10c. Using the Bible in Theology Essays

Righto - I've had a rant about proof texting and word studies (argh!) and I have made the point about reading the Bible as a whole, but I still need to say more. I still encounter a great degree of scepticism about the discipline of theology amongst evangelical Christians, even very well educated and thoughtful ones. And this is because they feel that theology asks questions about which the text of Scripture isn't directly concerned or says things without making apparently direct reference to the text of Scripture.

I appreciate the concern. Whereas the great vice of bibical studies is to get lost in the labyrinths of unanswerable and irrelevant historical questions, so the great vice of theology or doctrine is to follow the trail of bread crumbs leading up philosophical passageways to no clear or important destination.

Theology is, as Webster explained (and see above), 'exegetical reason'. Its job is simply faithfulness to Scripture. But in working out faithfulness to Scripture it will seek to probe the concepts that Scripture introduces, and to articulate them with precision and depth and clarity. It works with Scripture as a whole.

This I've said already. But we have to realise just how difficult this is. This is not simply a matter on each question of finding the simple proof texts and citing them. It is thinking through 'what is consistent with the God of Scripture and his might acts in the world'?

That's why we refer to this thing called 'orthodoxy' - because it gives us a set of intuitions, already carefully worked out, with which to begin our theological work on Scripture. We don't read Scripture alone, but in the company of a great number of faithful bible readers before us. And the consensus of the Christian church down the ages is that God is triune - three persons in one God. That is not, per se, the explicit testimony of Scripture. It is an inference drawn from Scripture and summarised in the great creeds of the Church. When you read Scripture and attempt a piece of Christian theology, you can legitimately begin with this as your presupposition and work from there.

Discovering the relations between the three persons, and between the acts of God in history and his transcendent being is a valid theological task which may involve passages of thought without proof texts. Yet it can be thoroughly, profoundly Scriptural - because it is taking the essential testimony of Scripture as a whole and working out how it is coherent and how it applies in our world.

For example: British theologian Colin Gunton makes the interesting observation that the unity and the diversity of the triune God who is at the heart of reality is neither a form of monism (all is one) nor a way of seeing the world as sheer unconnected chaos. The trinity - a doctrine established by a reading of the whole of Scripture and not from merely a set of proof texts or from a single text - provides a challenge in this way to both a tyrannical modernism and its postmodern opposite.

Another example is this: the 'openness of God' movement was a group of evangelical theologians who taught that God is 'open' to the future - that he changes, grows and indeed learns, and that he carries out his plans in reaction to what occurs in history as much as according to his foreordination. As evangelicals, this group of theologians claimed that the Bible was on their side - and so it certainly seems to be. The Old Testament depicts God in exactly this way.

And yet what they taught was a deviation from classic Christian orthodoxy. So what? Well, I am happy to grant that orthodoxy is open to revision if you can provide enough force from Scripture to establish that it needs to be. But orthodoxy - those theological convictions worked out in the first few centuries of the Christian church - also gives you a way of reading Scripture such that we ought to read much of the Bible's language of God changing and so on in an analogical way. It isn't a straightforward case of God changing his mind. We cannot, according to orthodoxy, always move directly from Scriptural statements about God to direct claims about his nature without first interpreting them in the light of what the orthodox doctrine of God says about him.

This means that you have more work to do than you may have thought to get your theology essay cooking on the stove. All the worst heretics have been Bible readers who claimed that Scripture supported their case and could point to proof texts that supported them. To defeat them, you need to show how what they say doesn't fit with the whole of Scripture and isn't consistent with Christian orthodoxy (which itself derives from Scripture).

Capiche?

What this means by the way for your reading of theologians is this: they may not cite a whole lot of texts directly, but they still might be Bible theologians. You can still be faithful to Scripture by working out the concepts of Christian orthodoxy. This is simply a way of reading Scripture - and is subject of course to the text of Scripture as its authority. But simply saying 'hey, there's not a whole lot of Bible references here' doesn't tell me anything about the Scriptural faithfulness or otherwise of a writer.

Like I said: all the worst heretics have been Bible men.