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THE TASK OF A CONFESSING BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP 

It is a familiar complaint that academic biblical scholarship fails to provide the help the Christian community needs in interpreting its own holy scriptures. In particular, the gap between this scholarship and Christian preaching has often been emphasized. Faced with the task of preparing a sermon on a passage from the book of Isaiah or the Gospel of John, the preacher dutifully consults one or other of the major modern commentaries on the text in question. Information philological and historical is plentifully provided; exegetical difficulties are resolved, so far as possible; significant scholarly views are reported and assessed; and no effort is spared to enter and to make comprehensible the thought-world of the biblical authors. But how helpful is all this for the task at hand? It is certainly not useless. Preaching informed by these academic disciplines may well compare favorably with a preaching for which the texts serve merely to confirm the beliefs, practices, and ethos of a particular ecclesial tradition. Here, the meaning of the text—what it is permitted and not permitted to say— cannot simply be known in advance; the possibility that something new might be heard and learned is at least kept open. And yet the gap between the text as imagined by the scholar and by the preacher is considerable. The one remains within the security of accredited scholarly procedures. The other must risk using the text to attempt to speak of God here and now, on the basis of how God was perceived to be there and then. Scholarship, schooled in caution, will rarely wish to take more than a few tentative steps down that particular path. 

Scholarship and preaching are, of course, different. Scholarship cannot straightforwardly be preaching, and preaching cannot be scholarship. And yet it is not clear that, within the disciplines of Christian theology, scholarship should regard itself as debarred from the venture of speaking about God. It is not clear why scholarship and theology (God-talk) should necessarily be incompatible. What is the rationale for a division of labor in which one group of biblical interpreters aims to speak of God (here and now) on the basis of the biblical texts, whereas the other group refrains from any such aspiration, contenting itself with the useful but limited task of speaking of God only as he was perceived there and then?

No doubt the historical and institutional factors underlying this division of labor can be identified and analyzed. But it is more fruitful (and more disturbing) to ask whether Christian faith itself, grounded in the holy scriptures as read and interpreted within the Christian community, can offer any basis for an interpretative practice in which the one thing needful— that we should learn to speak, here and now, of God, in the light of holy scripture—is omitted. Insofar as it omits the one thing needful, scholarly biblical interpretation is not Christian. It may be carried out by Christians, it may treat the biblical texts with reverence, it may reach relatively “conservative” conclusions on critical issues, but it is not Christian if it finds itself unable to make the transition between God-talk there and then and God-talk here and now; if, that is, it is incapable of theology.

If it is true (and, on Christian presuppositions, it cannot but be true) that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, then what was said of him there and then by apostles and prophets cannot be surveyed from a safe distance but impinges on us here and now with the greatest possible immediacy and urgency. If Jesus is not simply “a Mediterranean Jewish peasant” (J.D. Crossan) but Lord, then there can be no position of neutrality in relation to the texts that attest this fact. If, on the other hand, he is best understood as a Mediterranean Jewish peasant, or as a wandering charismatic with certain affinities to the Cynics, or as a mysterious x whose real, historical features have been almost entirely obliterated by the notoriously vivid imagination of the early church, then an attitude of scholarly neutrality towards the biblical texts is no doubt appropriate. This neutrality would not preclude certain forms of engagement where the texts appear to express ideals and aspirations that happen to coincide with one’s own. It would permit a sharp awareness of the possibility and reality of “oppressive” uses of these texts, together with a belief in their ultimate “liberating potential.” Engaged readings, in which these texts are coordinated with certain contemporary ideals and aspirations, are, however, still neutral, in the sense that a safe distance is preserved between the interpreter and the claim of the text to speak truthfully of the transforming reality of the light that shines in the darkness and that the darkness has not overcome.

Where this claim is held in abeyance, as though it no longer represented a living possibility, as though we need no longer trouble ourselves with it, then the scholarship in question is not only not Christian but also anti-Christian. It tries to remove the light from its lamp-stand and to conceal it under a bushel or under a bed. The idea that we can and should survey the Christian scriptures from a position of neutrality, teaching and exhorting others to do likewise, is—we might say—one of the errors addressed by Jesus’ offensive and tactless “woe” against scribes and pharisees who debar and dissuade people from entering the kingdom of heaven. And we may also recall how certain Christian colleagues of these same scribes and pharisees were intimidated into silence by the threat of expulsion from the synagogue, valuing their careers more highly than the glory of God.

These Christian scholars believed in Jesus, but “they did not confess it” (John 12:42). What form might a confessing biblical scholarship take? And what are the pitfalls and dead-ends that it must avoid?

(1) A confessing biblical scholarship would not cease to be scholarship. It would continue to practice those scholarly procedures whose aim is to establish, as precisely as possible, the meaning of the Hebrew and Greek texts. It would, indeed, reject the view that correct interpretation of the text stands or falls with our ability to reconstruct its historical circumstances of origin, since that view is incompatible with the concept of the canonical text. The canonical text is precisely the text to which the community assigns a continuing authoritative role beyond its immediate circumstances of origin. Much that seems important to conventional historical-critical scholarship would become a matter of indifference. Yet an orientation towards the final form of the text rather than its historical circumstances of origin would increase rather than decrease the importance of careful, painstaking, scholarly exegesis. If the biblical texts do indeed attest the saving self-disclosure of the triune God of Christian faith, it remains vitally important to attend closely to what they actually say.

(2) What form might Christian confession take in the context of scholarship? Confession is not simply acknowledging that one is Christian, and leaving it at that. A bare acknowledgment of that kind would be as empty and unilluminating as the currently fashionable “confession” that one is white, male, middle class, heterosexual, or whatever. Confession is not a matter of providing certain items of information about one’s personal identity. To confess that Jesus is Lord is to make a statement primarily about Jesus and only secondarily and indirectly about myself; and—in the context of biblical scholarship—this confession should be expressed in the form of an overriding concern to interpret the biblical texts in the light of their theological subject-matter, on the assumption that these texts present us with a fundamentally truthful and faithful rendering of that subject-matter. In one way or another, directly or indirectly, the subject-matter of the biblical texts is Jesus as Lord. This central truth-claim indeed entails further truth-claims (the confession can therefore be expanded into a creed), but there can be no question of any truth-claim independent of this one, since that very independence would in itself constitute a denial of Jesus’ universal lordship (cf. Col 1:15-20; 2:3). To interpret the biblical texts in relation to their subject-matter is, however, to engage in theology. If there is to be a confessing scholarship, then the idea that the biblical scholar need not and perhaps should not also be a theologian will have to be rejected out of hand.

(3) The fundamental characteristic of the Christian canon is the division of the canonical writings into two interrelated but separate collections, one designated “old” and the other “new.” The oldness of the Old Testament and the newness of the New derive from the different relationships of these two collections to the figure of Jesus, who constitutes the unifying center of Christian scripture. In relation to Jesus, the CT precedes and the NT follows; the CT prepares the way of the Lord, the NT proclaims that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. It is Jesus who makes Jewish scripture “Old Testament,” and therefore Christian Scripture: in many ways, the law and the prophets bear witness to him. As Christian scripture the CT does not have its center within itself but is in teleological movement towards the time of fulfillment.

Modern CT scholarship generally disregards the particular role of the CT within the Christian Bible, abstracting it from this teleological movement and treating it as a self-contained collection of writings (a “Hebrew Bible”). The christological focal point that holds together the entire Christian Bible is therefore lost, and attention shifts instead to the disparate nature of the individual canonical writings. Scholarship presides over the dismantling of the Christian canon. But if the Jesus who is confessed as Lord is the Jesus attested (in different ways) in the writings of both Testaments (if, in other words, we do not wish to be Marcionites), it is essential for Christian OT scholarship to take up again the neglected task of interpreting these writings as Christian scripture. And NT scholarship similarly must learn to understand the OT as more than mere “background” to its object of study, on a level perhaps with the Dead Sea Scrolls.

(4) How would a confessing biblical scholarship along these lines relate to the familiar polarity between “liberal” and “conservative” biblical scholarship? Conservative (non-fundamentalist) scholarship is, in my view, right to assume that scholarly biblical interpretation is compatible with orthodox Christian faith. Yet is has often been preoccupied with the wrong issues. Its category of “historical reliability” (or “historicity”) cannot do justice to the varied ways in which the Old and New Testament narratives render the theological and historical truth of which they speak. Its concern to harmonize “apparent discrepancies” between one scriptural statement and another betrays the biblicistic assumption that biblical unity is to be found in the texts as such rather than in the single christological center of the Christian canon. Its defence of traditional views on authorship has often been unconvincing. It is true that cases might be found where these concerns are fully justified and indeed necessary. Yet, as we have see, “confession” involves theology, the reading of the biblical texts in the light of their true theological subject-matter. It is all very well to argue that the historiography of the books of Kings is broadly reliable, or that the apostle John is the most likely author of the Fourth Gospel, but this is not confession. And one might hold quite different (more “liberal”) views on these critical issues and still interpret these texts in the light of the confession that Jesus is Lord.

According to the first article of the Barmen Confession of 1934, “Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in holy scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.” If this is so, then the sole task of a confessing biblical scholarship is to interpret holy scripture in the light of its testimony to the one Word of God.

By Francis Watson, King’s College London, University of London; Watson has developed this programme in more detail in two books: Text, Church and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective (7. & T. Clark! Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1994); and Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (T & T. Clark! Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1997).