Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew

Hans Boersma

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780830853908
• eBook ISBN: 9780830853915
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The disciplines of theology and biblical studies should serve each other, and they should serve both the church and the academy together. But the relationship between them is often marked by misunderstandings, methodological differences, and cross-discipline tension.

Theologian Hans Boersma here highlights five things he wishes biblical scholars knew about theology. In a companion volume, biblical scholar Scot McKnight reflects on five things he wishes theologians knew about biblical studies.With an irenic spirit as well as honesty about differences that remain, Boersma and McKnight seek to foster understanding between their disciplines through these books so they might once again collaborate with one another.

NO CHRIST, NO SCRIPTURE

SOLA SCRIPTURA AND CIRCULAR READING

Christ is first, Scripture second. From the beginning of the church’s history, biblical interpreters have recognized that Scripture serves its regulative role for the church’s faith because Christ is present on every page. This means that the early church’s interpretation primarily moved from Christ to Scripture, not from Scripture to Christ. The purpose of this first chapter is to explain this claim as well as its implications. The first thing that I, as a theologian, wish biblical scholars knew is that recognition of Christ’s presence in Scripture is essential for upholding its authority.

Discussions surrounding theological exegesis are often obstreperous because they continue to take place against the backdrop of Reformation debates about Scripture and tradition. Biblical scholars, especially evangelical biblical scholars, tend to be apprehensive about theological exegesis for fear that theological categories will override the sometimes-obvious meaning of the biblical text. Theological convictions that have developed over the course of history shape our reading of the text and, so it is thought, threaten to warp its original, true meaning. The perceived problem is that the Bible is forced to yield pride of place to tradition, so that human authority (tradition) ends up trumping divine authority (Scripture).

In this chapter, I purposely focus on the relationship not between Scripture and tradition but between Scripture and Christ.1 This shift allows us to move the focus away from formal categories (the authority of Scripture vis-à-vis tradition) to material categories (the content of Scripture and tradition, which centers on Christ). I do not mean to suggest that the question of formal authority (the Scripture-tradition relationship) is insignificant or irrelevant to the discussion at hand. What I am suggesting, however, is that the question of formal authority is secondary, in the sense that what we say about Scripture and tradition depends on how we understand the question of Christ’s presence in the Scriptures.2

In some quarters, the notion of sola scriptura has gained such prominence that agreement on formal authority becomes the main thing that unites us. As long as we share the basic conviction that Scripture alone governs our theological commitments, we are willing to tolerate many disagreements, because we are convinced that our shared belief in the authority of the Bible yields a “mere Christianity” that can accommodate varying convictions about secondary theological matters—including perhaps what we confess about the person of Christ, about the doctrine of the Trinity, or about the sacramental life of the church.3

The church fathers—as well as theologians through most of the Great Tradition of the church—would have viewed such an approach to Scripture with a sense of bewilderment. Their focus was not on the formal authority but on the material contents of the Scriptures. Don’t get me wrong: it is not the case that they disregarded the authority of Scripture or considered it unimportant. When reading Saint Irenaeus’s arguments against the Gnostics, for example, one cannot but be impressed with the consistent appeal to Scripture. As is well known, one of his key objections to the Gnostics centers on their interpretation of biblical texts. Scripture is obviously central to Irenaeus’s defense of orthodoxy.4 Similarly, the fourth-century debates about the doctrine of the Trinity as well as the later Alexandrian-Antiochian arguments about the person of Christ centered on biblical exegesis. Scripture was central to the development of Christian doctrine.

Nonetheless, these patristic debates are marked by a kind of circularity. While Athanasius defended the divinity of the Son with biblical arguments, these arguments were linked closely to prior convictions that he held by faith. Athanasius was convinced that in approaching the Scriptures he knew its overall dianoia, that is, its “mind” or its meaning. Insight into the dianoia of Scripture allowed him to read it correctly—that is to say, it allowed him to discover how a particular passage fits within the overall hypothesis or “plot” of the Scriptures that the church’s faith teaches. Francis Young gives an example of this in Athanasius’s debate with the Arians.5 In his First Discourse Against the Arians, the Egyptian bishop engages in a fairly lengthy discussion both of Psalm 45:7 (“You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness. Therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions”) and of Philippians 2:8-9 (“He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name”). Hebrews 1:8-9 explicitly identifies Christ as the bridegroom of Psalm 45, and the question—a potentially embarrassing one for pro-Nicene theologians such as Athanasius—was how this “anointing” of the Son would not imply his secondary status vis-à-vis the Father. The psalmist may give the impression that it is the Son’s virtue that gave him his status of “anointed” one. Similarly, Saint Paul’s Philippian hymn may seem to explain Christ’s exaltation as Lord simply as the reward for his obedience (with both passages using the term therefore, giving virtue as the reason for the anointing or the exaltation).

Athanasius, however, applies the dianoia or “mind” of all of Scripture to Psalm 45:7 and Philippians 2:9, and it is worth examining in some detail how he does this.6 The Alexandrian theologian asks rhetorically what the Savior was prior to the incarnation if it is true that he received the epithets of God, Son, and Lord only as a reward for his virtue. To show that these names cannot be restricted to Christ in his incarnation, Athanasius points to manifestations of the Son before the incarnation. If Christ was promoted merely as a reward for his virtue, asks Athanasius,

how were all things made by Him [Col 1:16], or how in Him, were He not perfect, did the Father delight [Prov 8:30]? And He, on the other hand, if now promoted, how did He before rejoice in the presence of the Father [Prov 8:31]? And, if He received His worship after dying, how is Abraham seen to worship Him in the tent [Gen 18:2] and Moses in the bush [Ex 3:6]? And, as Daniel saw, myriads of myriads, and thousands of thousands were ministering unto Him [Dan 7:10]? And if, as they say, He had His promotion now, how did the Son Himself make mention of . . . His glory before and above the world, when He said, “Glorify Thou Me, O Father, with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was” [Jn 17:5].7

Athanasius here appeals to the biblical truth that the Son preexisted as the eternal Son of God during the old dispensation. The Son was the Creator, the Wisdom of God who lived in the presence of God and as such enjoyed the Father’s glory. What is more, this eternal Son of God manifested himself within the historical economy to saints such as Abraham, Moses, and Daniel. This last point is significant, and I will return to it momentarily. Athanasius interprets the Old Testament theophanies christologically. They are proof of the glory that the Son, in his preexistence, had with the Father.

Athanasius links this preexistence of the Son to soteriological convictions: only if the Savior had the status of God, Son, and Lord prior to his incarnation does the theology of deification make sense. Athanasius questions how those who lived under the old dispensation could be deified by Christ if Christ received his status as Son of God at the end of his obedient life as a reward for it. Quoting John 10:35 (“If he called them gods to whom the word of God came”), he continues:

If all that are called sons and gods, whether in earth or in heaven, were adopted and deified through the Word, and the Son Himself is the Word, it is plain that through Him are they all, and He Himself before all, or rather He Himself only is very Son, and He alone is very God from the very God, not receiving these prerogatives as a reward for His virtue, nor being another beside them, but being all these by nature and according to essence.8

For Athanasius, it is clear that in the hypothesis or plot of Scripture, the Son is preexistent and, therefore, does not receive the status of divinity as a reward for his virtue. Athanasius concludes from this that we must distinguish between Christ’s divine and human natures. Passages such as Psalm 45:7 and Philippians 2:9 speak of his human nature: only human nature is such that it can be exalted, explains Athanasius: “The term in question, ‘highly exalted,’ does not signify that the essence of the Word was exalted, for He was ever and is ‘equal to God,’ but the exaltation is of the manhood.”9 Only Christ’s human nature can be exalted, which in turn allows for the deification or exaltation of those who through faith are in Christ.

Athanasius refers to his interpretation as an “ecclesiastical sense” (dianonan . . . ekklēsiastikēn), which he contrasts with the “private sense” (idion noun) of his Arian opponents.10 Athanasius’s exegesis is guided by the sense (dianoia) that is in line with the church’s confession of the two natures of Christ. Frances Young rightly refers in this connection to the canon of truth or the rule of faith as guiding the exegetical process.11 “The ‘Canon of Truth’ or ‘Rule of Faith’ expresses the mind of Scripture,” she comments, so for Athanasius “an exegesis that damages the coherence of that plot, that hypothesis . . . cannot be right.”12 Athanasius was convinced of the ecclesial understanding of the biblical plot, and even if some passages seemed a difficult fit within this plot he nonetheless was convinced he must interpret them in line with it.

A modern sola scriptura viewpoint may have a hard time justifying Athanasius’s approach: the circularity that he assumes between Christ and Scripture may seem dangerously subjective. Doesn’t Athanasius put his own, preconceived meaning onto the biblical text in order to uphold a pro-Nicene reading by hook or by crook? It is certainly true that Athanasius refuses to isolate the scriptural passages at hand from the church’s christological convictions, which is why he indeed engages in a circular type of argument. But I suspect that Athanasius didn’t see this as a particularly troubling kind of circularity—and in light of the broad contemporary acknowledgment that all interpretation involves some kind of hermeneutical circle, Athanasius’s approach should not cause undue surprise or offense.13 The sense (dianoia) that he took from these passages was not just his own, subjective reader response. It was an ecclesiastical sense, which as such offered safeguards against the private interpretations of the Arians. A sola scriptura approach that rejects creedal guidelines as authoritative for interpretation for fear of circularity usually ends up with a far more serious case of circularity, for interpretation that claims to bracket theological preunderstanding (Vorverständnis) inevitably ends up smuggling in unacknowledged theological and metaphysical assumptions. When the individual biblical scholar neither acknowledges them nor is even aware of them, these subjective prior commitments tend to wreak exegetical and theological havoc. The church’s confession is then erroneously viewed as lying at the end of a straight line rather than being caught up in a hermeneutical circle.

I already alluded to Athanasius’s insistence that we should not only identify theological statements about the preexistence of the Son in the (Old Testament) Scriptures, but we should also interpret theophanies (divine appearances) and visions (to Abraham, Moses, and Daniel) christologically—that is, as Christophanies. In other words, on occasion the preexistent Son actually manifested himself to Old Testament saints. Both of these notions—the belief in the Son’s preexistence and the christological exegesis of theophanies—seem to me highly significant in connection with our theme of “no Christ, no Scripture.” Many biblical scholars, grounding themselves in a sola scriptura doctrine, while ostensibly doing so in order to isolate Scripture and protect it against incursions of later tradition, actually isolate Scripture from Christ and shield it from a christological reading. On this view, after all, the main purpose of biblical interpretation is to reconstruct authorial intent; the meaning of the Scriptures lies in the past rather than the present. Christological and moral implications taken from the Old Testament are only later connections or applications. The meaning of the Old Testament Scriptures ceases to be inherently christological. As a result, one hears sermons from renowned Old Testament scholars that make little or no reference to Christ.

SENSUS PLENIOR AND REAL PRESENCE

To be sure, it is not as though Christology is entirely absent from such sola scriptura approaches to biblical interpretation. Christology comes to the fore in at least two ways. First, because many contemporary biblical scholars regard themselves as historians unearthing aspects of the redemptive-histor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Detailed Contents
• Foreword By Scot McKnight
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 No Christ, No Scripture
• 2 No Plato, No Scripture
• 3 No Providence, No Scripture
• 4 No Church, No Scripture
• 5 No Heaven, No Scripture
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Also Available
• Notes
• Praise for Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright