From Text to Doctrine

In thinking recently about the doctrine of the church I have been led to reflect further on the standard evangelical method of doing theology.


It is not too much of a caricature to say that much evangelical theologising is no different from a Bible Dictionary article. Or, that we are content with what such a dictionary article might say about a word.

So, asked to give an account of 'the doctrine of the church' we fly off to our Greek dictionaries and look for the word 'ekklesia'. How is it used? What does it mean? Or more often: what DOESN'T it mean? By this process we also hope to pick up - and correct - distortions in the tradition.

But of course, the NT usage of the word ekklesia and the Christian doctrine of the Church are two different (though related) things. We have other words, for example, that are used to describe the people of God in the NT (I don't think anyone denies this). What's more, this is not limited to words: we have a number of different texts doing different things that contribute to our knowledge. What's more, I think it is properly evangelical to give consideration to traditional answers to the questions we are asking.

That's not to say that this kind of process of checking how the Bible uses its terms isn't a necessary and useful one: merely that it isn't enough to do theology.

Bultmann on demythologisation

Our reading group has begun reading a collection of Bultmann's essays edited by Schubert Ogden: New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings. It seems to me Bultmann is a figure almost completely overlooked these days by NT scholars, but becoming more popular amongst theologians. When you read his John commentary for example you can see why this might be so: Bultmann was formidibly - even incredibly - learned as a philologist and historian, but his rearrangements of the NT text are often arbirtrary, even whimsical. However, his adaptation of the existentialism of Heidegger for interpretation of the NT is quite revelatory of the human and dramatic situations under scrutiny.

At the suggestion of the editor, we began with the last essay in the book, from 1961: 'On the Problem of Demythologizing'. Of course, as good postmoderns, our first observation was just how 'modernist' he is: the world-view of the natural sciences is the given as far as he is concerned, and means that we cannot except the 'myths' of the NT as anything but naive. The job of exegesis and theology is to decode the myths and express them in the idiom of contemporary thought: 'demythologization seeks to bring out myth's real intention to talk about out own authentic reality as human beings'. Of course, there is no hint from Bultmann that this might be a 'remythologization' in its turn! Bultmann's determination is to wrestle with the vary Kantian dilemma: since God is not a fact withing the world that can be objectively established but rather must be confessed, we can only talk about him if we at the same time talk about our own existence as affected by God's act. As he says:
The statement that God is Creator and Lord has its legitimate basis only in our existential self-understanding...
This on the face of it seems a curious claim: but the statement is a statement that is believed and confessed, after all, and preached, rather than one open to the inquiries of natural scientific methods.
The peculiar thing about Christain faith, however, is that it sees an utterly special act of God in a certain historiacl event, which as such can be objectively established. This is the appearance of Jesus Christ, who is seen to be the revelation of God that calls everyone to faith.
Not too much to complain about here.

Ricoeur on the exegesis of Gen 1

Photo: Dunblane Cathedral, Scotland.

Ricoeur's essay on exegesis relies the planting of two poles of interpretation which he says are indispensible. First, there is the genetic approach of von Rad et al. Second, there is the structural approach of Schmidt. Ricoeur says that in the case of Gen 1 the structural approach actually draws attention to the genesis of the text: by observing irregularities within the structure the way in which previous texts have been incorporated into the work becomes evident. Interpretation then is the 'act of the text itself on itself'. Already in the text interpretation has begun. The notion of interpretation, says Ricoeur, is 'an act of the text insofar as the text has a direction, a dynamic 'sense'. To interpret is to place ourselves in 'its sense'. I find this emphasis on the text as opposed to the author or the reader extremely interesting, because it draws the exegetes attention to the right place.

All well and good: only his account of the genetic method (of discerning layers of sources and editing in the text - the bread and butter of biblical criticism for years) rests on speculation after speculation after speculation. Certainly, if we could say with confidence that such-and-such a formula represents such-and-such a tradition which the later author/editor has both critiqued and incorporated into this new text, then we may find ourselves enlightened. The basic fact is that there is no agreement amongst scholars as to the arrangement of the source material and the composition of the text. So how much use is it really?