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Part 1
INTERPRETATION
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1
NARRATIVE INTERPRETATION AND THE QUEST FOR THEOLOGICAL UNITY
It is of the very nature of narratives to subsume variations that outside their narrational context are contradictions.
George Lindbeck1
The Problem of Diverse Voices in Scripture
The question of unity within the diversity of Christian Scripture is an ancient problem.2 Its roots lie in the formative period of the second and third centuries, when fateful decisions were taking shape about the scope and content of the body of writings that should be regarded as authoritative by the emergent Christian church. Should the Law and the Prophets be read as Scripture by Christians? If so, how was the church to construe their coherence with the story of Jesus Christ, despite Marcion’s vigorous assertion of their theological incompatibility with the Gospel? Or, to take another problem, did the Gospel of John really belong alongside Matthew, Mark, and Luke as an authoritative testimony to the truth about Jesus, despite its obvious material differences from the other three and its disturbing dualistic tendencies? Was Irenaeus’s argument for including John within a fourfold Gospel witness persuasive against gnostic readings of the Fourth Gospel? Irenaeus claimed that the (notoriously elusive) Rule of Faith gave him both a lens through which to discern the unity of the fourfold Gospel and a criterion for the exclusion of other gospels that conflicted with this norm. Even after the fourfold Gospel canon was firmly settled,3 conversations about the proper extent of the collection that the church came to call its canon persisted well into the fourth century—and these conversations turned, in part, on the question of the theological coherence of various disputed writings such as the book of Revelation with the apostolic message attested by other writings already deemed authoritative in the community.
So the problem of “unity and diversity in the Bible” is not a new problem in modernity. It would, however, be fair to observe that in antiquity the operative assumption of all parties was that Scripture should be read as a unified witness to the truth; the debates turned on the question of how to draw the boundaries of the operative canon so as to safeguard its material unity. Even in the Reformation era, Luther’s well-known denigration of the Epistle of James4 illustrates the same tendency: rather than seeking to demonstrate James’s coherence with Paul, Luther sought to relegate it effectually to deuterocanonical status. He made this drastic hermeneutical move in order to protect his conviction that Paul and the Gospels consistently bear witness to a unified message: they proclaim Christ in a way that he believed James did not.
In post-Enlightenment biblical criticism, the framing of the problem shifted. Near the end of the eighteenth century, Johann Philipp Gabler articulated the governing assumption of the age: the timeless theological truths of the Bible come to us buried like nuggets of gold in the dross of historically contingent writings, or—as Gabler’s contemporary Thomas Jefferson put it with greater rhetorical flair—like diamonds in a dunghill.5 The role of the critic is to refine the raw material of the Bible and to cull out the precious conceptual abstractions that are the real stuff of theology proper. It is not a matter of deciding which individual writings are reliable witnesses to the truth; rather, it is a matter of discerning a conceptual unity that lies somewhere beneath the surface of the diverse texts. Gabler was confident that historical criticism could excavate pure truths that would lend themselves to the dogmatician’s construction of a coherent universal theology.
As the work of historical criticism proceeded, however, the Enlightenment’s serene confidence about discovering unified universal truth in the Bible receded. One cumulative effect of historical-critical work throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to undermine assumptions about the unity of the Bible’s witness. This development had at least four facets:
(1) Historical critics exposed seams and sources within individual texts, claiming to discern multiple and even conflicting perspectives behind and within a single witness. One thinks, for example, of Bultmann’s hypothesis that an ecclesiastical redactor had injected fragments of apocalyptic eschatology into the Fourth Gospel precisely to contravene John’s own radically existential message.6 Or, to cite a more widely accepted hypothesis, many critics have suggested that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke have incorporated a hypothetical Q source that saw no saving significance in Jesus’s death.7
(2) The historical approach tended to highlight the situationally contingent character of individual biblical writings. The Pauline Letters, for example, according to many critics, could no longer be read as expressions of a consistent theology; rather, they were ad hoc responses to various local problems, and one should not expect them to hang together conceptually.8
(3) Critical attention to the original historical settings of the biblical writings also generated numerous theories about early Christianity as an arena of conflict between rival theologies and practices. The apparent Auseinandersetzung between the Pauline Letters and the Letter of James was only the tip of the iceberg; what we see through critical examination of the NT, it is alleged, is a collision of conflicting ideologies vying for power. Of course, one thinks here of the massively influential constructions of F. C. Baur.9 One of the most powerful theological articulations of this viewpoint was Ernst Käsemann’s blistering polemic in 1963 against the World Council of Churches for sponsoring a modernized version of Lukan Heilsgeschichte that threatened to engulf and negate the lordship of Christ over the church.10 According to Käsemann, the Pauline kerygma of the crucified Christ was the nonnegotiable critical norm that must stand in irreconcilable conflict with all ecclesial triumphalism, even if that triumphalism should appear within the NT itself. (Notice the formal similarity to Luther’s assessment of James.) In our own time, we have seen several variants of this hermeneutical move, replacing the doctrine of justification with theological perspectives based on gender or ethnicity as the critical norm for championing some NT voices against others.11
(4) Finally, historical criticism has highlighted the distance of the Bible from our world and our categories of interpretation. This created a new kind of hermeneutical problem. Prior to modernity, theologians saw themselves living within the symbolic world of Scripture and therefore understood the church’s confessional tradition as nothing other than the organic explication of the Bible’s coherent message. With the rise of historical consciousness in modernity, the contingent character of that confessional tradition became more readily visible; consequently, many critics came to see the church’s dogma not as a faithful interpretation of the Bible but as an alien imposition upon it, an anachronistic harmonization of the pluralism of these ancient texts. One outcome of this trajectory of thought has been a newly heightened interest in the history of interpretation, not in order to illuminate the theological meaning of the Bible’s witness, but rather to trace its diverse social effects. In his 2004 presidential address to the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas (SNTS) in Barcelona, Wayne Meeks argued that we should give up the effort to find “normative” meanings in texts. The student of the NT should now instead seek to trace the “formative” effects of the NT, i.e., its influence on the formation of culture. “We should start,” Meeks writes, “by erasing from our vocabulary the terms ‘biblical theology’ and, even more urgently, ‘New Testament theology.’” Why? Because these terms “claim textual and historical warrants” for normative and unifying propositions that are actually nothing other than contingent products of the interests of later interpretative communities.12
In the face of these developments, it has become increasingly difficult to talk about the unity of Scripture. Under the impact of historical criticism, the Bible seems to fall apart into a diversity—or even a cacophony—of disparate voices.
Narrative Interpretation to the Rescue of Scripture’s Unity?
During the past generation, however, we have also witnessed an explosion of interest in literary approaches to the Bible, often with a particular focus on narrative interpretation. The widespread appeal of such approaches has almost surely had something to do with an underlying hope that they might help us recover the unity of Scripture, or at least the unity of individual Scriptural texts.
Powerful impetus was given to this literary turn by the work of Hans Frei, whose paradigm-changing book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative devastatingly documented the literary tone-deafness of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century biblical hermeneutics, particularly in Germany. Frei showed that criticism during this era, by focusing almost exclusively on reconstructing a history of events and sources behind the texts, had forfeited theology’s traditional capacity to read the Bible as a narrative text whose meaning was imbedded precisely in its way of telling the story.
By speaking of the narrative shape of these accounts [i.e., Genesis and the Gospels], I suggest that what they are about and how they make sense are functions of the depiction or narrative rendering of the events constituting them—including their being rendered, at least partially, by the device of chronological sequence. The claim, for example, that the gospel story is about Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah means that it narrates the way his status came to be enacted.13
Frei followed up his critique of earlier criticism by publishing his own constructive proposal in a slender but influential volume entitled The Identity of Jesus Christ, which sought to show how “The New Testament Depiction of Jesus Christ” narrates his enacted, self-manifested identity.14 One striking feature of Frei’s account, which focuses particularly on the passion and resurrection narratives, is that he pays no attention to the differences between the four distinct canonical Gospels. Without reflecting explicitly on the problem of their diversity, he seems to treat them as complementary witnesses to a single unified story, a story that coherently bears witness to the identity of Jesus and actually mediates his presence to the reader. Of course, in treating the Gospels in this manner, Frei is faithfully following the precedent of the classic “Western Christian” hermeneutics that he was seeking to recover. Thus, Frei’s work provided both a theoretical justification for the practice of narrative hermeneutics and an encouragement to believe that such a practice might assist in the retrieval of the unity of the scriptural witness.
The great difficulty, however, is that Frei—oddly—paid so little attention to the actual narrative particularity of the individual Gospel narratives. Not surprisingly, as narrative-critical studies of the Gospels proliferated in the wake of Frei’s work, most of them were less theologically synthetic; instead, they tended to highlight the unity of each individual Gospel narrative and its distinctness from the others. Rather than drawing on a confessional construal of canonical unity, they employed narratological methods to study the evangelists’ uses of emplotment, characterization, point of view, and other narrative devices.15
But the claim that a literary approach could recover the unity even of the individual biblical writings soon came to be seen as suspect. As Stephen Moore has tellingly argued, the interpretative methods that were fashionable among biblical literary critics in the 1970s and 1980s were heavily indebted to the school of New Criticism, which had characteristically sought to read literary works as self-contained, well-wrought artifacts; however, this critical perspective had already by that time fallen out of favor with cutting-edge critics in the field of literary studies, who—under the influence of theorists such as Derrida and Foucault—were more interested in deconstructing literary texts by exposing their internal fault lines and concealed political agendas.16 And one of the most brilliant literary readings of a Gospel text produced during that era was Frank Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy, which explicated the Gospel of Mark as a narrative encoding of the indeterminacy of narrative interpretation. According to Kermode’s analysis, the message of Mark is that the messages of all narratives are dark, elusive, and fragmentary, always luring the reader to strive after a closure that the narrative itself resists.17 Between Frei’s The Identity of Jesus Christ and Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy, published only four years apart in the late 1970s, a great conceptual chasm was fixed so that no one could cross from one side to the other.
But even in less theoretically radical versions of literary criticism, the problem of canonical unity remains a vexing and perhaps insuperable one. The more one attends to the individual integrity of the various tellings of the story of Jesus, the more difficult it is to see how they can be construed as expressing a theological unity. If Mark’s Jesus dies crying, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34), and Jo...
