Upon reading the New Testament, it is quickly apparent to any careful reader that the apostles’ hermeneutic was anything but grammatical-historical. Does this mean that the apostles were lousy exegetes? Maybe. But before we dismiss the apostles for their supposedly arbitrary interpretation of the OT, it is important that we first examine our own modern assumptions in light of Scripture. If we fail to do so we run the risk of telling the Scriptures what to say and how to say it, rather than hearing the voice of God:
Apostolic hermeneutics was driven by a Spirit-initiated intimacy with the crucified and risen Christ. It was their [the apostles'] conviction that Christ was God’s deliverer–a conviction that can come only by God’s gift of illumination–as demonstrated in his crucifixion and resurrection, that drove the apostles to see all of the Old Testament as finding its culmination in Christ. The apostles did not arrive at the conclusion that Jesus is Lord from a dispassionate, objective reading of the Old Testament. Rather, they began with what they knew to be true–the historical death and resurrection of the Son of God–and on the basis of that fact reread their Scripture in a fresh way.
There is no question that such a thing can be counterintuitive for a more traditional evangelical doctrine of Scripture, since this is eisgesis (reading meaning into Scripture) rather than exegesis (getting meaning from Scripture). It is precisely a dispassionate, unbiased, objective reading that is normally considered to constitute valid reading. But what may be considered valid today cannot be the determining factor for understanding what the apostles did.
Another way of putting the problem is that apostolic hermeneutics violates what is considered to be a fundamental interpretive principle: don’t take things out of context. So, it is thought, we cannot have New Testament writers taking the Old Testament out of context. But we must learn to look at it differently. It is not that the Old Testament words are taken out of context and tossed into the air to fall where they may. Rather, the New Testament authors take the Old Testament out of one context, that of the original human author, and place it into another context, the one that represents the final goal to which Israel’s story has been moving.
- Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), 152-53.
Filed under: Biblical Theology, Hermeneutics, Quotes, Reformed Theology , Biblical Theology, Hermeneutics, Exegesis, Peter Enns, Eisogesis
April 25, 2009 • 10:58 pm
A neat quote from Athanasius that gives an idea of how the Church Fathers held two testaments (i.e., the ‘double account’) together. The two were neither confused nor separated but distinguished and were kept together by the common subject matter to which they both pointed, namely, Christ:
What is the basic meaning and purport of Holy Scripture? It contains, as we have often said, a double account of the Savior. It says that he has always been God and is the Son, because he is the Logos and radiance and Wisdom of the Father. Furthermore, it says that in the end he became a human being, he took flesh for our sakes from the Virgin Mary, the God-bearer.
One can find this teaching indicated throughout Holy Scripture, as the Lord himself has said, “Search the Scriptures, for it is they which bear witness concerning me” [John 5:39]
- Athanasius, Orations Against the Arians, in The Christological Controversy trans. & ed. Richard A. Norris, Jr. (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1980), 87.
Filed under: Biblical Theology, Canonical Approach, Church History, Hermeneutics, Quotes , Athanasius, Biblical Theology, Brevard S. Childs
Rev. Danny Hyde’s new book on images of Christ is out. Here’s a link to his blog. Click here to purchase his book from Amazon. And if you haven’t done so already, make sure you check out his commentary on the Belgic Confession here.
Some endorsements:
Danny Hyde has written an excellent piece on a very misunderstood subject. Through effective combination of biblical, theological, and confessional discussions, he has presented the Reformed view of the second commandment winsomely and attractively. He helpfully emphasizes not the negative prohibition of making images of God but the positive facts that God has revealed himself now so generously in Word and Sacrament and will one day reveal himself visibly in the most perfect and authentic way.
—David VanDrunen, Robert B. Strimple Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics, Westminster Seminary California
In these pages, Danny Hyde argues with great clarity against all images of Jesus as man-made media. He shows that all such images are abominated in Scripture and roundly rejected by the Reformed confessional heritage without exception. Hyde goes on to argue, however, that God does provide us with His “media”—the preaching of His Word and the administration of His sacraments.
—Joel R. Beeke, President, Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary
Filed under: Book Recommendations, Creeds and Confessions, Means of Grace, Reformed Theology, Word and Sacraments , Danny Hyde, Images of Christ, Reformed Theology
April 22, 2009 • 10:06 pm
Childs on Isaiah 53 and the vicarious suffering of the servant:
Yet the point of the Isaianic text is that God himself took the initiative in accepting the servant’s life as the means of Israel’s forgiveness. In the first divine speech (52:13), the “success” of the servant is promised because of what God had done. This proimse was hidden, never before told (v. 15), but Israel finally understood it as a revelation from “the arm of the LORD.” The role of the servant resulted in Israel’s forgiveness because of God’s acceptance of the servant’s obedient suffering. Israel not only recognized the freedom that the servant had won for it, but in the experience of encountering the hidden plan of God, was itself transformed into the new Israel, which shared in the coming redemptive age. Aleady the scene for Israel’s restoration was set as God designated the servant as the embodiment of Israel (49:3), through whom God would be glorified and the nation would be gathered again to him. When seen in the light of the unfolding drama of God’s plan to redeem Israel in chapters 40-55, the vicarious role of the servant lies at the very heart of the prophetic message and its removal can only result in losing the exegetical key that unlocks the awesome mystery of these chapters.
- Brevard S. Childs, Isaiah (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 418.
Filed under: Biblical Theology, Canonical Approach, Quotes , Brevard S. Childs, Canonical Approach, Isaiah
April 21, 2009 • 10:43 pm
Consistent with his conviction that the Old and New Testaments should not simply be conflated (so that either the NT ends up being just a form of midrash, or the OT is read as though it were merely an “earthly” version of the NT), Childs advocates finding the unity of the two testaments in the subject matter (res) which they point to, namely, Christ. Here’s a concrete example of what that looks like:
When John the Baptist linked the appearance of Jesus with the prophet’s call to “prepare the way of the Lord,” he was not making a mechanical connection with an ancient prediction of Isaiah. Rather, the reality of God’s salvation was manifest in Jesus Christ in such a way that his advent provided a perfect morphological fit according to its redemptive substance with the Old Testament promise. In a word, the salvific significance of Jesus Christ was understood in the light of Old Testament prophecy, while, conversely, the Old Testament promise gained its true meaning from the revelation of the Christ in the fullness of God’s time.
- Brevard S. Childs, Isaiah (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 303.
Filed under: Biblical Theology, Canonical Approach, Hermeneutics, Quotes , Biblical Theology, Brevard S. Childs, Canonical Approach, Isaiah
In his book, The Sickness Unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard, in good Lutheran fashion, distinguishes between acts of sin and the state of sin. Each new sinful act is merely an expression of one’s sinful condition. When Kierkegaard goes on to speak of “the continuance of sin,” then, he does not mean the continuance of particular acts of sin, but the continual state of sin one is in. Whereas the first act of sin was a break with the good, the continuance of sin, what he calls the “second severance,” is not another act of sin but a break with repentance and grace. This second break, otherwise known as despair (this is the sickness unto death), “is an effort to give stability and interest to sin as a power by deciding once and for all that one will refuse to hear anything about repentance and grace” (110). With these distinctions in mind, Kierkegaard addresses the frequent misconception among people that despair over sin is somehow a thing to be commended. On the contrary, “despair over sin is not averse to giving itself the appearance of being something good”:
. . . The better a person is, the more acutely painful the particular sin naturally is, and the more dangerous is the slightest bit of impatience if he does not make the right turn. In his sorrow, he may sink into the darkest depression–and a fool of a spiritual counselor may be on the verge of admiring his deep soul and the powerful influence good has on him–as if this were of the good. And his wife, well, she feels deeply humbled by comparison with such an earnest and holy man who can sorrow over his sin in this way. His talk may be even more deceptive; he may not say: I can never forgive myself (as if he had previously forgiven himself sins–a blasphemy). No, he says that God can never forgive him for it. Alas, this is just a subterfuge. His sorrows, his cares, his despair are selfish (just like the anxiety about sin, which sometimes practically drives a man anxiously into sin because it is self-love that wants to be proud of itself, to be without sin), and consolation is the least of his needs; therefore the prodigious number of reasons that spiritual counselors prescribe for taking consolation merely makes the sickness worse.
- Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, Ed. and Trans., Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 112.
True humility is not resisting the Gospel, but receiving it. Kierkegaard calls this, “the humble courage to dare to believe.” The man who lacks such a faith will inevitably be offended by the gospel. Why? “Because it is too high for him, because his mind cannot grasp it, because he cannot attain bold confidence in the face of it and therefore must get rid of it, pass it off as a bagatelle, nonsense, and folly, for it seems as if it would choke him” (84-85).
Filed under: Law and Gospel, Quotes , Faith, Gospel, Justification, Lutheranism, Philosophy, Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
In a chapter entitled, “Our Help Is in the Name of the LORD,” Christopher Seitz explores the phrase “the maker of heaven and earth” in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. He explains that the “Creed is more than putting out theological brushfires. It is letting scripture come to its natural, two-testament expression.” (178) In light of this, Seitz considers the fact that the creed begins with a confession of God the Father. This demonstrates that “It is not possible to speak of Jesus as this savior without speaking of God who sent him” (186). He continues, “There is no Jesus Christ apart from the prior electing, creating ‘maker of the heavens and earth.’” In this sense, then, the Old Testament’s per se voice, which witnesses to the same subject matter as the New Testament (i.e., Christ), must be appreciated and understood in order to properly hear and understand the voice of the New Testament witness. What Seitz doesn’t want is a reading of the Old Testament that ignores the fact that the two testaments are distinct books–the New Testament is not a ’spiritualized’ Old Testament. On the other hand, however, Seitz also warns that “the insistence on the rootedness of the description of God in the Old Testament must guard against another tendency”:
. . . The God of the Old Testament has fully identified himself with Jesus Christ. He does not continue to exercise some separate, untameable, unpredictable rule prior to, and perduring after, what he has made clear in Jesus. The New Testament does ont introduce a great parenthesis outside which God retains an unruly and undomesticated authority. The mystery and sovereignty of God the maker of heaven and earth are guarded precisely as these attributes are true of Christ, who raises the dead and walks on water, and of the Holy Spirit, who blows as he will–not over against them. The creed does not seek to isolate the Father to ensure his majesty. It points us to the God of Israel and asks us to see in his life with the world as shown there, that which comes to expression in complete terms in his Son. To speak of the Old Testament as Christian scripture, and not as Hebrew Bible, is not an offense to Judaism, which takes this selfsame literature and hears it through the testimony of tradition, just as Christians hear it in conjunction with the testimony of a second testament. Stressing the Jewishness of God, by reinstating his name or enumerating his Israel-specific life untouched by his condescension in his Son, makes sense for neither Jew nor Christian.
- Christopher R. Seitz, Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 188-89.
Filed under: Biblical Theology, Canonical Approach, Creeds and Confessions, Hermeneutics, Quotes , Biblical Theology, Christopher R. Seitz, Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed
April 16, 2009 • 11:17 pm
Christopher Seitz concludes an interesting chapter on the canonical function of John 21:25. Seitz asks what “the concern of his Gospel–what has been called its perlocutionary force–is to do with the theology of history itself? That is, John is considering whether historiography reaches its aporia in Jesus Christ.” Here’s his conclusion:
. . . There is no access to Jesus to be called “historical” that seeks to interpret the real Jesus in any form but the one given. Any effort to get below or behind the record encounters a different kind of difficulty referred to in John.
Historical proximity, if that is what we should call it, actually breaks apart the very form of the testimony required for comprehension in the first place. To get behind the Gospel record would be to ignore the pivotal role of Israel’s scriptures in showing who Jesus is, on the one hand (see John 19:35-37). On the other hand, to get behind the literary record of the “we” who broker to us the Gospel is to enter a realm where Jesus can be veiled to eyes that lack in the very quest meant to find him as a historical datum that very strange gift: the testimony of the Holy Spirit at work through the testimony of the fourfold Gospel witness. It is a truism that the Holy Spirit’s sending is a function of the Gospels having reached the form in which we now find the record to Jesus the Advocate intends to work with.
In other words, John has in mind a twofold illumination of a sufficient canonical record, a record whose literary limits and form he deems fully competent to compel belief and give life. The chief form of illumination is the sending of the Advocate, but in addition to this, John reckons the witness of Israel’s scriptures also essential in testifying to who Jesus is for those who seek him truly. Insofar as quests for something called a historical Jesus must stand outside these parameters, in order to do their work, they will fail to comprehend Jesus on the terms the Gospels insist are nonnegotiable for encountering him. This encounter deserves to be called historical, because the fourfold apostolic witness to Jesus is witness to reality and truth. The burden remains with those who seek something else under the label of historical questing to clarify how their use of the term “historical” can be correlated with the parameters for comprehending Jesus set by the record to him.
- Christopher R. Seitz, Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 100-01.
Filed under: Biblical Theology, Canonical Approach, Hermeneutics, Quotes , Brevard S. Childs, Canonical Approach, Christopher R. Seitz, Historical Criticism, Historiography
. . . You know, the prophetic words and actions actually bring things about. And of course the Word of God, famously in Isaiah 55, does things – my word shall not return to me empty but shall accomplish that which I send it forth to do. So to the Hebrew – a word is not a mere word; words, words, words, batter us from advertising and that sort of stuff all the time; these are words that actually bring about light. It is interesting that for the fourth gospel the devil is described somewhere as the father of lies; so even in a sense is the lie – and lies of course can only be overcome by the truth, and that is, I think, the point behind it. And similarly, of course, in Romans, by their wickedness they shall suppress the truth, that is almost Paul’s definition, one of Paul’s definitions of sin. And if there is a clear meaning to Jesus’ saying about sin against the Holy Spirit, you know, the only sin that isn’t forgiven, it probably means those who see the good and call it evil. You see, that is what the Pharisee does, you cast out evil by the prince of demons; you see they saw good happening and call it evil. You see, that seems to be the point, those who are enthralled to the lie are simply unable to see the world as God made it. And so Jesus’ prophetic office overturns this lie by the truth. And I think that this is an enduring and valuable insight. Luther used to end with the phrase a word shall quickly slay him, you know, in Luther’s great hymns. And I think that is right; Luther famously threw an inkbottle at the devil, very symbolic.
- Colin E. Gunton, The Barth Lectures, ed. P.H. Brazier (New York, NY: T&T Clark International), 211-12.
Filed under: Quotes, Word and Sacraments , Colin E. Gunton, Karl Barth
In a short chapter entitled, “The Canonical Approach and the ‘New Yale Theology,’” Childs briefly reviews how his canonical approach might benefit from the cultural-linguistic approach of his colleague, George Lindbeck. While he commends much in Lindbeck’s book, The Nature of Doctrine, Childs still finds a few points of disagreement. I found his second point helpful as it relates to an issue that I have been wrestling with in Hans Frei’s book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. Specifically bothersome to me is Frei’s complete rejection of the biblical text’s having any ostensive historical reference. Thankfully, Childs disagrees with Frei and Lindbeck at this particular juncture:
. . . in agreement with the recent emphasis on ‘narrative theology’, Lindbeck stresses the ‘intratextuality’ of meaning. Indeed, the term has provided a much needed service in checking the abuses of a crude theory of historical referentiality which has dominated biblical studies since the Enlightenment (cf. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative). Nevertheless, the concept is not without serious problems when used as a positive formulation of the Bible’s relation to the external world. Above all, the New Testament bears witness to realities outside itself. The prophets and apostles spoke of things which they saw and events which they experienced as testimonies to what God was doing in the world. It is far too limiting to restrict the function of the Bible to that of rendering an agent or an identity. Rather, the nature of the biblical referent must be determined by the text itself which points referringly both to the Creator and the creation in a wide variety of different ways. To recognize that the Bible offers a faith-construal is not to deny that it bears witness to realities outside the text. Christians have always understood that we are saved, not by the biblical text, but by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ who entered the world of time and space.
- Brevard S. Childs, The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (United Kingdom: First Fortress Press, 1985), 545.
Frei’s book is definitely helpful in pointing out the development of a ‘crude theory of historical referentiality’ in response to Enlightment/post-Enlightenment threats, but as Childs points out, it doesn’t do much in positively formulating a theory of historical referentiality. Childs’ canonical approach offers a via media wherein the biblical referent is determined by the text itself.
Filed under: Canonical Approach, Hermeneutics, Quotes , Brevard S. Childs, Canonical Approach, Hans Frei, Narrative
