Five reasons that Calvin was a postmodernist - well not quite

1. Calvin thought author's intentions were not decisive for interpretation, though not irrelevant. You can't understand biblical prophecy if you are wedded to author's intentions! In fact, it was the Enlightenment that was obsessed with origins and psychological states, not the Reformation. The text is to be understood with reference to its self, primarily.
2. Calvin recognised that texts produced a multiplicity of possible meanings depending on context and purpose - because he believed that the text was speaking to us today, and had spoken to people in the past. The text has a tradition of interpretation that is not irrelevant to understanding it.
3. But Calvin's not an allegorist - he believes in history, of which we are a part. He doesn't seek 'eternal spiritual truths' from the text. Rather, he is aware of its time-boundedness. So, NARRATIVE is really important for him
4. He thinks hermeneutics has a context - ie, it serves an interpretative community. 'Who is this for?' is a question that really matters for the interpreter.
5. He was French -so must have been a postmodern!

Calvin’s Hermeneutics Today?

Having offered both an overview of Calvin's hermeneutics and a sample of it in full flight, it is now opportune to return to the questions I posited in the opening section. I asked in what sense it might still be possible for contemporary interpretation of Scripture to trail in Calvin's wake, given the differences between then and now. We live in the aftermath of historical criticism. We have become used, in the last two centuries, to understand 'history' as a reconstruction of the facts in as an objective and disinterested manner as possible. While, like Calvin, we understand the need to trace the causes of events, it is not a matter of connecting analogous events by resort to a doctrine of providence; modern practice has been to scrape away at the evidence, removing the overlayers of interpretation and bias, until the causes of events are laid bare, to be linked in a great chain to other causes and other events. We live, too, on the other side of the era in which the Bible itself has become the subject of academic study, rather than the book of a people of faith – read in the seminar as much as the sanctuary, in the service of that great encyclopaedic vision that built the modern university.

This is where Calvin's pre-critical hermeneutics start to show their value for post-critical interpreters. As we have seen, Calvin approached the Bible believing that it was saying something for the contemporary believer. He was an exegete in the service of the believer and of the church – because he believed that the Bible was speaking to those people today. This was the proper context of biblical interpretation. He was not part of an independent academy, beholden only to the principles of higher learning. It was to believers that the Bible was addressed – and so the interpreter's task was to show how what the ancient text said was now the God's word for the present time. This message was not to be located behind the text, or by dismembering the text; it was not something to which the text referred. It was gleaned from reading the text itself.

The endeavours of historical critics cannot be merely set aside. However, interpretation in the service of the church and its members is never merely an analysis of the text. It is always an exercise of listening to the text. Calvin positions himself as the servant of the text, and not its master. This posture is not an empty rhetorical move, or a false humility on the part of the exegete. It is actually a decisive condition for biblical interpretation if it is to be interpretation of the Bible, and not of some other thing to which the bible is apparently a conduit.

If Calvin was ever aware of the context in which he carried out his biblical interpretation, then we should not be embarrassed as his putative heirs to discover that our context is somewhat different. That is: if in Calvin's day he read the Scriptures as being addressed to the sixteenth century reader, so then might we read the Scriptures as if we are being addressed in our time. How is that different? The believer of the twenty-first century lives in a context in which even belief in God is not at all a given. The 'Secular Age', as Charles Taylor calls it, is in some ways the step-child of Calvin's thought. The task of biblical interpretation now takes place in a context in which its value as a task is very much under question. The authority of Scripture is not taken for granted by our contemporaries, or even those within the churches.

There is then a need for greater awareness of the evangelical heart of the Scriptures. Christology is not sufficient, unless it is understood as a soteriological motif. The motifs of promise and fulfilment, so prominent in Calvin's exposition of the text, need to be understood as propelling the missiological task of the churches of Jesus Christ. Calvin was aware of this of course; but he could not have been aware of the extent to which secularism would roll back Christian belief five centuries after his birth, or of how full the earth would be of people who need to hear the message of the Jesus Christ of the scriptures. Exegesis must not be an intramural activity; and hermeneutics must insist on this. Its sphere of reference cannot be ecclesial only – because the Bible is not merely
addressed to the church, but also to the world.

Reviewing Tom Schreiner's New Testament Theology

I have been asked to write a review of Tom Schreiner's New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ. It is an interesting and well-considered work.



Schreiner wants to argue that the anchoring theme of NT Theology is something like:



God magnifying himself through Jesus Christ by means of the Holy Spirit.



That is, God's concern for God's own glory is the driving heartbeat of the NT witness and mission. His self-referencing self-regard is what perpetuates his plans and his interaction with his creatures.


Of course, accusing this God of narcissism is beside the point: he is God after all. But is this really a true depiction of the Biblical God? Isn't God - the who God who is love - fundamentally other-regarding?

Bird on imputation

Michael Bird's excellent short book 'A Bird's Eye View of Paul' is really a very good piece of work - especially to a non-Pauline-specialist like me. Pauline studies has really suffered from a plethora of disagreeing experts in the last twenty years, which leaves trials of confusion.

One area on which I have felt particular disorientation is that of the imputation of Christ's righteousness. In the teaching of a John Piper, this teaching becomes a crux. But, as NT Wright points out - where is the NT on this subject? Where is it explicitly taught? Even if we decide that imputation is a necessary inference from the theology of the NT, it is surely the case that it can't be as focal as Piper seems to make it.

Anyhow, here's Bird:

...what about the imputation of Christ's righteousness as the basis of justification? That is the notion that God imputes the obedience and merits of Jesus to believers and in turn imputes their sins to Jesus on the cross. Well, the fact of the matter is that we cannot proof-text imputation. If we think we can cite 2 Cor 5:21, Rom 4:1-5, 1 Cor 1:30, Phil 3:6-9 and find the entire package of the imputation of Christ's active obedience and the imputation of our sin to Christ embedded in all of these texts, we are sadly mistaken...

At the level of the text, then, Paul argues that we are justified by union with Christ through what I have called 'incorporated righteousness.' Jesus is justified in his resurrection, and by faith we have union with him so that we share in his justification. Through incorporation into Christ by faith, what is his becomes ours and what is ours becomes his...

The imputation of Christ's righteousness is a necessary and logical inference to make, as it allows us coherently to hold together a number of ideas and concepts in Paul's story of salvation. Although no text explicitly says that Christ's righteousness is imputed to believers, nonetheless, without some kind of theology of imputation a lot of what Paul says about justification does not make sense. Imputation is a synthetic way of holding together a number of themes...

I concur with Leon Morris, who said that imputation is a corollory of the identification of the believer with Christ. (p. 96-8)

Marilynne Robinson on sermons

I have been reading a truly excellent novel, Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. It is about an old pastor from the mid-west - and so it is a novel imbued with theological thinking and scripture. Anyhow, I found this comment on sermons from an interview with Robinson:

A sermon is a form that yields a certain kind of meaning in the same way that, say, a sonnet is a form that deals with a certain kind of meaning that has to do with putting things in relation to each other, allowing for the fact of complexity reversal, such things. Sermons are, at their best, excursions into difficulty that are addressed to people who come there in order to hear that. The attention of the congregation is a major part of the attention that the pastor gives to his or her utterance. It's very exceptional. I don't know anyone who doesn't enjoy a good sermon. People who are completely nonreligious know a good sermon when they hear one.
One of the reasons that I think that a sermon is a valuable thing now and so impressive when you do hear a good one -- and there is a lot of failure in the attempt; it's a difficult form -- is because it's so seldom true now that you hear people speak under circumstances where they assume they are obliged to speak seriously and in good faith, and the people who hear them are assumed to be listening seriously and in good faith. This is a kind of standard of discourse that is not characteristic of the present moment. I think that it makes a sermon, when it is a good sermon, stand out in anyone's experience.

She also has this to say about 'The Protestant Imagination':

Protestantism, of course, is much more explicitly divided into different traditions -- the Pentecostals, the Anglicans. But there is the main tradition of Protestantism that comes out of the Reformation and that produced people like Kant and Hegel and so on, who are not normally thought of as being people writing in a theological tradition, although Hegel, of course, wrote theology his whole life. I think, frankly, that his PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT is theology, too.When the Reformation became established, one of the things that was a question between Catholicism and the Reformation traditions was whether there was a hierarchy of being. If you look at Thomas Aquinas, for example, you have hierarchies of angels and all the rest of it, and hierarchies even of saints and then subsaints -- people who aren't quite there, that sort of thing. The Reformation rejected all of that and created a new metaphysics, in effect, that is not hierarchical. The idea that the universe itself is physically structured around hierarchy was sort of an integration of earlier science and theology that was made by people like Thomas Aquinas, that was assumed doctrinally in that tradition. The Reformation rejected that model of reality and created a highly individualistic metaphysics in the sense that it located everything normative that can be said about reality in human perception, there being, of course, no other avenue of knowing. There is Scripture, there is conscience, there is perception itself. If you read Calvin, for example, he says, How do we know that we are godlike, in the image of God? Well, look at how brilliant we are. Look how we can solve problems even dreaming, which I think is true, which I've done myself. So instead of having an externalized model of reality with an objective structure, it has a model of reality that is basically continuously renegotiated in human perception. I think that view of things is pretty pervasively influential in Protestant thought.

10 Really bad reasons to stop having the Lord's Supper

1. Jesus said nothing about it. When he said 'Do this in remembrance of me' in Luke 22:19 and 1 Corinthians 11:24, he clearly meant something else.
   
2. In 1 Corinthians, the Christians were clearly having a full meal, not just a bit of bread and wine.
   
3. Why say with a symbol what you can say with words?
   
4. Outsiders will think that we think that we are offering a sacrifice to God that takes away our sins.
   
5. People will think the minister is a sacerdotal priest with special powers.
   
6. People will think we are Roman Catholics.
   
7. We haven't had it for so long that now it is weird.
   
8. We will have to explain everything and that will take too long.
   
9. The scary words about eating the supper unworthily in 1 Cor 10 and 11 mean that we are probably better not to do it and so keep out of trouble.
10. Having done away with the old formal ways of doing the Lord's Supper, we can't decide on a new, less formal way of doing it that isn't awkward and weird.

The Ten Worst Habits of Preachers

My assumption in this list is a culture that values the preaching of scripture very highly. This of course should not be assumed at all! There are actually worse crimes than these that include doing violence to the text of scripture, or ignoring it altogether, or waffling and calling it 'spirit-led'.

1. Merely 'explaining/teaching the Bible' and not preaching the living Word of God. (I think we should ban the phrase 'we are now going to hear the Bible explained'. I don't need it explained. I need it preached.)

2. Introducing us to the text and not to the issue addressed by the text.

3. Providing overelaborate explanations of the biblical-theological background to no great end.

4. Moralising from the Old Testament.

5. Reading every OT text immediately in terms of Christology without regard to its own particular context and meaning and purpose.

6. Speaking down to the congregation; assuming we are simpletons and do not read or think for ourselves. That our questions just need better information in order to answer them.

7. Getting Penal Substitution (or whatever the hot-button issue is for your church!) from every single text.

8. Illustrations that confuse more than illuminate. That's...most of 'em.

9. Never referring to self and own Christian faith in sermon. (Of course, the opposite is worse: using the pulpit for autobiographical purposes. Yuck.)

10. Making ill-informed generalisations about culture/sociology from a knee-jerk conservative standpoint.

11. (sorry) Pop-psychologising.

Preaching like...Peter Roebuck

How do you train preachers?

Preaching is not a technique or a method, though of course it makes use of techniques and methods. To think you have taught preaching because you have given students a workable outline of how to go about preparing a sermon is utterly mistaken.

Teaching preaching is like teaching a creative writing class. You will have tips and suggestions - but what is really needed is for the person to find their own voice, and to be capable of real insight and wisdom. The getting of wisdom takes an array of skills, to be sure, but it takes personal courage; and the development of one's own voice requires an ear for the language.

The reason that a preacher needs to find his/her own voice is because sermons (as Alan Lukabyo says) must be true, clear, and real. Giving real sermons is much more complicated and intuitive than giving merely true and clear ones. And it takes the development of a whole person in a Godward direction.

An analogy: in the Sydney Morning Herald there are two cricket writers with clear tasks. Chloe Saltau is the reporter. Her job is to give a descriptive account of the day's play, informing the reader of its significant events and scores. She has to integrate information from the teams as well as what she sees before here eyes, but though she is involved in a level of interpretation, she is not venturing her own opinions in doing so. Her style is very unembellished and direct. She may have played the game for years, but in a sense that is irrelevant to her work. Salthau could go and become the crime reporter and still do the same kind of writing. She does what she is supposed to do very well.

Peter Roebuck on the other hand provides a world class level of analysis and insight into the game. He himself was a first class player for many years; and he has coached cricket all over the world. He is deeply imbued in the very spirit of the game - a man formed by its challenges and attracted to its joys. He brings to his articles (which are some of the best loved in the whole newspaper, of any kind) a level of insight and wisdom that he achieves by integrating at a very deep level his insights developed over his years of study of the game. He can opine believably about Zimbabwe because he has been there and he knows Zimbabwean cricketers. He is fascinated by the characters who play the game and what the game brings out of them, or what the game does to them. He ventures opinions about cricket that are sometimes controversial, and sometimes he gets it wrong by his own admission - such as when he called for Ricky Ponting to resign in early 2008. He takes that risk, the risk of giving his opinion - and I assume it did not make him popular in the Aussie dressing room - because that is the nature of his task.

My point? Preachers are to be more like Roebuck than Salthau.

(Which is why Moore College is by far the best college for the preparation of preachers in Sydney, btw ;-) )