was that he kept the peace for the Romans. But this is another touch of John’s irony (a common ancient literary device): this was their view, not that of the Romans (18:38; 19:12); and although they killed Jesus, the Romans ultimately did take away their temple and nation, in A.D. 70, anyway.

11:49. The high priesthood, like some Greek priesthoods (e.g., at Eleusis), had originally been a lifelong office. It had never been reduced to an annual assignment, like most priesthoods in Syria or Asia Minor, but John’s “priest that year” may poke fun at how the Roman governor had power to change the high priests, or at how the high priest’s deposed relative could still meddle so much in these affairs (18:13); or he may simply mean “high priest in the particular year of which we speak,” because officials’ terms were used to date events.

The high priest presided over the *Sanhedrin. To have a high priest inform his colleagues, “You do not know anything,” is the epitome of John’s irony.

11:50-53. Here the high priest means one thing on the level of his own hearers, but his words have another meaning that would be more obvious to John’s readers: others (both Greeks and Jews) also believed that those appointed as God’s representatives could sometimes prophesy (speak God’s truth) without meaning to do so. Some Jewish traditions seem to associate *prophecy with the priesthood.

Sacrificing the few for the many makes good politics but bad religion: *Josephus claimed that King Agrippa II urged his people to forego vengeance for injustice for the sake of peace; but Jewish teachers said not to betray a single Israelite to rape or death even if the result would be the rape or execution of all.[2]

 

Depth Theological-Exegetical Reflection

Based on the cursory analysis this exercise has provided it is clear that the office of the high priest could also function in the role of a prophet of Israel. In the Johannine pericope under consideration Caiaphas fulfills his role, even as that is based upon corrupt, politicized, and self-seeking ulterior motives. And yet in the face of its res (reality) in Jesus Christ—the genuine and final prophet-priest ( -king) [triplex munus]—even while attempting to thwart the purposes of God in the spirit of the antiChrist, God’s Way prevails. It’s as if Caiaphas in this situation becomes Balaam’s ass, passively, unbeknownst to him, prophesying for the final time of the promised prophet-priest (cf. Deut. 18), that the Logos ensarkos, Jesus the Christ, ought to die for the nation of Israel, whether they be there, or in some diasporic situation. This is the power and providence of God, He takes His Holy offices, as those were intended for Jesus Christ, even as they have been corrupted by the spirit of antiChrist, and reveals the nothingness of their corruption just as He establishes their reality and substance, as that was antecedently established before the foundations of the world, and re-creates their malformed instantiations by the shedding of the eternal blood of the Lamb in Jesus Christ.

The above continues to hold true: even as the Church of Jesus Christ has waned and wooed here and there, even as she currently apostatizes, even while thinking herself as the functionary, even as prophet-priests for the world, the purposes and providence of the living God will not be thwarted. The esse of the Church is her reality in Jesus Christ as that is grounded in the triune life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Just as the nation of Israel, the Church has taken what is Holy and soiled it by its own unholiness, over and again. And yet, even as we stand in the face of the living Christ, and as we speak, as the Church, as if we are speaking for God, and we well might be, all of this is in spite of our malformed intentions; as those have taken shape in the milieu of our continuously corrupt hearts, even as the people of God in Jesus Christ.

The Church would do well to recognize her fallen status, even as the simul iustitia et peccator alerts us to. That even while thinking we are doing the work of God, just as Caiaphas did, even as the people of the Way, unless we are living in a repentant lifestyle by keeping in vigilant step with the Spirit, we are prone to be Caiaphases, even while speaking the genuine Word of God to ourselves and the world. This seems to place us in an impossible situation, almost defeatist. But that is what the school of Christ’s faith is for. We are called to recognize our Caiaphasitic hearts, and to seek God’s kingdom and His righteousness moment by moment as we live lives of utter dependence on God’s mercy and grace as He showers that upon us moment-by-moment by the Spirit from the heavenly priestly session of the Son of Man as He always lives to make intercession for us.

 

[1] William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon Of The New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature: A translation and adaptation of the fourth revised and augmented edition of Walter Bauer’s Griechisch-Deutsches Wöterbuch zu den Schriften des Neu Testaments und der übrigen urchristlichen Literatur (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), 723.

[2] Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary New Testament (Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 1993), 293-94.

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.

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.

A Response to the Reformed Baptists: Against Naked Scripture Reading

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What’s going on with these Reformed Baptists? I’m referring to people like James White, Rich Pierce (White’s sidekick), Owen Strachan et al. I just had a fun exchange with White’s guy, Pierce on Twitter. It’s always the same thing with these guys. I cut my teeth in the blogosphere with these types of extended engagements with the JMac crew over at the Pyromaniacs blog back in the day. White, and his whole Alpha and Omega crew, along with the Apologia guys, and then people like Strachan and Jeff Johnson, and all their followers in the so-called Reformed Baptist camp suffer from the same sort of arrogant naivete. They all operate with this notion that it’s possible for the biblical interpreter to read Scripture without a hermeneutic. In other words, they simply believe that they purely read the 5 Points of Calvinism out of the text of Scripture (or a modified/heretical understanding of the Trinity, in some cases). They don’t acknowledge any reception history from its development in the Reformed history of ideas. In fact, they are anti-Confessional (except maybe for the London Baptist Confession of Faith, the parts that resonate with them). Here’s a sampling of my recent excursion with that really nice guy, Rich Pierce:

This guy took this tone with me immediately, in a previous tweet exchange. This is how it always goes with them. The irony is that they operate out of an Enlightenment rationalist/naturalist hermeneutic, not confessionally Reformed whatsoever. They fail to recognize that all reading is interpretation, and that confessional Christian reading is simply the mode that has given the orthodox categories we use to think the Trinity and Christological loci like the hypostatic union, homoousios so on and so forth. Instead, they read from the confessionalism provided for by the naturalism inherent to the Enlightenment; being confessional is an inescapable reality of interpretation (any kind of interpretation). The only people in Reformation history who claimed to read the Bible outwith confessionalism were the Socinians (and maybe the Anabaptists before them). That’s the spirit people like White, Pierce, Strachan et al. operate from. Indeed, in Strachan’s case, and now White is defending him, he arrives at his eternal functional subordinationism (EFS) of the Son, precisely because of their anti-ecclesial confessional reading of Holy Scripture. No matter how much testosterone these guys muster up to counter critiques like mine, just as Pierce does above, the facts of the theo-logic, they are ignoring, remain.

What they don’t understand is how the order of authority works. People like White/Pierce seem to think that if you use conciliar categories (like we get from Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon etc.) that somehow you are denying the Protestant Scripture Principle (or more colloquially, sola Scriptura), but that is to engage in a radical error of thought. The ecumenical confessions/creeds, for example, are subordinate to Holy Scripture insofar that they are attempting to supply a grammar for the inner-theo-logic of the text. In other words, given the occasional nature of the text, which it always is, even if the occasion turns out to be purely canonical, the authors of Scripture make theological assertions; that is, they leave many things either inchoate or unstated in their respective communications about God. What the creeds/confessions do, in principle, is come along and recognize that things are stated about God, in Scripture, that require a grammar; particularly so that the Church can know the difference between truth and error; not to mention, so that the Church can speak and think intelligibly about God. There is no inherent denial of the Protestant Scripture principle in this endeavor. The only real problem that can and has obtained, at points, is that the ‘metaphysic’ used to flesh out said biblical theo-logic could potentially be at odds with the Scriptural categories and witness vis-à-vis God. This has always been the basis of my critique with reference to the developments of scholasticism Reformed dogma in the 16th and 17th centuries. But this sort of thinking goes right over the heads of people like White, Pierce, Strachan et al.

In order to end this post on a positive note, let me share something I’ve shared multiple times in the past from Oliver Crisp. He offers a nice taxis, in regard to how to think the relationship of Holy Scripture to the creeds, confessions, and theologoumena. And with this we’ll close:

  1. Scripture is the norma normans, the principium theologiae. It is the final arbiter of matters theological for Christians as the particular place in which God reveals himself to his people. This is the first-order authority in all matters of Christian doctrine.
  2. Catholic creeds, as defined by and ecumenical council of the Church, constitute a first tier of norma normata, which have second-order authority in matters touching Christian doctrine. Such norms derive their authority from Scripture to which they bear witness.
  3. Confessional and conciliar statements of particular ecclesial bodies are a second tier of norma normata, which have third-order authority in matters touching Christian doctrine. They also derive their authority from Scripture to the extent that they faithfully reflect the teaching of Scripture.
  4. The particular doctrines espoused by theologians including those individuals accorded the title Doctor of the Church which are not reiterations of matters that are de fide, or entailed by something de fide, constitute theologoumena, or theological opinions, which are not binding upon the Church, but which may be offered up for legitimate discussion within the Church.[1]

It would be nice if the Reformed Baptists under consideration could internalize the above, but they won’t. Instead, they will continue to appeal to their egos and insecurities and respond the way Pierce did to me in the aforementioned. Unfortunately, these things have real life consequences; like denying an orthodox understanding of the Holy Trinity (as we now see in Strachan, and White’s defense of him). This is why sometimes I’ll bring this sort of discussion up for consideration. Peoples’ eternal souls are literally at stake in many cases.

 

[1] Oliver Crisp, god incarnate, (New York: T&T Clark International, 2009), 17.

Theological Ontology and Biblical Interpretation: How This Impacts People Like NT Wright, Andrew Perriman, and Everyone

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Theological ontology and biblical interpretation are not often paired in the way they should be. Samuel Adams (someone I’ve had correspondence with in the past) wrote his PhD dissertation on this locus; it was published in 2015 with the title: The Reality of God and Historical Method: Apocalyptic Theology in Conversation with N. T. Wright. I just happened upon a Facebook thread, based on a post from a friend, wherein a (unbelieving, as I discern it) NT studies guy (someone I have some history with online) falls prey to the sort of naïve historicist epistemology that someone like N. T. Wright promotes. Someone else who falls prey to this, and someone I have had an argument with in reference to the themes that Adams is promoting in his work is a biblical studies scholar named, Andrew Perriman. In order to “de-thread” the argument I was having with Perriman approximately 5 years ago, I am going to share my response to him, where I also quote salient portions of his press-backs to me. I don’t think many have considered the gravity of these things before, and so I hope this brief exposure will at least pique your interest. Here’s the exchange (at least as I frame it in my responses back to Perriman):

Andrew wrote:

If we are then left with a gulf between our understanding of the Bible and dogmatic tradition, then we have to do something about it. My preference is to regard dogmatics as part of the narrative, as much subject to prevailing worldviews (pace Adams) as New Testament apocalyptic. The answer is not to keep allowing theologians to make scripture say what they think it ought to say.

This is quite a negative view of what theologians do! But since you reject (below) the idea of the ‘inner-logic’ of Scripture, negativity makes sense. What’s interesting, though, is that you don’t seem to hold the same view when it comes to the capacity that historical-criticism can and can’t do. Apparently historical-criticism does not attempt to reconstruct the “inner-history” within which the text of Scripture is located and written within. To me your critique is a double-edged sword, and you ought to fall on it as much as any theologian (if they ought to at all).

The history of interpretation is framed by confessional Christian dogmatics; that is undeniable. Yes, post-enlightenment has moved some beyond confessional so-called pre-critical interpretive practices; but that’s a crying shame. At the same time, I’m not totally antagonistic towards what has happened in the critical and now post-critical periods—there is some value there—but I only see that value tempered by also realizing the role and frame that Christian dogmatics offer, with particular reference, again, to the history of interpretation as a resource for the interpretive process. I’m not advocating an all or nothing, but a some here a some there.

Andrew wrote:

I’m afraid that sounds to me like a theological fiction. To ascribe an “inner logic” to scripture is just the same as the old sensus plenior argument—it’s a way of smuggling meanings into the Bible that don’t belong there.

Eh, I’ve just addressed this above. Historians do just as much “smuggling” ostensibly as do the theologians; not buying that response.

Andrew wrote:

Clearly Israel believed it was participating in history with YHWH. This is not conflating two different models. It is simply recognising that the biblical narrative has to do with a historical community’s experience of God. So I would turn it around: the concrete historical experience of the community is the ground for any more abstract notions of participatory history.

I would flip this on its head (your flip) and say: the concrete particularity of God’s life in Jesus Christ enfleshed and those in union with Him by the Holy Spirit is the ground of experience through which God is known, and by which all other historical particularities in regard to Israel make sense (moving from shadow to substance/telos). Participation is not grounded in an abstract historical experience of the “people of God,” it is grounded first in God’s own participatory life for us in Christ, and it is this vertical reality that implicates how linear history (so called) makes sense in relation to Him and His in-breaking into the world. There is no Israel, there is no history, there is no revelation without that first order reality who is God (In the beginning). If you are going to read from bottom-up (i.e. Israel’s experience of God back to God), then I would suggest the better route, as I just noted, would be to start with Christ (as the par excellence particularity of Israel’s history) and work from there (a posteriori).

Andrew wrote:

… how would the ancients have explained their own metaphysics?—but a very difficult one, because they didn’t ask the questions in the sort of terms that you presuppose; in fact, the question may be anachronistic and meaningless.

This seems really rather strange to me, Andrew! You seem to have much more confidence (maybe of the enlightenment sort) to access what in fact the ancients actually thought. And then you seem be building a whole hermeneutic based upon your confidence and ability to reconstruct the ancient near east psyche. I think Adams is critiquing this very notion, and rightly so! This is about theological ontology and epistemology, and your treatment of things doesn’t seem to critically engage with that reality at all (i.e. the noetic effects of sin etc and how that impacts theological enquiry and hermeneutical/exegetical conclusions). You can assert that what Adams, and what I am saying is meaningless and anachronistic, but that fully misses the point here; again, the point has to do with theological/hermeneutical epistemology which is intextricably tied to theological ontology. You can dig your heals in all you like at this point, you claim a certain access to history, etc, but that does not engage with the elephant in the room which happens to be a theological elephant — this is where Adams’ (and of course I haven’t read him so I’m guessing based upon what you’ve written and knowing in general where he is coming from) thesis I think pretty much leaves your position listless. J

Andrew wrote:

… There’s nothing peculiar about it. The problem is that for 1500 years the church forgot what the original context was and assumed that its dogmatic conclusions were all that was needed to guarantee an accurate reading of the text.

No Andrew, I think this is rubbish! The church did not forget anything (your position is starting to sound a little like the Ladder Day Saints!), the mind of the church, if properly conceived, is first grounded in the life of God’s life in Christ by grace. This takes us back to my early response to you about participation (in this comment). Jesus never abandoned his church, but to read what you just wrote (and what many others in your mode do like NT Wright et al) one would think exactly that; i.e. that God’s presence had been absent until the ball got rolling to its current trajectory (in sectors, like yours, in biblical studies) — that just silly and absurd! In fact there is a movement of theological retrieval and ressourcement that is attempting to draw from the riches that lay in the heritage of the Christian church. Now just because you seem to think that that heritage is either not there or defunct doesn’t make it so — God forbit it! — it just means that you have chosen to believe that the enlightened mind is better suited to access the real life categories of Scripture than is the “pre-critical” mind. But I refuse to accept that, in fact I take it as pretty much blasphemous thinking! If we follow through on your logic God had abandoned his church for 1500 years; the years that gave the church the grammar for the Trinity, the hypostatic union, the homoousious, etc. This is why I actually think you do reject the idea of participatory history, because it is that reality that believes that God has always been present in his church providing dialogically conditioned ways of knowing him through Holy Scripture by the Spirit.

Anyway, Andrew, we are on totally different wave lengths here; as I’m sure you and Adams are. But the hurdle that you haven’t overcome or even really engaged with, as far as I can see, is the hurdle of explicating and engaging with the notion of a theological epistemology (which is a very important piece, even fundamental piece of thinking Christian dogmatically — which is maybe why you haven’t really engaged with it). To simply defer to the mind of the ancients only illustrates your disengagement here (with theological epistemology); because you are already presupposing upon an epistemology that believes it can access the ancients mind unabated, at least enough to say with enough certainty that allows for you to develop a whole hermeneutic that ostensibly gets God in Christ more right than does the Trad of the Christian church (in ALL of its history thus far).

To be clear: I’m not saying there is no value in attempting to reconstruct history, ancient minds, etc; but it is dangerous to presume that that is the basis for establishing a robust hermeneutic. It is dangerous because it remains contingent upon you and others’ capacity to reconstruct the history, and as such is susceptible to winds and waves of the historian’s mind rather than the mind of Christ.

Perriman ended up writing a whole long post in response to my pushback here. All he ended up doing was doubling down on his thesis, without actually responding to my points on theological ontology/epistemology.

I am somewhat known (at least in the online theological world) for my intense focus on prolegomena, or methodological considerations when it comes to doing theology and biblical interpretation. The debate between Perriman and myself ought to illustrate why. I will have to get into explicating further what these things entail more fundamentally in a later post. Suffice it to say that if people do not critically attend to these matters, such people could become lost in a suffocating loss of Christian faith and reality; and this, all in the name of critical realism. The basic point is this: the Christian ground for epistemology is not based in an abstract naked self, but instead in God’s fulsome Self and Being for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. This is where the concrete reality of the real comes to be known; that is as humanity is confronted by the Triune Being who has always already been in the ultimacy of His life as the prius of all that is following.

In nuce: people need to take the noetic effects of the Fall much more seriously. The resurrection says so.

 

On Being an evangelical biblicist and Scripture’s Holy Depth Dimension as an Antidote

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I was going to write a post on the topic of biblical hermeneutics and exegesis. But then I searched my blog, and as usual I found a post that I had already written on the very topic I was setting out to compose for you my fine readers. So, let me re-share the post I have already written, and hopefully it will make the point I was inspired to make before I realized I’d already made it.

I grew up as a ‘biblicist’ evangelical, or at least this was the label we freely chose to self-identify with. It meant we eschewed labels like ‘calvinist’ or ‘arminian,’ or what have you. It meant we just believed what the bible simply taught, and like ‘good Bereans’ we tested all things by the canon of Scripture in order to make sure that what people were teaching was true or not true. But then I became “educated,” and I realized how complex things were when it comes to a doctrine of Scripture and a biblical hermeneutic. As I pushed further into the theological world I began to realize that many Christians through the millennia had come to interpret Scripture through the regulative reality propounded by what came to be known as the consensus patrum, and what many associate with that as ‘classical theism.’ I came to realize that being a biblicist in the sense that I was operating, in the past, was really based on a modern construct of a form of biblical rationalism; i.e. an approach to Scripture that was given birth in revivalism, pietism, conversionism, and probably most central: Fundamentalism. In this approach I believed everything could be reduced down to propositions, and that all important Christian teaching could simply be found by reading and studying the bible over and over again. At a level, even a fundamental level, in principle, this is true; indeed, this is what the Protestant Reformers identified as the ‘scripture principle.’ But 20th century evangelicals, of the revivalist hue, took this principle in a different direction; eschewing all else but Scripture, or so they thought. American evangelicals, “my people,” of the 20th century, believed, and continue to believe that Holy Scripture can be read as a tabula rasa (or white slate) without ever imagining that there is a depth dimension to Scripture; an informing theo-logical reality that allows Scripture to assert what it does in its various teachings and ways.

I am still an evangelical. I am still a biblicist. But I understand these days how every single bible interpreter engages in what is called theological exegesis. In other words, we all interpret Scripture based on a prior theological grid that we have consciously or unconsciously assimilated into our lives. Many people still believe this as I did for many years; in regard to an ability to simply read Scripture for all its worth without recognizing the role that ‘theology’ plays in their interpretive process, and exegetical conclusions. I think we do best to recognize that Scripture has a depth dimension, as TF Torrance calls it, and understand that Scripture is merely the signum (sign) of which Jesus is its res (reality). If we mistake the sign for the reality we will expect more of the sign than it can deliver. We must understand, as John Calvin did, that Scripture really has an instrumental value; as such its purpose, as is all of creation’s, is to give way to its reality as it bears witness to Jesus Christ. It is when we operate with this ‘ontology of Scripture’ (or understanding of its place vis-à-vis God) that we will be set up better to be genuine biblicists.

A genuine biblicist, in my view, is someone who can be honest about the limit of Scripture’s capacity. What I mean is that they can recognize that Scripture only has meaning when it is understood that Jesus is its altitude. If we can’t accept that the Word of God ultimately is Jesus Christ, and not the bible, per se, then we will expect Scripture to be Holy without its Holy reality; we will end up projecting our own “holy” ambitions into the text, and allow our own navel-formed aspirations to become Scripture’s reality. I believe, with all good intention, this is what I used to do to Scripture. Thankfully, Scripture’s reality, if we are committed to inhabiting it constantly, has the power and resource to break through this sort of good intentioned naïveté and contradict the self-projected divinities we so often impose on it as the canonic text. I used to believe I had a very high view of Scripture, but it turns out, at a functional level, that I had a very low view of Scripture.

All of the above said: it is a complex when we consider the role that the so called consensus patrum and/or the great tradition of the Church has vis-à-vis Scripture, and its interpretation. This is where my biblicism rises up. When I think a foreign construct (potentially even aspects of so called ‘classical theism’) is being imposed on Scripture, displacing Scripture’s reality and claiming to offer its most normative understanding, it is at this point that I object. It is at this point that I go solo Christo. But this is a complex indeed, and one that we will have to revisit later. I just wanted to register my thoughts on these things again, because for some reason they are thoughts that constantly attend my daily existence as a Christian person.

ανοιγω: The Heavens are Continuously Open in Christ

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Believe it or not I have a minor in NT Greek, and an MA in NT studies; you might never know that based on the content of my online postings. Of course, I also have a double major in bible and theology, and another emphasis in historical theology (both at the undergrad and grad levels, respectively). Anyway, I thought in light of this I would do a post that focuses on NT Greek.

Under the tutelage of Dr. Dale Wheeler for first year Greek something stood out to me; it was just an offhand remark Dr Wheeler made about the word ανοιγω (ἠνεῴχθησαν) in Matthew 3.16. In English the passage reads: “When He had been baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened to Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting upon Him” (NKJV).[1] The word ‘opened’ is in the present active indicative, which means that the heavens are now continuously open to Him. The implication of this for all those participatio Christi (participating in Christ), is that the heavens are always already open for you. Indeed, the heavens are continuously open for the world, for all those who will repent and acknowledge Jesus as Lord. This reminds me of the priestly imagery used in the epistle to the Hebrews:

19 Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the Holiest by the blood of Jesus, 20 by a new and living way which He consecrated for us, through the veil, that is, His flesh, 21 and having a High Priest over the house of God, 22 let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. 23 Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. 24 And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, 25 not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching. –Hebrews 10.19-25

As I look up at the sky at night (when I work) I imagine all the saints of history (so all Christians), and this great cloud of witnesses (think Heb 11) as part of this great ‘chain of being’ all bounded together in the πíστiς Xρiστoȗ (faith of Christ). The Good News, the Evangel is that the heavens are open because Christ has torn them open for us by re-conciling the world to God in His consubstantial divinity/humanity (Theanthropos) for us. He has ascended filling the whole cosmos with the very pleroma (fullness) of God, a πλήρωμα that He has consubstantially and eternally shared with the Father and the Holy Spirit; and now a pleroma He has consubstantially shared with us by assuming our humanity that we might assume His divinity by GRACE, not nature.

For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; 10 and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power. –Colossians 2.9-10

This is where my sense of liveliness comes from; the very liveliness of the living and triune God; knowing that He holds the heavens open, continuously, that we might fellowship and sup with Him all the days and nights of our lives, and for all eternity. God is open for us in Christ; that is all that matters.

[1] βαπτισθεὶς δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς εὐθὺς ἀνέβη ἀπὸ τοῦ ὕδατος: καὶ ἰδοὺ ἠνεῴχθησαν [αὐτῷ] οἱ οὐρανοί, καὶ εἶδεν [τὸ] πνεῦμα [τοῦ] θεοῦ καταβαῖνον ὡσεὶ περιστερὰν [καὶ] ἐρχόμενον ἐπ’ αὐτόν: :Matt. 3.16 (GNT).

 

 

An Initial Engagemet With David Bentley Hart’s ‘That All Shall Be Saved’: Hart’s Eastern Facing Living Room

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I wanted to engage with David Bentley Hart’s recently published book That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation; this seems to be the thing to do right now, so I thought I should at least say something. I haven’t as of yet read the book, but I have watched a ninety-minute lecture he did where he presented the major themes of the book; with some development. So, my engagement will not be in-depth coverage, but it will be an initial impression based upon what I understand his argument to be. In particular, what I really want to do is deal with his Orthodoxy, and the theory of authority he appeals to in order to make his ‘exegetical’ arguments. As a primer to that, let me share a quote from Jaroslav Pelkian, that Al Kimel shared on Twitter; it fits into the context of DBH’s theory of ecclesial and interpretive authority—indeed, Kimel is friends with DBH, and sporadically shares posts from DBH at his blog. But I think he shared this quote from Pelikan as a help towards understanding the exegetical bases by which DBH is able to arrive at his conclusions in favor of Christian Universalism (what TF Torrance identified as one of the twin heresies; the other being the Calvinist ‘limited atonement’). Here is Pelikan via Kimel:

“The Old Testament achieved and maintained its status as Christian Scripture with the aid of spiritual interpretation. There was no early Christian who simultaneously acknowledged the authority of the Old Testament and interpreted it literally.” – Jaroslav Pelikan

This might strike us as rather enigmatic to the broader discussion on universalism, but it is an important piece of the pie for DBH’s biblical interpretive work to have any force at all. Beyond what I would take to be an overstatement by Pelikan (JND Kelly would dispute this as a sweeping generalization, I think), what is interesting is how this allows for the sort of license that DBH takes with various passages of Scripture that would seem to indicate an antecedent prothesis of what would be developed and picked up on later by the exilic Rabbinic tradition in regard to teaching a concept of an eternally conscious torment understanding of hell. To help illustrate the way DBH thinks about Scripture more fulsomely, let’s take a look at what he recently had to say in response to Peter Leithart’s book review of the book under question:

In short, you want me to account for myself in a way answerable to the hermeneutical practices of communities gestated within a religion born in the sixteenth century.  But those practices are at once superstitious and deeply bizarre.  They are not Christian in any meaningful way.  They are not Jewish either, as it happens.  They are a late Protestant invention, and a deeply silly one.  From Paul through the high Middle Ages, only the spiritual reading of the Old Testament was accorded doctrinal or theological authority.  In that tradition, even “literal” exegesis was not the sort of literalism you seem to presume.  Not to read the Bible in the proper manner is not to read it as the Bible at all; scripture is in-spired, that is, only when read “spiritually.”[1]

We can see how DBH needs to mitigate any possibility for what Calvin might call the sensus literalis (‘literal sense’), when it comes to an engagement with and interpretation of Holy Scripture. DBH needs the text to ‘only’ be opened to an allegorizing or spiritualistic, or maybe Alexandrianizing way of biblical exegesis. In this mode of interpretation DBH has the capacity to insert what would seem to be foreign categories into the text of Scripture, under the guise of these categories being the ‘spiritual’ sense of the text. In this way, and eo ipso Hart can begin an argument for the evacuation of a literal hell, by understanding its function as a spiritual one wherein that only serves as a foil for the reconciliation of all of creation.

But beyond this, and this has to do with DBH’s theory of authority as an Orthodox thinker, the categories and whence he gets his theological soundings from is not Holy Writ, but the Holy Fathers of the Church. It is upon the basis of Apostolic Succession, and the authority inherent to this magisterium, this consensus patrum, that Hart can offer an argument for universalism that negates the concept of a literal, physical, and eternal hell from the pages of Holy Scripture. For DBH, Scripture is not the norma normans, nor is it the principium theologiae; instead Scripture is on the same plane as the patrological tradition, and the consensus of the faithful that has developed within the halls of the Church; in Hart’s case, the east-wing of those halls. This might not, in itself, give him an absolute argument for universalism, but it does allow him the latitude to appeal to an extra scriptura; or he can appeal to the theological furniture available to him in his own Eastern context. Indeed, this is what Hart does. His argument requires the Protestant, as I understand it, to submit to the authority inherent to apostolic succession, and allow the Eastern vector, of an aspect present in that wing of the Church, to present us with the theological foundations by which we arrive at his conclusion for his version of a Christian Universalism.

This is all I’ve got for now (without actually reading his book, and only going off of what I remember from his lecture on his book; and reading Leithart’s review, and DBH’s response). But what is most interesting to me, beyond Hart’s normal rhetorical flourishes (indeed, they can be quite beautiful to the wordsmiths among us), is that his argument really requires that the Christian be already submitted to the Apostolic Succession that Hart takes as normative for his biblical exegesis. In other words, I don’t really see how DBH’s argument can be entertained by the Protestant thinkers in the room. This is not to say that there aren’t a variety of Protestant arguments for Christian Universalism; it is just to say that Hart’s is idiosyncratic to the furniture of his own ecclesial living room.

[1] David Bentley Hart, Good God? A Response, accessed 10-09-2019.