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!

Contextualisation, and so on.

I am always surprised by the naive but belligerent talk one hears from evangelicals who are disdainful of "contextualisation'' - usually with an equally vehement contempt for ''hermeneutics".

I understand the fear. The craven accommodation of the gospel to the fads and fashions of the time is appalling to see. Even now, the fad of the 1980s to have 'perspectival' theologies - black theology, lesbian theology, latino theology and whatever - looks simply laughable. Why did anyone ever take that seriously?

But the alternative is to be blind to our own context, and to our own (sinful and human) propensity to distort things. The Bible needs to be interpreted ever anew, not because it isn't clear or effective or coherent, but because we tend to get it wrong. Faithfulness to the original demands not parroting it but hearing it again as fresh for today and today's people. To borrow an analogy from bible translation: ''dynamic equivalence'' is the most authentic and faithful means of transmission!

Calvin, hermeneutics and history…

On the final page of his authoritative work The Unaccommodated Calvin, Richard A. Muller writes: 'A clever theologian can accommodate Calvin to nearly any agenda; a faithful theologian – and a good historian – will seek to listen to Calvin, not to use him.' Professor Muller's warning is salutary, not the least in the area of Calvin's hermeneutics. If anything, there has been since the 1960s a revival in interest in Calvin's interpretation of scripture, and an unseemly rush to appropriate or 'accommodate' him to new hermeneutical models. In the light of the slow dismemberment of the text of the Bible by scholars who hunkered around it like vultures pecking at a carcass, what else was to be done? The problem is that while this clinging to our forebear is driven by motives that are indubitably noble, it is by no means clear that Calvin has been listened to, and not used.

That is all very easy to say. The honest truth is that it is by no means obvious that listening to Calvin on the matter of hermeneutics is possible five centuries after his birth. The providential unity of the historical and Christological senses of scripture is no longer a assumption with which the contemporary interpreter can proceed. Stephen Edmondson voices the disquiet:

'These developments over the last four centuries have shut off any direct appropriation of Calvin's scriptural hermeneutic for contemporary interpreters concerned with the historical sense of the text. …it is problematic at this point to offer an historical reading of Scripture that is either unitive or generally theological, much less one that roots the unity of the narrative in a robust Christology. Calvin's history, then, is not our history.'

On the one hand, Calvin posited a single divine authorship to the Scriptures that was evidenced in its unity of voice and continuity of narrative; and that the text was a direct description of what actually happened in history. In direct and mutually-informing relationship with it, on the other hand, he held to a Christological theology of providence – the divine will shaped the events of history such that Christ was their consummation. If, first, the text could be shown to be not a united text but a plurality of competing texts, with an at best uncertain relationship to what actually happened in history, and second, if the view of the divine superintendence of historical events could be challenged and even discredited, then Calvin's reading of scripture could be made to look very odd indeed. Both of these were held to have occurred by the beginning of the nineteenth century; and so Calvin's narrative reading of scripture was 'eclipsed'.

[to be continued...]

Biblical 'data'... no more!

Every now and again I catch myself using the language of 'biblical data'. That is, I suggest that some or other conclusion can be drawn 'from the biblical data'.

I think this language, while not strictly speaking wrong, is badly misleading. And I hereby resolve not to use it!

How come? Well, 'data' is a word that comes to us from the world of scientific empiricism. It implies a set of raw, uncollated information that lies dormant until the scientist can put into some sort of order and therefore draw conclusions. Or, 'data' is a list of entries of unfiltered informationinto a computer programme which then has operations performed on it to turn it into something meaningful.

The Scriptures are not in this sense 'data'; nor is the theologian in the position of the scientist or the computer. There two particularly important reasons (at least) why this is the case:

a) the Scriptures are writings which already have a large degree of interpretational activity going on within them. The writers of the Bible are not presenting to us 'just the facts': they are unafraid to admit that this is their 'spin' on things.

b) the language of 'data' prevents us from seeing the sequential, historical nature of the Scriptures. Each piece of scriptural 'data' is not of equivalent standing to the next. It has its place in the testimony of the scriptures to the God of Abraham who is also the God of Jesus Christ.

The Theological Interpretation of Scripture

I am interested in compiling a reading list of works to do with 'theological interpretation of Scripture. It is a growing field of theological investigation. What's exciting about it is that biblical studies and systematic theology are ending their turf war over who can and can't read scripture.

Can you add to this list? (Francis Watson's works are an obvious addition).


Scripture's Doctrine and Theology's Bible: Howthe New Testament Shapes Christian Dogmatics ed Marcus Bockmeuhl

Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Recovering a Christian Practice by Daniel Treier

The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings ed Stephen Fowl

Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible ed Kevin Vanhoozer

Philosophy and Theology

I have to say Paul Ricoeur's Gifford lectures published as Oneself as Another ranks among the most difficult books I have ever tried to read.

But I was interested to read in the first chapter to the book how Ricoeur sees his largely philosophical work in relation to theology. He had, he said, written a couple of more explicitly theological chapters, but does not include them in this book.

He is adamant that he doesn't want his philosophy of the self to be seen as a crypto-theology. It is certainly the case that he discovers all these conceptual difficulties and problems that seem to be suggestive of a theological resolution. Does not the philosophy of the self point us inevitably to the need for some kind of divinity? This is the move he wants to resist

And, what's more, he doesn't want to see it the other way around: theology as taking the place of philosophy. Theology doesn't give the 'ultimate foundation' (rationally speaking) that philosophy strives for but can never attain. That would be stretching theology to do work it isn't designed to do:

If I defend my philosophical writings against the accusation of crypto-theology, I also refrain, with equal vigilance, from assigning to biblical faith a cryptophilosophical function which would most certainly be the case if one were to expect from it some definitive solution to aporias that philosophy produces in abundance... (p. 24)

No: theology does not answer the questions that philosophy has raised. The irretractable problems that a philosopher discovers are not susceptible to a theological answer. The problems remain, and remain to be addressed by philosophy. What he has instead from theology is assurance, which is to be taken by faith. This is how he puts it:

The dependence of the slef on a word that stripsit of its glory, all the while comforting its courage to be, delivers biblical faith from the temptation, which I am here calling cryptophilosophical, of taking over the henceforth vacnt role of ultimate foundation. In turn, a fiath that knows itself to be without guarantee...can help philosophical hermeneutics to protect itself from the hubris that would set it up as the heir to the philosophies of the cogito (ie Descartes) and as continuing their self-foundational claim. (p. 25)

Hans Frei on Typology or Figural reading

Hans Frei has done most in recent decades to rehabilitate figurative or typological reading as a necessary component of Biblical hermeneutics. Building on the work of literary scholar Eric Auerbach, Frei argued that the Bible points to its own unity and inner coherence by inviting figural interpretation. In Auerbach’s terms:

Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or person in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while second involves or fulfills the first. The two poles of a figure are separated in time, but both, being real events or persons, are within temporality. The are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the comprehension, the intellectus spiritualis, of their interdependence is a spiritual act.[1]

In other words: typology shows that two events or characters are part of the one connected stream of history in way that is not necessarily obvious from mere analysis of causality. The prefiguring of one by the other is discerned by (or, perhaps better, revealed to) the reader. In theologian Frei’s words:

In figural interpretation the figure itself is real in its own place, time, and right and without any detraction from that reality it prefigures the reality that will fulfill it. This figural relation not only brings into coherent relation events in bibical narration, but allows also the fitting of each present occurrence and experience into a real, narrative framework or world. Each person, each occurrence is a figure of that providential narrative in which it is also an ingredient.[2]

Unlike allegorical reading, typological interpretation points to the embeddedness of the events in a common narrative framework governed by providence.[3] These are ‘real’ or ‘historical’ at least in the sense that they gain their meaning from a relation to divine providence – the same providential narrative in which the reader of the text then in turn finds herself.[4]

This observation dovetails with Nicholas Lash’s proposal for a ‘performative’ reading of Scripture. There is a sort of double typology at work: the reader of Scripture is invited to see not only types of the Messiah in the OT narratives, but also then to model his own life (and death) after the pattern of the life of Christ. The structure of shadow and fulfilment is not repeated in the life of the believer (the believer’s life is not the reality prefigured in some way by Christ); but the typological similarity serves to bind the disciple into the same reality as the world of the text, within the frame of the same providential narrative. The text may serve not only as a type of Christ but also, in a secondary way, as a type of the follower of Christ.

[1] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis : The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 73.
[2] Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative : A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 153.
[3] The great Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye, for his part, wrote: ‘Typology points to future events that are often thought of as transcending time, so that they contain a vertical lift as well as a horizontal move forward.’ Is ‘transcending’ the right verb? Typology as it is used in the NT, and as observed by Hans Frei, reconfigures time certainly, but doesn’t overcome or dispense with it (if that is what is meant by ‘transcending’ here). Northrop Frye, The Great Code - the Bible in Literature (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul Ltd, 1982), p. 82.
[4] This is what Frei argued had been ‘eclipsed’ in all the debates about what it was the texts refered to.

Nicholas Lash on Performing the Scriptures

This notion of ‘performing the Scriptures’ was highlighted in an influential essay by Nicholas Lash.[1] He begins from the rather obvious point that reading or interpretation of a text depends largely on the kind of text being used: ‘different kinds of text call for different kinds of reading’.[2] To read some texts – in particular, those texts which are ‘works of art’ – does require the assistance of experts; however, the role of experts in reading texts while indispensible, is subordinate. Their expert ‘reading’ is not the fundamental form of interpretation. Rather, ‘there are at least some texts that only begin to deliver their meaning in so far as they are ‘brought into play’ through interpretative performance’.[3]

Having used King Lear and a Beethoven score as examples, Lash now applies his insight to the New Testament, suggesting that ‘the fundamental form of the Christian interpretation of scripture is the life, activity and organization of the believing community’.[4] Christian practice can properly be described as ‘interpretative action’ – a performance of the texts, in other words. This performance, in its turn, is an enactment of the conviction that the best (‘best’ because most appropriate to the text in question) reading of these texts is as the story of Jesus, human beings and God. The performative interpretation of Scripture can also be called ‘Christian discipleship’. Lash allows that performances may differ over history, as circumstances change; but though the story may be told differently, it cannot be a different story if it is to be a performance of this text. The original meaning of the text gives an appropriate constraint to later performances of it.

This points to an important difference between Scripture and King Lear, which has to do with history. The New Testament self-conciously adheres to particular past events. Its original meaning was not merely that Jesus Christ was representative of certain fundamental human virtues, but that he was one man ‘in whom the mystery of divine action is seen to have been embodied and disclosed’.[5] So, for Lash, to suppose that we could render an authentic performance of the New Testament utterly disconnected from the historical would be to tell a different story from the one the New Testament itself tells. Lash goes on: ‘…for the practice of Christianity, the performacne of the biblical text, to be true…must not be not only ‘true to life’, but ‘true to his life’; and not only ‘true to his life’, but ‘true to God’.[6]


[1] Nicholas Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," in Theology on the Way to Emmaus (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005).
[2] Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," p. 38.
[3] Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," p. 41.
[4] Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," p. 42.
[5] Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," p. 45.
[6] Lash, "Performing the Scriptures," p. 45.

Take the hermeneutics quiz...

... and tell me what you scored.

I got 71, which, in author Scot McKnight's book makes me a 'progressive!' I thought I was more moderate than that...

Reading the Bible in the old South Africa

Richard Burridge, who wrote a remarkable work on the genre of the gospels, has a new book called Imitating Jesus - An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics. While I have yet to discover what he means by 'inclusive' - a word that normally makes me reach for my gun, because it is a such a loaded term - I have been impressed by his determination to recover the role of the Bible, and of the Biblical Jesus, in ethics. He relates the problem to the apartheid era in South Africa, when genuine Christians prayerfully earnestly and intelligently reading their Bibles decided that it supported racism. Does this mean that the Bible ought to be rejected, because it is open to such uses? By no means: though merely appealing to the Bible does not guarantee good reading of it.

Interestingly, he quotes CESA Bishop Frank Retief's submission, made in 1997, to a hearing of 'Faith Communities'.

...when the government made legislation that accorded with our moral or biblical understanding, we supported them. However, on the great issue of justice for all, we were often insensitive. We had not made the connection between gospel and society...We were witnesses to how the Bible and its message can be misused to support an evil ideology. National government used the Bible to support its policies, to give the impression that they were a Christian government. But then so did some liberation theologians who finally supported violence as a means of continuing the struggle...Where we have been negligent, careless and insensitive to biblical injunctions and mandates as we have been, may the Lord graciously forgive us....The fact that the Bible was used in the past to condone injustice does not mean its true message may be ignored today...It is our belief that this day and hour calls for men and women of conviction and integrity to apply the message of the Bible more accurately and faithfully to our emerging society... p. 397-8

I have met Bishop Frank and heard him speak, and I find this an impressive and moving statement. But, Burridge asks, what gives him and others (and the rest of us) confidence that we aren't making similar mistakes now?

Burridge gives an analysis of how the South African churches got into this mess - and notes on the one hand a lack of self-criticism and on the other a theology which overlooked the central place of Jesus for all Christian ethics. Could a church that was actually prioritising Jesus - the Jesus of the gospels, but also the Jesus of Paul and the other authors of the NT - have allowed itself to lapse so badly? Make no mistake, there was some sophisticated theological and exegetical work done in the theological faculties of South Africa in the apartheid era... but, says Burridge, the voice of Jesus was strangely silent even so.

So, argues Burridge, if churches want to avoid falling into the group-think which has resulted in such terrible misusing the Bible, they need to practice self-reflection and self-criticism as a matter of course. And also, they ought to pay attention to Jesus.

[Note: to any South African readers - I am only here reporting from Burridge. I cannot know and do not pretend to know what it was to live in those times and to be a Christian in those times. Nor do I know what it is to live as a Christian with this as a legacy - though Australian Christians have made their own mistakes of course.]

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.

Calvin and Hermeneutics

I have been invited to contribute an essay to a proposed collection on Calvin for his 500th birthday next year.

The suggestion was to write something on Calvin and Hermeneutics. But of course, there already exist some general overview articles on this subject, and even a book-length study by TF Torrance. So, an angle is needed.

Furthermore, I would rather not write a piece of merely antiquarian interest. It seems to me that if we have nothing to learn from Calvin's hermeneutical theory and practice, then the piece isn't really worth writing.

So: what do you think my angle should be?

I could:

• take a key text and see how Calvin handles it in his commentaries and his institutes, as an examplar of his method;
• write about his polemic against allegory, and against Origen in particular (preferring Chyrsostom);
• compare and contrast Calvin with a near contemporary - Bucer perhaps?
• or see how Calvin's hermeneutic was received by Anglicans (if it was);
• I would love to see how Calvin's interpretational method was embodied in the Geneva Bible, an English Bible translated by English exiles living and working alongside Calvin in Geneva while Mary was Queen;
• or, an essay entitled 'the Postmodern Calvin?' Calvin and Derrida, perhaps??! Calvin and Ricouer? (Someone has already tried this, admittedly)
• It would be cool to see how someone like, say, John Milton or some other more literary figure learnt from Calvin, if he did.

Any other ideas?

More on Williams and Wiles...

Has Williams succeeded in outflanking Wiles? Has he, in other words, managed to burrow into the world of the text such that krisis – that moment of decision when we are confronted, yea even judged by what we meet in the text ­­– is allowed its prominence? Williams attempts to see from within: but has he smuggled in an objectivism – the kind of objectivism he repudiates – somewhere along the line? Tendenzkritik, that form of criticism most interested in uncovering in the text the interests of various individuals and communities, per definition tends to be hypersuspicious of ‘interests’. It holds as its moral starting point the critique of power itself. Is it not the case, however, that Williams’ version of krisis – his teaching on the judgement of Christ – resembles the values of Tendenzkritik?

That is to say: Williams seems to operate with a definite set of moral presuppositions. For example, he is tentative in his claims about language because of the tendency of individuals and groups to use language – and perhaps religious language more than any other kind – for their own interests. This is what the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth exposes to us, on his account. Williams would argue that Kritik is the right kind of intellectual work prompted by and encounter with Jesus: it takes his judgement and applies it self-critically to the practice of Christian speaking and thinking about God. Yet is it not surely the case that this reading of Jesus, and this application of Jesus’ teaching, is itself generated by the application of critical methods to the New Testament? It goes without saying that the history of New Testament scholarship is dominated by the triumphant revelation by each generation of the prejudices and preferences of the previous one.[1]

My charge is that Williams’ exposition of krisis is a product itself of Kritik, rather than the other way around. The problem is, once Tendenzkritik is in the tank, it tends to devour all the other fish. Where does Kritik end and krisis begin? Can we so readily shift from one to the other? Is this a moral possibility to have a text which is so beset with interest-laden and inadequate human talk as authoritative Scripture, as the catholic church has always held it to be? It is difficult to see how, on Williams account, we can read the New Testament with any confidence that we are able to apply the right filtration to the text and so be judged by it in exactly the right way. Can we really be both radically suspicious and humbly naïve about the text at one and the same time?

[1] See Stephen Neill and N. T. Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1986, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

A word on scripture in theology

A word as to hermeneutical method deployed is needed at this point [ie in my thesis!]. The early martyr-acts and the patristic discussions of martyrdom are richly drenched in scriptural references and allusions. This was possible and meaningful because (despite the variety of methods of interpretation used) the scriptures were held to be a unity cohering in Christ, the one whose death provided the template for Christian martyrdom. The texts of scripture had particular import for these individuals facing a terrible death, and as it is reported, gave them particular inspiration and solace.[1] Scripture ought to have particular prominence and authority in any theological account of martyrdom, therefore. More than this: a reading of the canonical scriptures which highlights their salvation-historical – and so Christological – shape is the appropriate complement to the subject at hand, because theological reflection on martyrdom has always had this perspective in one way or another. We attempt to read scripture, therefore, with an eye to its unfolding disclosure of a history of redemption as well as to the theological concepts that it generates.[2] The readings of scripture we attempt here are necessarily selective, but in each case the selections of texts are neither arbitrary nor irrelevant. The salvation-historical nature of the material necessarily plunges us into the business of narrative analysis; but it also the case that the scriptures provide the frame, or chart the trajectory for a theological discussion they themselves prompt but do not provide.

[1] Brad S. Gregory says the same about the martyrs of the Reformation era. Gregory, Salvation at Stake : Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe, p. ??
[2] We hope to take heed of Oliver O’Donovan’s stern warning not to ‘dip into Israel’s experience at one point … and to take out a single disconnected image or theme from it’ which would be ‘to treat the history of God’s reign like a commonplace book or a dictionary of quotations.’ Oliver O'Donovan, The Desire of the Nations - Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 27.

Bultmann on demythologizing

We have been reading Bultmann, and I am sorry Ben Myers, but we have all been quite disappointed. It just seems so, well, dated. Never mind - he puts this really good question to all of us: where do you demythologize? We all do it (he says), so where do you?

In many cases we demythologize unintentionally and unreflectively by taking the mythological statements of the Bible as pictures that have long since lost their originial mythical sense. This is done most easily, naturally, with poetic writings in the Bible like the Psalms, in which the mythological language may in many cases already have been intended poetically. In our daily life, also, we use pictures that stem from mythical thinking, as when we say. for example, that our heart prompts us to do this or that - a statement that no one understands any longer in its original mythological sense, But those of us who have to interpret scripture responsibily ought to be conscious of what we are doing and to remind ourselves that honesty at this point requires us to be radical.

More radical? I am not sure: certainly, more honest and more systematic perhaps. Perhaps, too, the problem lies in calling this process 'demythologization', which implies a certain discovery of the 'real' intentions of the author - intentions that he not have been aware of himself.

Williams and hermeneutics

From his lecture on the Bible given in Toronto this year:

"It is not that we are given only a method of interpretation by the form of Scripture – a method that, by pointing us to the conflict and tension between texts simply leaves us with theologically unresolvable debate as a universal norm for Christian discourse (I make the point partly in order to correct what some have – pardonably – understood as the implication of what I have written elsewhere on this matter). There is a substantive and discernible form. The canon is presented to us as a whole, whose unity is real and coherent, even if not superficially smooth. To quote from Kevin Vanhoozer’s recent and magisterial work on The Drama of Doctrine. A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology, p.137, ‘The canon both recounts the history of God’s covenantal dealings with humanity and regulates God’s ongoing covenantal relationship with his people…[I]t is the text that “documents” our covenantal privileges and responsibilities.’ We must acknowledge the tensions and internal debates in Scripture; we must also acknowledge the clear sense that the text is presented as a narrative of ‘fulfilment’ – as one that contains a vision claiming comprehensiveness of meaning. We are to locate ourselves within this set of connections and engagements, the history of Israel, called, exiled, restored, and of Jesus crucified and risen and alive in the Spirit within the community, not to regard Scripture as one element in a merely modern landscape of conflicts. "

Williams defends himself from the charge that he sees 'unresolveable debate' as the key to Christian hermeneutics. He admits that it is understandable that people have misheard him on this. I would have to say the emphasis of his theological writing falls very much on observing the dissonance. There seems to be very little on the fulfilment aspect.

The power of Scripture VII

Conclusion

The postmodern offence with Scripture is rooted in the problem of power and the way it appears to violate human autonomy.[1] What I have tried to establish in response is that, although the creator has indeed an authority that is of a different order from that any creature can rightly command, the word of God in the pages of Scripture functions as powerful in ways that do not contravene its humanity. In fact, that God speaks using human writing is entirely in keeping with the God whose essential nature it is to seek relationship with his creatures. His authority is, as Colin Gunton phrases it, ‘an authority of grace’.[2] We need not deny the power of the words of Scripture. But we can observe how God deals graciously and gently with us in it. The gospel proclaimed in its pages is divinely powerful – powerful for the salvation of those who believe. It is a powerful expression of the love of God.


[1] The language is Colin Gunton’s. C.E. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), p. 31

The power of Scripture VI

Second, the power of Scripture is legitimate because of the freedom that its readers are given to accept or reject it. It isn’t an incantation, as wizard-words are; or some kind of hallucinogenic rhetoric that robs its readers of their capacity to respond as persons. The freedom of readers is always to close the book – to remain deaf to the voice of God. Resistance, as Foucault observed, is always possible, to the point of self-destruction. God’s authority is, we may say, exercised gently, or even graciously. As Richard Bauckham puts it:

This is how the Bible transcends the contemporary dilemma of a total incompatibility between freedom and authority, conceived as total autonomy versus oppressive authoritarianism. The authority that inheres in the biblical story is the authority of grace. In other words, the biblical metanarrative is a story not of the assertion of autonomy in domination, but of grace and free response. In this story all is given by God, including freedom.[1]

The covenant-making God calls his people to respond to his redeeming of them with their continued trust and obedience. The book of Deuteronomy may serve as an example. Yhwh founds his command to his people on his mighty and gracious liberation of them from Egypt. Memory of the gracious acts of Yhwh is the sine qua non of Israel’s life and the ground of her obedience to him. While refusal of the command of Yhwh is condemned, it still remains for them a possible choice (see Dt 30-1). Although the word of God - the commands, stipulations, decrees and ordinances – is a word of authority among the people, it is up to them to enact that word.[2] It is they who are to ‘fear the Lord you God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the Lord your God’ (Dt 10:12-13). The will of Yhwh is to be carried out by the co-joining of his will to the wills of the people. They are to submit, but it is from freedom that they submit, else it is not true obedience.

It is at this stage that I would like to note the place that Scriptures themselves give to the voice of protest against the absence of God. The gentleness of the voice of God in Scripture is such that he even allows the articulation of a dissent against him. The complaint of the Psalmist at the delay of Yhwh’s justice is one of the remarkable features of this word that God can call his own word. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ pleads the Psalmist. That the God-forsaken man utters the same words on the cross reveals how well this complaint has been heard by the one to whom it was made: so well heard indeed that he enters into the very condition that led to that complaint.

Third, the final power to which Scripture gives witness remains to be seen. That is, the Scriptures declare and describe the coming judgement of God according to the righteousness of his character. The day is coming when the Lord will powerfully fulfill all the words of Scripture and show them decisively to have been true words.

According to its human nature, Scripture is revealed to be powerful along the continuum of salvation-history. That power has yet to be revealed in full; it as yet remains a power that is partly concealed, and in contention. It is rejected as much as accepted; denied as much as affirmed. It is a great, unfinished symphony! The themes have been stated and re-stated, but the resolving cadence has yet to be played.

However, we must also assert that the judgement of God has been inserted into human history, at the cross of Christ. For all the gentleness and forbearance of God’s word to us in Scripture, it has at its central motif God’s fearful verdict on humanity. The publication of this judgement in the pages of Scripture stands as a terrible warning to men and women of what the final judgement holds for them. It is God’s promise that he will vindicate his own righteousness at the last.

Furthermore, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead – the most dramatic revelation of God’s power since creation (see Rom 4:17) – we receive public notification that, in the work of Jesus, God himself was at work. He was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification (Rom 4:25). How much more can the believer expect salvation from the wrath to come! As Paul describes it in 1 Cor 15, we are shown in the risen Christ the trajectory of what is to come. The death and resurrection of Christ ‘according to the Scriptures’ are a powerful affirmation of those Scriptures from within the present age ahead of the final Yes of God, which is yet to come.

Recognition of the place in salvation history from which we receive and read the Scriptures means that we can strongly affirm the meaningfulness and trustworthiness of those writings without claiming that we have complete mastery over that meaning here and now. We also know that we read those Scriptures with the responsibility to answer to their divine author for how we read and respond. As we read the Scriptures, we read as seriously as we can to discern the meaning of those writings, neither shirking the discomfort of disagreement nor avoiding the painful truth in them. Reading with what we might call an ‘eschatological’ sense we may avoid merely co-opting Scripture in the service of our own power and instead become its servants: not using the text, but being used by it.

[1] Richard Bauckham, "Authority and Scripture," in God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives (Louisville, Ky.; London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), pp. 67-8
[2] Kevin Vanhoozer similarly speaks about the practice of the Word of God. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology, 1st ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005)

The power of Scripture V

Some utterly pagan dancing.

ii. the gentleness of God
The written words of the Bible show the perspiration of human authors as much as the inspiration of a divine one. Can the divine authority survive uncompromised by its use of human language? Can the Bible as God’s word overcome the scandal (to use Barth’s phrase) of its humanity? For an answer to this question I point to the nature of the Scriptures themselves, and make three points:

First, the Scriptures are promissory and prophetic in nature. They have at their core the great promises of God to Abraham, to Israel at Sinai and, later, to David: and signal God’s declaration of his commitment to his people. In Jesus of Nazareth all God’s promises coalesce; and yet in him there is a magnification, an intensification, as well as a fulfillment, of the ancient promises. The promise of his return and the recapitulation of all things in him is the abiding hope of the New Testament. The Holy Spirit, whose work as inspirer, illuminator and counsellor so closely intertwines with the words of Scripture, is given to believers as an arrabon or guarantee of the return of the Lord Jesus (2 Cor 1:22).
The legitimate power of Scripture is rooted in the God who says and it is, as we have seen. But it is a power now played out gradually, over the sweep of human history, within and across human culture and language. The word of the creator God HAS the power of absolute force, but the Bible’s power is not like this. It is a power appropriate to human nature, too. With that in mind, we may observe that scripture is primarily and not incidentally a narrative. The various parts of the Bible cohere around the story that is its central theme. This narrative shape is not merely the casing for a set of propositions or timeless truths. It is quite deliberately immanent, as humans are. The Scriptures chart a revelation that has taken time to come to its fullness. For men and women to see the righteousness and trustworthiness of God necessitates the passage of time: for it is only over time that promises are to be declared, believed, tested and fulfilled.
We might here adopt Calvin’s language of accommodation to describe what we here find in the nature of the Scriptures. In speaking to us in Scripture, ‘God is wont in a measure to ‘lisp’ in speaking to us’ as a nurse does with a baby:

Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity. To do this he must descend far beneath his loftiness.

The drawing out of God’s speaking over time as portrayed in the Scriptures is a feature of his stooping to us – what we may call his gentleness. This gentle accommodation is not an act or a façade: rather, it is entirely true to the character of the God the Bible describes, a characteristic seen in its full flourishing in the obedience and humility of the Son.

Promise is one feature of God’s stooping to us in Scripture; the use of a human mediator is another. That divine speaking might be mediated through human words is not an embarrassment to Scripture itself. At Horeb Israel shrank back for fear of God’s word to them: ‘if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any longer, we shall die. For who is there of all flesh that has heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the fire as we have and remained alive?’ (Dt 5:25-6) Yhwh provided for them a mediator, Moses, to teach and expound his will to them. The role of the prophet in the Old Testament grows out of this gracious possibility in the life of Israel with Yhwh. In appreciation of this point lies an important rejoinder to Shaw, Jasper and Castelli: the power that Paul claims is only as a messenger of the gracious divine word – the gospel in other words – and expressed with persistent awareness of the limitations of his own humanity and the derivative nature of his authority. In fact, in the Corinthian correspondence, he appeals to his own weakness, suffering and lack of verbal skill as a sign of the work of the Father of the crucified and risen Christ in him.

[more points to follow]

The power of Scripture IV

III God, Christ and Power
i. the authority of God

I would not want to dispute - but rather join with - the postmodern protest against abuses of power in the form of wizard-words. Across the sweep of history, human words have been deployed by the mighty to oppress the lowly. As George Orwell showed in 1984, language can be the ultimate instrument of coercion, offering the possibility of enslaving not just the body but the memory and the imagination as well – all without guns. If no power is available that is not guilty of this oppressive tendency, then a retreat into a peaceful plurality is the only strategy for the survival of the human race in the age of mass destruction. It is notoriously the case that the Bible has been co-opted by those who would support violence, terror and oppression: the apartheid regime in South Africa being only one such recent example. This is a text that has been misused: that much we can grant.

But the power critics have gone too far.[1] What they have failed to see is the crucified form in which the Bible seeks to persuade its readers; which is to say, although the Bible witnesses to an Almighty God, it witnesses to him through the story of his sacrificial love for the world. The God of the gospel is a God who himself rules by dint of an act of submission to the powers of the earth. The very nature of the Bible’s message in fact relativizes human attempts at domination: it is a power protest of its own.

The authority of the God of the Bible – the God who is Father, Son and Spirit – rests on three supports: his capacity to act, his knowledge, and his utter trustworthiness. First, Scripture testifies from its opening sentences to a Lord who says and it is. His Word corresponds exactly to reality: in fact, it is what reality is: ‘And it was so’. The absolute sovereignty of this deity is not met by any challenge. He is not tapping into some primal force or casting a spell, but exercising his free creative power and his absolute mastery of things. These words were the kind of speaking that wizards attempt to emulate: except that here, of course, the being that is speaking is of an entirely different order. And his act of creative will establishes his worthiness to receive the adulation of all creatures (Rev 4:11).

Second, God speaks true words because of his knowledge of all things. He has the ‘view from nowhere’, although it is better rebadged as the ‘view from heaven’; and so may properly speak powerful words. It is not that he is objective; rather he is authoritatively subjective. This difference in knowledge is what Yhwh wields against Job in Job 38-41: it is a comparison of Job’s ignorance (rather than his weakness) against Yhwh’s knowledge of the origin of things (rather than his strength). It is a conversation, not an arm-wrestle.

Third, the character of the God of Scripture is not dissembling or unreliable but utterly trustworthy. Words that he speaks do not distort or pervert reality. In speaking, this God speaks truly of the world but also speaks truly of himself. He does not construct an identity for himself like a participant in an Internet chat room. When he speaks, he truly reveals himself.
So: if the God who is mighty, knowledgeable and reliable speaks, ought we not expect powerfully authoritative words? Does he not have a moral right as well as the freedom and the capacity to utter words of power? Once again, Job 38-41 is suggestive: after all, what right do human beings have to dispute with God? And yet, from the whirlwind the Lord deigns to converse playfully and beautifully with Job in such a way that it restores him to his original dignity.

The lines of our argument are of course consummated in Christ himself, who as Prophet, Priest and King exercised the authority of God on earth. It is of course from this enfleshed Word that we learn not about what God is capable of doing but what he wills to do and does do. First, the life of Jesus was marked of course by dynamic activity – a virgin birth, and many miracles and healings. Yet, though his ministry had the character of a challenge he refrained from taking up arms against the rulers of the world. His consummate ‘act’ was becoming subject to the power of those who killed him. Secondly, he spoke, powerful, life-giving words – ‘Talitha koumi’; ‘Lazurus, come out!’; ‘Peace! Be still!’ – and yet also spent his days in patiently teaching his disciples from the Scriptures about the cross-shaped pattern of their discipleship. Thirdly, he also demonstrated in his life and death the utter covenant faithfulness of God; he was the proof that God had remembered his people, and that their consolation was near – as the aged Simeon and Anna recognized when they met the child Jesus at the Temple. In this cruciform way Christ was indeed ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’ (1 Cor 1:24).

[1] It ought to be noted that some of Foucault’s interpreters have gone taken his descriptions of power and presented them as a blanket censure of all power. Elizabeth Castelli, for example, badly confuses the Foucauldian terms ‘governmentality’ and ‘domination’: Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power