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THE “PROGRESS” OF SOME HERMENEUTICAL PILGRIMS

Priscilla and Aquila Seminarian, formerly known as Jean and John Christian, are filled with questions and not a little anxiety. They have discovered that their seminary studies are inviting (or forcing?) them to rethink the way Christians travel from Bible to doctrine.

Priscilla observed, ‘The way always used to seem so straight and easy. If you believed the Bible, the doctrines just automatically followed.”

‘Yes,” John (now called “Aquila”) concurred, “I used to think that the hardest thing was memorizing all those prooftexts for Bible doctrines. Since we started seminary, thinking about the faith now seems more complicated.”

Departing from Home
“Do you remember when we first began to study the Bible academically?” Aquila asked Priscilla. “You came home and declared that this was certainly going to be a different experience than the warm-f uzzies Bible study group where we first met!”

“Yes,” Priscilla responded, “I remember you proclaiming that the only hermeneutical theory you needed was: “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it!”

“It really helped me when I finally figured out the difference between first-order religious language—like praying or reading the Bible—and second-order religious language—like theology and other religious discourse, which reflects on the ways people have thought and talked about God across the centuries. Theology is not just a collection of Bible facts. Theology is the church’s critical self-examination of its own language about God.”

“What helped me the most,” Priscilla recalled, “was when I finally understood that Christian theology wasn’t trying to prove things to some supposedly neutral audience by some supposedly universal reason. Instead, like Anselm said, theology is faith seeking understanding. Theology assumes as its starting point the faith of living communities of believers like you and me. Theology is an in-house discussion of our quest for knowledge of God, which welcomes outsiders who want to listen in on the conversation. Christian doctrine uses insider’s language
to express the teachings of the faith as coherently as possible.”

“As an evangelical,” Aquila solemnly emphasized, “I always begin with the sole authority of Scripture.”

‘Now, Aquila,’ Priscilla admonished, “do you remember your life before we assumed these new Seminarian identities, when you were simply John Christian? You used to say that all that really mattered was whether you were born again, if Jesus was in your heart. Personal experience with Jesus Christ was your primary authority then. What’s changed’?”

Not wanting to be outflanked, Aquila retorted: “Hold it right there, Priscilla. I can remember when a certain Jean Christian thought that belonging to the right Bible study group was what really mattered. Do you remember how almost everyone who was a regular in the group also belonged to the one really alive evangelical church in town, whose pastor taught the right doctrine and whose college program provided the right music? It seems to me that Christian community was your primary
authority then. What’s changed?”

“Well,” Priscilla admitted, “although we claimed that the Bible was our only authority, looking back, I think that our Bibles were interpreted by the traditions of our community, just like your view of biblical authority was mediated through your conversion experience with Jesus Christ.”

“So,” Aquila concluded, ‘it seems that under Jesus Christ we have three sources of authority which we seek to understand with our reason: Scripture, community, and personal experience. Then, what makes me an evangelical is my belief in the primacy of Scripture. The Bible is the number one authority, which, though interpreted through community and personal experience, provides the standard by which the others are measured.”

Checking the Old Routes
“I certainly am glad that seminary has helped you to get beyond your ‘just the facts, please’ understanding of the Bible,” Priscilla observed with relief. “You were well on your way to becoming a don’t-confuse-me-with-complexity fundamentalist when we first met.”

“Yes,” Aquila agreed rather sheepishly, “I was rhetorically defending rather than prayerfully thinking on God’s truth in those days. I remember my first theology class, when I blithely informed Professor Patient that, ‘The Bible gives us all of the facts about Christianity. Doctrines simply organize those facts into a system.”’

Priscilla smiled. “Professor Patient didn’t even ask you how you fit together the two different accounts of Judas’ suicide, let alone all the cock crows when Peter betrayed Jesus. I believe you once told me there had to be six of them to harmonize all the facts!”

Aquila remembered: “Professor Patient just asked me to think about how the variety of contexts in which the Scripture was written and read might influence its meaning. He asked me whether I believed that God could speak to Christians through the diversity of Scripture, as well as its unity. What really surprised me, however, was when he suggested that I might want to read that Old Princeton theologian, Charles Hodge, if I wanted to state my view that the Bible is a storehouse of facts with more precision and elegance!”

“My college world history class made me suspicious of thinking of the Scripture as a collection of verifiable historical facts,” Priscilla recalled. “I discovered how difficult it was for historians of the ancient world to define what constitutes even a plain historical fact like a date. For instance, whose calendar are you using? When I saw how complicated and uncertain it was to determine what processes of interpretation will produce reliable historical data, I began to think that your facts-of-revelation road from the Scripture to doctrine was filled with lots of potholes! Perhaps it was even a detour sponsored by the Enlightenment.”

“Well, what about all of your confident assertions about biblical theology?” Aquila countered. “Do you remember your old college pastor, the one who studied in Germany and taught you those impressive sounding terms?”

“I really did think Pastor Earnest’s biblical theology had all the right answers, Priscilla conceded. “The Bible was the historical record of the events of revelation. It was Heilsgeschichte—the history of salvation. The Bible was not a collection of facts, but the witness to God’s saving acts in history. The route from Bible to doctrine runs through the events of revelation, which lie behind the text of the Bible.”

“I’ll never forget the term when you took that Old Testament theology course,” John declared. “You read that book analyzing the decline of the Biblical Theology movement and went into existential crisis!”

“What a difficult time I had,” Priscilla painfully recalled. “It was like watching my carefully borrowed college theology collapse like a house of cards. How could I have missed that so much of the Bible is poetry, rather than history—dreams and visions, rather than just historical events? Jesus taught his disciples in parables, which need to be read as stories, rather than history. The history-of-salvation approach I learned in college claimed that God was revealed in the events behind the Scripture, instead of God’s being revealed within the text of Scripture. Of course, we couldn’t recover the events behind the text of the Bible directly. ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’ I wasn’t! So, we had to depend upon their historical reconstruction. As I learned in my history courses, such reconstruction is ambiguous and uncertain. My faith became dependent upon the dubious and debatable historical reconstruction of revelatory events.”

“So, your events-of-revelation route was filled with potholes, too!” Aquila wryly commented. “I guess we both needed to find a better way to travel from Bible to doctrine.”

Seeking a New Direction
“It was certainly an unexpected blessing when we both took that elective course on Amos with Professor Hermeneut last term,” Priscilla sighed happily.

“It was certainly a good course, but really a lot of work,” grumbled Aquila. “I hadn’t imagined that such a stack of books and articles would ever be written about a short book with only nine little chapters, let alone that we would be required to read so many of them!”

“Do you remember the day we studied about the prophecies at the end of the last chapter?” Priscilla reminisced. “We had to read several of those standard critical commentaries, and they all said basically the same thing. ‘Scholars believe that the historical Amos didn’t write those promises of salvation appended to the end of the book. Later editors, probably during the period of the Babylonian exile, added the prophecies about God’s restoring the kingdom of David and the coming glorious age of the salvation of Israel. The oracles of salvation are secondary additions.”’

“In plain English,” Aquila commented warmly, “they were saying that Amos was just a prophet of gloom and doom! The promises of salvation were tacked onto the end of the book by somebody else, like a ‘PS’ at the end of a letter.”

“But then do you remember Professor Hermeneut’s lecture?” Priscilla recalled excitedly. “She said that she disagreed with the standard critical view that later additions to the Scripture were secondary to its meaning. The promises of salvation which conclude the book of Amos were central to its meaning, not peripheral. The canonical Amos—the Amos that we have in the whole text, not the one that historians try to recover behind a part of the text—taught both God’s judgment and God’s salvation. The message of the final form of the book of Amos, the Amos that we have in our Bibles, is that God’s judgment and God’s grace cannot be separated. In Christian theology law and gospel go together.”

“Well, that’s certainly a big theological improvement over the gloom-and-doom Amos,” Aquila readily admitted. “What was the name of that Yale professor she said had developed this approach to interpreting the Bible?”

“His name was Brevard Childs. I think he’s a Presbyterian. Anyway, he calls his view the canonical approach to biblical interpretation, or exegesis in a canonical context. He’s written some huge books about it including Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture and The New Testament as Canon. Although, this view doesn’t answer all of my questions about how to get from Scripture to theology, I certainly want to learn more about it. Professor H. is offering an elective course on various approaches to theological hermeneutics next term that I plan to take. Do you want to take it together?”

By Charles J Scalise, Associate Professor of Church History Fuller Seminary in Seattle; Scalise discusses these issues further (and more formally) in From Scripture to Theology: A Canonical Journey into Hermeneutics (lnterVarsity 1996).