Review Article

Abstract

What a brilliant idea on InterVarsity’s part to commission two complementary works on this prominent but controverted theme, the difference between the way biblical scholars approach the Scriptures, and the way theologians do! As a biblical scholar, I am more directly addressed by Hans Boersma but more identified with Scot McKnight, though as a theologian who focuses on the Old Testament, I come at both volumes from a different angle than the authors. I will first comment on each of the books and note questions they raise for me, then reflect on what they make me as a theological interpreter want to say.Hans Boersma’s first chapter has the arresting title “No Christ, No Scripture” (13): scholars need to focus more on the fact that Scripture is about Christ and that he makes himself known to us from Scripture, than we do on “formal categories” (14) such as the authority of Scripture over against tradition. Boersma sees biblical scholars as so concerned with affirming that it is Scripture alone that counts, and not tradition, that they risk losing the living reality of which Scripture speaks. And I recognize that we biblical scholars do focus rather much on text rather than living reality, though I am surprised at the suggestion that this is because we are concerned for text and not tradition (which his later discussion confirms is a somewhat 1960s issue). Nor do I generally get the impression that theologians focus on living reality more than biblical scholars do. Boersma’s quotations from Athanasius don’t suggest such a focus; the arguments of early church theologians often seem as cerebral and abstract as the arguments of biblical scholars. I am also surprised at the suggestion that we focus overly on text because we work with a sola scriptura hermeneutic. I don’t know of scholars who talk in those terms, but maybe that just means I move in different circles from Boersma. But my biggest question about this first chapter relates to the declaration that in the Scriptures “Christ is present on every page” (13). It seems to me obvious that this is not true, and it is not something that the New Testament says, and Boersma does not seem to provide any argument for it except the declaration that patristic writers worked that way.The also-arresting title of ch. 2, “No Plato, No Scripture” (39), reminded me of my initial theological studies and my attempt to understand words like ousia and hypostasis (which incidentally illustrates my comment about early church theologians often seeming cerebral and abstract). But Boersma makes a different point, which at first sounds bolder but is actually less controversial. It is that the New Testament already expresses the gospel in a way that presupposes a framework from Greek thinking. It works with the convictions of (Ur)-Platonism, which involves belief that bodies are not the only things that exist, that the natural order cannot be fully explained by natural causes, that there are such things as universals, that humanity is not the measure of everything, and that knowledge is possible. Such Platonism is thus bigger and more umbrella-like than one might have thought before Lloyd Gerson formulated the nature of Ur-Platonism in 2013.1 If you don’t work with Ur-Platonism, Boersma says, you won’t be able to understand the Scriptures, because you need some commonality of assumptions with them. Part of my puzzlement then concerns the identity of the biblical scholars who would dispute that list of convictions. Ur-Platonism seems to be closely related to a regular non-Enlightenment perspective, and I can see that many “liberal” scholars might question it, but in general they are not the people Boersma seems keen to address. I can also see that more orthodox scholars can fall as well into what one might call a nonsupernaturalist way of thinking, as they can fall into a focus on text rather than living reality. Yet the characteristics of Ur-Platonism don’t look peculiar to the framework of Greek thinking; any Old Testament author would affirm them. But also, conversely, I would have thought that one needs to subject Ur-Platonism to a scriptural critique. It forms a Greek way in to identifying the metaphysical presuppositions of the Scriptures; there is surely more to those presuppositions than that. I think of the fact that humanity is corporate and not just individual and that reality is involved with time.Third, “No Providence, No Scripture” (64). That reminded me of a couple of possibly unpopular truths. One is that we don’t know as much as we wished about how the books in the Old and New Testament came to be the books in the Old and New Testament. The other is that the text in a Greek New Testament is a scholarly construct, not a printed version of a manuscript that actually exists, while we don’t know how close the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Scriptures is to what Ezekiel (for instance) generated. We have to trust God’s providence to have made sure that we have the right books and a good text of them. And it would indeed have been odd of God not to make sure of it! Being confident about providence therefore matters in connection with the Scriptures. Boersma has another point about providence. It is that a divine providence was involved in the forming of the words in the Scriptures and that this providence issued in there being something special about that wording. I like the idea of God’s providence being involved when Isaiah, for instance, talked about a girl having a baby (Isa 7:14), so that this providence made the words available for Matthew to use to illuminate the moment when another girl got pregnant and was still a virgin when she had the baby (Matt 1:23). When Boersma himself comments on this quotation, he interprets it in light of the idea of the Scriptures having a “fuller sense” (21), and my eyebrows raised when he attributed this understanding to me in something I wrote, but I discovered that I was actually there reporting the views of other interpreters, not exactly affirming them, and I prefer his appeal to providence.2Fourth, “No Church, No Scripture” (87). “The primary domain of reading Scripture is not the academy but the church” (87), and further, the Scriptures need to be interpreted by the church and not by individuals. Those are overstatements, but they overstate important truths. The other week I dreamed I was in a church service, reading the first Scripture lesson, which was from Exodus. Why was it from Exodus? Because one of the actual lessons in church the previous Sunday had indeed come from Exodus. So it had the preceding Sunday and so it would be the next Sunday, because we follow a lectionary and we thus read systematically through a cross-section of the Scriptures. Yes, church is a primary context for the reading of the Scriptures, and the reading of the Scriptures is a primary feature of worship. But even if the church reads the Scriptures in this systematic way, this doesn’t mean it reads them faithfully. “We cannot properly understand the Scriptures without the guidance of the catholic or universal church” (87), Boersma declares. This comment raises eyebrows. The catholic or universal church has sometimes misinterpreted the Scriptures. It’s usually said that the Reformation (and the development of biblical criticism) depended on the conviction that the Scriptures need to be interpreted in light of themselves and not in light of what the church says they mean, and the authority of Scripture in itself (as opposed to the authority of the church to interpret it) has been a key theological principle for many Christian groups. I’m not clear how to relate Boersma’s exposition to these ideas. Even the interpretation of the “undivided church” is surely subordinate to the Scriptures, rather than vice versa.Finally, “No Heaven, No Scripture” (112). Boersma is not referring to heaven as a place we will go when we die. Richard Middleton offered a monetary reward to anyone who could show from the Scriptures that we will go to heaven when we die, because (he declares) our destiny is more bodily than that.3 The New Testament says we are in heaven now, in spirit. Boersma’s point is that the Scriptures are designed to help us be heavenly-minded now. The implication is not to question whether the Scriptures are significant for our earthly lives. On the contrary, Boersma sees them as designed to encourage the development of virtue ethics. Actually, their relationship with virtue will be two-way. Love is key to scriptural interpretation, and love is to be the criterion for scriptural interpretation and the fruit of scriptural interpretation. As Augustine said, the question is whether our interpretation serves love of God and love of neighbor.4Scott McKnight starts his book with the conviction that “Theology Needs a Constant Return to Scripture” (15), and he identifies two models for approaching interpretation. One is retrieval, which means trying to get back to the Scriptures’ own agenda. This model “contends that the fundamental form of theology is commentary on Scripture and the exposition of Scripture in preaching” (19). I guess this is the model I subconsciously work with. The other is the expansive model, whose impulse “is to explore new dimensions of thinking as it carries forward the Christian biblical and theological tradition” (26). The second is closer to systematic theology, but it is broader because it also works with the conviction that the Spirit brings new light to the people of God in each generation. McKnight suggests that we need to integrate these two models. We must do so for theological reasons, and anyway in practice we can’t help it. I guess that I subconsciously accept that, too. There follow two further notes that nuance the exposition of the models (34–46). One is that sola scriptura may therefore be an impractical idea, but prima scriptura is important. Scripture is not the only thing (Boersma critiques that notion), but it is the first thing from which all else must develop. I wasn’t clear what this really meant, or how it relates to the distinction between general revelation and special revelation (general revelation surely comes first?). Maybe prima scriptura really means ultima scriptura. Only the Scriptures can tell us the gospel because only they can tell us the gospel story, so they have supreme significance. The other (long) footnote is a discussion of biblicism, which shows that this is a confusing idea but also one that is more or less impractical, like sola scriptura (of which it is a variant).The title of ch. 2 is “Theology Needs to Know Its Impact on Biblical Studies” (47). The implication of the title is that theology has more effect than theologians may think. McKnight starts with the creed that an orthodox biblical scholar like himself (or me) says each Sunday. He then turns to three New Testament scholars who have sought to go back behind the creed to trace the history of the growth of beliefs about Christ—James Dunn, Larry Hurtado, and Richard Bauckham.5 They assume a gap between the New Testament and the creed. Then he looks at other scholars who are more open to the idea that the patterns of thinking in the creed are articulating something that is present in the New Testament—Wesley Hill, Matthew Bates, and Madison Pierce.6 He is thus here contrasting old guys (two of them have passed) and relative youngsters. Further, the old guys were the young guys when their books started coming out, and their books then seemed theologically creative and illuminating. So presumably these youngsters’ work will look out-of-date in a decade or two. McKnight finally notes Robert Jensen as a systematic theologian who comes at the interrelationship of doctrine and Scripture from the other end, starting from the creed rather than from the Scriptures, but who also seeks to link the two, in a positive way.7 The word prosopological plays a key role in McKnight’s discussion here; maybe wondering about this word gets me out of juggling with ousia and hypostasis. McKnight seems to gloss prosopological with the expression “person-centered” (67), and he indicates that it means that the other persons of the Trinity can be speaking in the Old Testament. I discover from Google that “prosopological exegesis is now widely-discussed,” so I apologize for my ignorance. I wondered why we need a word such as prosopological if person-centered would do the job, but I thought that perhaps prosopological presupposed a special meaning of person of a kind that goes back to patristic thinking. Yet my biggest puzzle about this chapter was that it seemed to belong in the other book—it was telling biblical scholars what they should be doing.So far, McKnight has been rather conciliatory and ecumenical. With ch. 3 he starts getting more straight: “Theology Needs Historically Shaped Biblical Studies” (75). It’s easy for theology to work with understandings of biblical concepts that don’t really correspond to the concepts as they appear in the Scriptures. Most of this chapter goes to John Barclay’s study of grace in the New Testament.8 If Barclay is right, an implication is the paradoxical fact that theology’s understanding of grace is a biblical concept, but it’s not what the Scriptures themselves mean when they talk about grace, and therefore theology misses out on what the Scriptures themselves have to say when they talk about grace. As is often the case, the problem then isn’t what theology says, which does express scriptural truths and/or works out their implications. The problem is what theology doesn’t say, because it misses the point made by what the Scriptures do say, or its agenda or assumptions don’t correspond to the agenda or assumptions of the Scriptures. “Covenant” is another example: what biblical theologians and systematic theologians say about covenant may be biblical and true, but it’s generally not what the Old Testament is referring to, at least, when it uses the word berit. Talk in terms of covenant thereby misses important things that the Old Testament does say when it uses that word.In ch. 4 McKnight gets even more straight, in what might be his most important wish: “Theology Needs More Narrative” (89). The way I would put it is to say that one ought to be able to tell from a systematic theology that Christian faith is a gospel, a story about what God has done. McKnight begins again from the creeds. They do have a basically narrative shape, and it seemed odd to me that he focuses more on critiquing them for not being narrative enough. On systematic theological studies in general, he goes on, “I myself ask this question often when I’m done reading systematic studies: Where’s Israel?... Where, in fact, is history as the stage on which God plays out redemption for the sake of the world? Where’s the exodus? The exile? The land? The city?” (99). Israel thus comes first in his list, and I was amused, because in another connection I was just looking for the article on Israel in a thousand-page dictionary of theology, and there wasn’t one. “The Bible’s central theology is a narrative about God’s ways with a people (Israel, church). The Bible’s theology is a story, and without that story framing theology, we lose the centrality of the Bible’s own frame” (115).In my view, however, in this chapter McKnight also demonstrates that narrative interpreters can as easily read their own modern convictions into the Scriptures as systematic theologians can. McKnight is “bothered by the holy war passages in the First Testament,” not least because of people who use them to justify nuclear proliferation (111). He goes on to speak of “recurring ethical damage from literal holy war” (112), though he does not give examples; it is often said that Old Testament war texts inspired (for instance) the Crusades and the American pioneers, but the evidence is thin. Nor does he indicate what is “the ethical mess of those who experienced embedded (in)justice in ancient biblical holy war” (112). He comments, “either we keep the holy war texts as viable teachings or we think there is some level of progress in the Bible such that Jesus’ vision annuls the holy war texts” (112).9 But surely Jesus makes a point of denying that he annuls any scriptural texts (Matt 5:17), and surely Paul makes a point of noting that all Scripture is viable teaching (2 Tim 3:16)—as McKnight points out elsewhere? And there is of course no basis for thinking that scriptural texts about war (the Old Testament never speaks of “holy war”) are recorded so that they may be implemented in other contexts, but Jewish readers as much as Christian readers realize this fact. They do not need to take note of what Jesus says (or does not say) about the question in order to see it. Our modern unease concerning the scriptural texts about war is not a reflection of our following Jesus but of our being modern people, influenced in a number of ways by our cultural, philosophical, and political context. Our reading this concern back into the New Testament is exactly that, reading our concern back into the New Testament. McKnight refers to the ideology of the Old Testament (113), but it’s our own ideology we have to worry about. When Jesus is asked about a tricky ethical question, his response is not to say that he brings a new vision or that there is progress in the canonical story line. It is to point people to the oldest vision and the beginning of the story line (e.g., Matt 19:3–12).McKnight’s last wish is that theologians would recognize that “theology needs to be lived theology” (116). Arguably this is his most radical point. He notes that throughout the Scriptures, what we believe and what we do is interwoven. But from the beginning, Christian theology separated the two, so that the creeds, again, which are at least somewhat narrative, are not ethical at all. And it is entirely possible to be faultless in one’s theology but astray in one’s life. In fact, it may be quite a temptation. Getting everything theologically right can easily push one into pride. And that great proof text about inspiration (2 Tim 3:16) is also a text about the consequent capacity of the Scriptures to shape our lives, while Paul’s theological exposition in Romans is also a great work of ethics. With some irony, McKnight’s emphasis on lived theology stands in tension with the way his previous chapter has undermined the Scriptures’ emphasis on life lived by people with bodies and lived on land and by nations (112–13).The obvious response to the stimulus of these two thought-provoking volumes is to formulate my five wishes, so here are five convictions that I wish theological interpreters seemed to recognize, which I articulate in light of reading the two books and mostly in tension with either or both of them.First: the gospel is about God and the Scriptures are about God. The good news is that “the Lord God of Israel... has looked at his people and brought about redemption for them” (Luke 1:68).10 It is that people are now able to come to the Father (John 14:8). It is that whereas gentiles were without hope and without God in the world, they have been brought near (Eph 2:12–13). This happened through Christ; he is the one through whom God effected redemption, the one who takes Jews and gentiles to the Father. But the Father is the one to whom he brings us. The gospel is about us being put right with God, the God who created the world, made promises to Abraham and Sarah, rescued the Israelites from Egypt, accompanied them through their story over the next millennium, and drew attention to the necessity that all the nations should acknowledge him. Through Christ we gentiles are also able to join in that recognition, and we can read the Old Testament as the story of God’s relationship with Israel, into which relationship Christ has drawn us. The gospel is about God.It fits, then, that the Old Testament is about God; it is not about Christ. You only have to read it to see that this is so. If you read it as if it were a story in which Christ is there under the surface, so that the challenge is to identify where it speaks about him in a way that its original readers could understandably not discern, then you miss the thing it actually has to say about God and us. The Old Testament’s spiritual meaning is its surface meaning. Its surface meaning is its spiritual meaning.So Christ is not the starting point for reading the Scriptures. God is the starting point. And not surprisingly, the New Testament does not say that we will understand the Old Testament only if we start from Christ, though it does say that we will not fully understand the Old Testament unless we see that Christ is the end term of its story and the one who has in part fulfilled its hopes and who will complete the fulfillment of them.The New Testament indeed sometimes enables us to see aspects of the inherent meaning of the Old Testament. For instance, Paul’s quotations in Rom 15 draw attention to the psalms’ references to the gentiles acknowledging Yahweh, a theme that readers often miss in the Old Testament. The New Testament thus helps us see things that are there, on the surface, not hidden underneath the surface. But there is a contrast with Paul’s quotation in Rom 9:25–26 from Hos 1:10 and 2:23 in the same connection. Hosea is talking about God’s faithfulness to Israel, in which Paul believes and which he emphasizes in Rom 9–11, but at this point he quotes Hosea’s words in order to apply them to God’s welcome of gentiles. In doing so, he is not revealing something about the fuller or deeper or spiritual meaning of Hosea, and his appeal to Hosea does not aid an understanding of Hosea. By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he is discerning a significance of Hosea’s words for his own exposition that is not part of the text’s meaning. If we take the New Testament as a guide to the exegesis of the Old Testament text or if we look for references to Christ in the Old Testament that would not be there for the author and the original readers, we miss the point that God was making through and to them.That links with a second fact, that God was really relating to his people before Christ came, and therefore it is worthwhile to discover what he was saying to them. It’s worthwhile considering what (say) Jeremiah was bringing as God’s message to people in his day. Thus Hebrews begins by noting that God spoke to our ancestors by the prophets (Heb 1:1). We would surely therefore want to know what he was actually saying to them and not just read what he said to them in light of what tradition has made of it or what the New Testament made of it. That’s why biblical interpretation is a historical discipline and why a focus on authorial intention is theologically, devotionally, and ethically important. We don’t have to choose between explaining the historical meaning of the text and using the Scriptures as a means of grace, of drawing the reader to God. The first can be a means to the second. We don’t have to choose between ascertaining the one true meaning of the text, on one hand, and seeking the wisdom of knowing God and being known by him, on the other. Ascertaining the historical meaning of the text is a way of knowing God and being known by him. We enter into the situation of (say) the people of Jerusalem when Sennacherib is about to besiege their city, we listen to Isaiah bringing God’s word to them, and we experience God fulfilling his promises and delivering them (see Isa 36–37). Our relationship with God is thereby challenged and deepened. Or (more controversially), we enter into the situation of the people in the same city a generation previously, in an earlier crisis, and we listen to Isaiah giving Ahaz the message about a sign that Ahaz doesn’t want, about a girl who is going to have a baby (Isa 7:14), and in light of the way God fulfills his promise in Isaiah’s day, our relationship with God is challenged and also deepened thereby—even though we cannot help but also note the way this promise helped Matthew understand Jesus.Thinking about interpretation in this way does indeed imply reconsidering in several connections what we mean when we describe interpretation as a historical discipline and when we speak of authorial intention.11 Part of the background lies in the development of philosophical thinking and of related developments in approaches to the interpretation of texts over two or three centuries. Biblical scholars are a varied bunch, but in connection with the agenda of this discussion, we might divide many of them into three types. There are agnostics and atheists, who are often people who were once evangelical believers but gave up for one reason or another. There are believers for whose faith and theology the Scriptures are not very important. And there are believers for whom the reality of their relationship with God and their academic study are in separate compartments. All three types mostly work with some variant of historical-critical interpretation or historical-grammatical interpretation, both of which developed in the nineteenth century. Historical-critical interpretation involved being critical of what tradition or the church said the Scriptures meant, and it was right to open up that investigation, though in declining to treat Jerome or Calvin as potential sources of insight on the text, it gave away as much as it gained. Further, historical-critical interpretation became preoccupied with the history behind the text instead of the text—both the historical events to which the text referred and the historical process whereby the text came into being.12 Its focus continues to lie there, and this focus is of little use in helping the Scriptures to speak to us. The story of Hezekiah and Sennacherib in Isa 36–37 again provides an example. At best, historical-critical interpretation focuses on what the human author was doing and on the faith of Israel, but still not on God. In reaction, historical-grammatical interpretation focused on an elucidation of the text itself and on a conservative understanding of the process whereby it came into existence and of its historical value, but it still didn’t focus on the way God was speaking to the ancestors in these texts. Thus historical-grammatical or conservative commentaries are no more useful to the believer, the preacher, or the theologian than historical-critical or liberal ones.The problem was not and is not that scholars focus on authorial intention. It is actually that they do not focus on authorial intention. The intention of the authors was to enable people to understand who God was and what God was doing with them, and (furthermore) even to speak about those matters in a way that would be edifying for the people of God as its life would continue over the decades and the centuries. By the providence and/or the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the authors in their historical contexts were thus bringing God’s message to their people. But neither liberal nor conservative commentators were looking at it that way. And that’s why “theological interpretation” became necessary. As if there could ever have been non-theological interpretation! The challenge of regular exegesis includes discerning the intrinsic theological meaning of the text. It does not mean bringing a theological framework from outside in light of which to read the text. We do not take the creeds as having the responsibility of deciding what the Scriptures mean. The church’s tradition is not the authoritative context for reading the Scriptures. The Scriptures decide what they mean.Third, the New Testament and the Old Testament are both revelatory and authoritative. Further, the New Testament does not provide criteria for deciding how far the Old Testament is revelatory or how far it remains authoritative. If there is progress between the Old and the New, there is also regress; for instance, the Old Testament has a more enlightened view on slavery.13 In the Old Testament the Holy Spirit makes allowance for human hardness of heart (Matt 19:3–8), and he does the same in the New Testament.14 In neither case does this gracious condescension on God’s part compromise the Scriptures’ revelatory, authoritative, edifying, or God-breathed nature. Conversely, the New Testament does not think that it itself brings a fuller revelation of God or a revelation that corrects what people might think on the basis of the Old Testament.For instance, the Old Testament indeed speaks of Yahweh being involved in war, not least in the process whereby the Israelites arrived in Canaan, and the New Testament doesn’t question that he was so involved: the about-to-be martyred Stephen rejoices in it (Acts 7:45), as does Hebrews in its list of people who achieved things by faith (Heb 11:32–34). This is not to imply that the New Testament writers thought that God might now get people who believe in Jesus to be involved in war, but the reason is not that Jesus has come and ruled out the war idea, a topic to which he does not refer. Israel had hardly gone to war for six centuries, since Josiah’s day (perhaps not surprisingly, given how that one turned out). Jesus did not come to bring a new revelation about peace or love or non-violence. He came as the embodiment of the revelation that God had already given. Hebrews indicates as much when it goes on from “God spoke to our ancestors in many various ways” to “in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son” (1:1–2). Many modern translations add a “but” between these statements, but there is no “but”; the KJV more literally has, “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son.” Hebrews is indeed affirming that there is a difference between the variegated nature of the revelation in the Old Testament and the unified nature of the revelation when Christ embodies it. But