Learning Theology

Tracking the Spirit of Christian Faith

Amos Yong

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781611648805
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

Theology—the attempt to come to a deeper, more faithful understanding of one's encounter with God—is something to which all Christians are called. In Learning Theology, Amos Yong invites the reader to lay claim to that calling and to see it as yet another opportunity to love God.

Written for those taking their first course in the subject, this book introduces the foundational sources and tasks of theology. It asks what difference theology makes in our lives, how it can influence the way we write and study, and how we understand other forms of learning as part of the Spirit's leadership. Yong encourages the reader to see all of life through the lens of faith, and Learning Theology offers tools to more thoughtfully and faithfully perform that task.

PART I

The Sources of Theology

1

Scripture

The Word and Breath of God

The Bible is indisputably central to Christian life and faith. If you were raised in church, you certainly have heard many sermons or homilies from the Bible, and if you were introduced to Christianity later in life, you have come also to realize how important this book is to Christians. In this chapter, we will see how the Bible is not only the most important resource for theology but also suggest how it can or should be used in theological reflection.

Our discussion will revolve around three sets of interpretive methods usually brought to reading the Bible. The first looks at the world behind the text (historical and critical approaches). The second focuses on the world of the text (literary and narrative approaches). The third connects to the world in front of the text (pragmatic and performative approaches). We shall see that as each moment is interwoven with the others, theological interpretation presumes their togetherness. We will then conclude by considering, in a very preliminary way, how we can and should listen to the Holy Spirit speaking through these scriptural moments to the church (and its members) to empower Christian practice and belief (theology) in every age and every situation.

Remember that our use of the Wesleyan quadrilateral construct means that we see Scripture to be interlinked with tradition, reason, and experience, all as theological resources. This means that our discussion of Scripture in this chapter anticipates and, in many respects, presumes what is said in the rest of part I of this book. While in the abstract we might be able to discuss Scripture apart from how it is encountered and engaged in real life, given our own commitments to its authoritative character for Christian life and faith, we will attempt to revere Scripture on its own terms as much as possible. But we will signal ahead, as needed, to indicate that our approach is perhaps more circular than linear across the four chapters of this first part of the book.

1.1. Behind the Text

What is the world behind the text, and why is it important? This has to do partly with how to understand the references of the biblical message. The Bible tells stories—of Israel, its leaders, or the apostles and others—and these stories contribute to one overarching story of God’s relationship with the world. The word “Christian” derives from the person of Jesus Christ, who is presented in the Gospels as the Logos or Word of God, who “became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14a). The good news rests on this historical person: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life” (1 John 1:1). In short, while skeptics might think that these stories are made up, Christian faith rests on their having happened in some respect as accounted for in the pages of the Bible. This is not to say that every biblical story happened exactly as it is written in the text. It is to say that study of the world behind the text is important, both because of the historicity of Christian faith and in order to understand the nature of what happened in relationship to how such stories are told across the Scriptures.

There are at least three kinds of “tools” or methodologies, each overlapping in some way, that we can deploy when attempting to grasp this world behind the text. The first, the historical method, attempts to understand the text in relationship to what happened. Here confirming evidences are sought for what is presented in the biblical narratives from nonbiblical sources. Part of the goal here is to determine, according to more-or-less established historical methods, what happened. Much of this relies on some form of what is called analogical thinking, which is the equivalence, more or less, between what we read and our own experience. Thus we might be more inclined to believe a text’s account of what happened if we ourselves have experienced something like what the text describes. Or we might be disinclined to accept such claims if they seem too far removed from our own sense of reality. Yet the challenge of the biblical narratives is that they often involve more or less fantastic events and developments. Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is a prime example. Hence historical methods can never provide absolute assurance. At some level, we approach the Bible in faith, and it might be that a dynamic personal encounter with God (to be explored in chap. 5) makes it possible for us to accept, tentatively at least, what the Bible appears to say despite its less-than-easy believability.

A second and related approach is historical and grammatical analysis. This is focused on how to understand what authors are communicating through their texts against the background of their historical contexts. Texts are produced by an author, or a group of authors, in certain historical periods of time, perhaps slightly or even quite removed from the time of the events that are being described. For instance, the book of Joel seems to be about a plague of locusts that may have happened as early as the late ninth century BCE. But the prophecy may have been written a few hundred years later, even after the exile to Babylon in the sixth century. Alternatively, we might not know exactly when Joel was written, but perhaps certain grammatical clues are suggestive. The style of writing might also help us discern whether it was written closer to or much later than the events purported therein. If authors of texts can be determined with greater rather than lesser certainty, we know who these persons were, what their historical context was like, how their language was used in that time, and why they may have chosen to produce the text that bears their name. Such knowledge can enable further our comprehension of what they have written. In many cases, however, we may not know who the authors are, so we have to decipher from the text what might have motivated its writing. Further, internal textual or grammatical cues combined with external witnesses (e.g., other texts that provide confirming accounts) may enable us to determine approximately when a text may have been written, and this gives us some perspective so we can better understand its historical context. From a Christian perspective, however, we might say that all texts, regardless of who they are from and when they were produced, are divinely authorized by the Spirit of God. This is “because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Pet. 1:21). “Prophecy” here is a more generic reference to the Scriptures of the Old Testament and hence applicable to the Bible more broadly.

Historical context—what we can know about human life and the events that shaped it—is central to understanding the world behind the text.

This leads us to canonical criticism, the method of considering Scripture as one book or canon. Historically, then, the world behind the text involves (1) the world described by the text, (2) the world of the author/s that produced such texts, and (3) the world of developments that led to the collection of such texts into certain configurations that eventually resulted in what we call the Bible. This last aspect of the world behind the text is important for at least two reasons. First, if we can comprehend why a text was eventually included in the scriptural canon, we can better realize how it was viewed as authoritative for others and hence also for ourselves (in contrast to other texts that may not have been canonized). Second, if we can appreciate how these texts were understood in relationship to each other, for instance in their ordered sequence rather than other possible arrangements, we can better follow how others have seen the progression of the big story of God’s relationship with the world amid the many little stories that contribute to that narrative. In short, a canonical perspective helps us both to grasp how Jewish and Christian reading communities came to accept texts as divinely communicative and to connect the dots across the two sections of Scripture.

1.2. The World of the Text

Considerations of Scripture as canon lead us into the text of the Bible itself. Here, canonicity foregrounds one of the Bible’s major interpretive principles: that we interpret Scripture in part by Scripture. Earlier parts of Scripture (e.g., in the Old Testament) may be understood afresh in light of later portions (e.g., in the New Testament), even as readings of the latter are also in part shaped by our understandings of the former. Or one Gospel account could be supplemented by the others, although the integrity of each writer and text ought to be respected, and apparent discrepancies ought not to be too quickly harmonized just in order to eliminate our uncomfortable dissonance.

Intertextuality = how scriptural writers directly quote or more indirectly allude to other biblical texts.

Some scholars discuss canonical interpretation in terms of intertextuality. This refers not just to reading one part of the Bible in relationship to the other parts but to how scriptural writers directly quote or more indirectly allude to other biblical texts. The author of the Hebrews, for instance, quotes one of the psalms (95:7–11), the group of which are elsewhere in the New Testament understood to be of Davidic authorship. But in this case, Hebrews describes such as being words of the Holy Spirit (Heb. 3:7–11). Such an ascription invites a consideration of this segment of the Letter to the Hebrews in dialogue with this psalmic passage in particular, and with the traditions of Israel’s wilderness wandering in prior portions of the Old Testament that have fed this psalmic text. There are intertextual echoes all over the canon. Earlier Old Testament texts appear in later Old Testament (also known as the Hebrew Bible) writings. In the New Testament, there are intertextual connections between various portions of the Christian writings as well.

Intertextual criticism leads in one direction toward literary criticism. The key here is attending to the various genres across the Bible and observing how each one functions in accordance with how such genres were meant to communicate in ancient times. The creation narratives operate less as a modern historical treatise and more like a mythic account of the world in relationship to God. In contrast to other ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies (creation myths or stories), however, the world in Genesis is dependent on a personal God rather than emanating from impersonal divine forces. Similarly, the historical books of the Old Testament are sometimes inconsistent from the perspective of those wanting to know what exactly happened. Did Yahweh (the Hebrew name for God) incite David to take the census (2 Sam. 24:1–2) or did Satan (“an adversary,” 1 Chr. 21:1 NET)? There are different time periods and circumstances behind these narratives. Samuel is a kind of prophetic and historical book, while Chronicles is a scribal tradition that seeks a new understanding of Israel’s fortunes in light of the Babylonian exile. Attention here to the world behind the text can therefore be suggestive of why these so-called accounts are different from modern histories that seek only to record what exactly happened. Instead, they are of a more theological type that understands historical events, in all their complexity, in relationship to transcendent (good or not too good, in this case) realities.

The point is that the Bible is constituted by different types of literature from the ancient world: (1) historical accounts that have theological dimensions (which modern histories do not have), (2) poetry, (3) prophecies, (4) lamentations, (5) letters (epistles), (6) gospels (unique in the ancient world), and so forth. Each must be understood against its historical setting but also following the interpretive guidelines relative to such literary forms. Poetic texts must be respected as affective and evocative in ways less relevant to more didactic epistolary segments of the canon, for instance. Prophetic texts, in contrast, presume an interactivity between God and the world. If not granted, that will inhibit any real engagement with these writings.

The basic teachings of Scripture exist, not as abstract propositions, but within stories that are enveloped by the story.

Yet in the main, the various genres exist within and are located across the overarching narrative of the scriptural canon that for Jews persists from Genesis through Malachi and for Christians extends through Revelation, or the Apocalypse. As such, there is a kind of biblical metanarrative, or overarching story, that is all-embracing of the various textual genres and other literary elements. In the twenty-first century, there is suspicion in some quarters of metanarratives as being presumptuous since human beings only have finite perspective. Yet it is also undeniable that some kind of big picture precedes and informs all understanding. It is therefore important to acknowledge that our overall assumptions are constantly changing and shifting in response to our experience. As such, Scripture is best approached narratively: as one dramatic chronicle of God as Creator and Redeemer. Yet this one account is punctuated by many different, not always cohesive, stories (or “histories,” keeping in mind the differences between ancient and modern notions of this term), whether that of Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, the apostles, and the like.

In any case, the basic teachings of Scripture exist not as abstract propositions but as situated within stories that are enveloped by the story. It is not that the Bible contains no theological or doctrinal teachings, but that such claims and statements are best received within the historical and canonical contexts within which they have been communicated. “Absolute truths” that are presented as fairly straightforward philosophical or metaphysical propositions are relatively absent within the scriptural narrative. This does not mean that a biblically informed theology cannot eventually make so-called universal claims. It is to say that any such assertions arise from Scripture, but are not the content of Scripture itself: the Bible is primarily telling stories rather than uttering theological or philosophical propositions.

To be sure, stories have affective and emotive potency, and this means that they ought to be critically assessed so that we don’t just twist these narratives to say what any of us might want them to say. In a sense, the whole first part of this book is intended to provide a range of tools to enable such sober analysis and reception. However, criticism here is in the service of faith, a kind of faith-in-the-biblical-God-seeking-understanding, as it were. For the moment, however, we have already begun to see that literary and narrative interpretations exist not by themselves, but as approaches also related to and informed by historical, grammatical...