Echoes of the Word

Keck

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498206747
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Table of Contents:Part 1: The Discipline of Hearing1. Exegesis as a Theological Discipline2. Listening To and Listening ForPart 2: The Presence of the Prior Word3. Challenged by the Greek Precedent4. Energized by Jewish Beginnings5. Paul: Problem and Promise6. Death and Afterlife in the New TestamentPart 3: The Word as Criterion7. The Penetrating Word8. Scripture and Canon9. The Gospel's Promise of SalvationPart 4: A Word for Bearers of the Word10. Our Identity's Dimensions11. A Word for Us Theologians12. Is There Good News for Ministers Too?13. The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of KnowledgePart 5: The Word Borne14. Summoned to Christian Unity15. King Jesus?16. Are You the Coming One?17. Promise and Hope

Part 1

The Discipline of Hearing

Interpreters of enduring literature know that the art of hearing is more important than the skill of speaking. Those who interpret Scripture, Sunday after Sunday, know intuitively, as well as experientially, that the Word must be heard before it can be re-said. Fruitful hearing, though an art, is also a discipline that can be learned. Its name is exegesis.

The two addresses that together serve as the overture to the rest of the collection were given in quite different settings. The first sounded notes that later were repeated, amplified and, I trust, played in more nuanced tones. It was, in effect, my inaugural lecture at Vanderbilt Divinity School, given in September, 1959. (Years later I discovered that Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, had published Professor James May’s lecture on the Old Testament, under the same title!) In Nashville, among this newly appointed assistant professor’s hearers were his new colleagues, his students from a part of the country wholly unknown to him, and, surprisingly, Vanderbilt’s Chancellor, B. Harvie Branscomb, a distinguished New Testament scholar previously at Duke University. The lecture is published here for the first time.

The second piece is a slightly modified version of an address given thirteen years later at the Assembly of the Tennessee Association of Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ), meeting in Clarksville. The text was assigned: “You shall receive power” (Acts 1:8). The address was later outfitted with footnotes and published in Interpretation 27 (1973). Here it is paired with the inaugural lecture because it makes concrete what was said or implied in 1959 and in my 1978 book, The Bible in the Pulpit.

1

Exegesis as a Theological Discipline

At the beginning of our year’s work, it is good to focus attention on that part of the theological enterprise which traditionally has been the foundation of the whole—exegesis. Not a few would hold that if the Christian faith is built on the apostles and prophets, the explication of it is built on the exegesis of the apostolic literature. But even if this were admitted, our task would only be stated, for generally speaking, we lack an adequate understanding of what exegesis involves and of how it is related to theology as a whole.

How, then, should we understand exegesis? The dictionary definition—that it is the critical interpretation of a text—is not adequate, because our problem is precisely that we are no longer confident that we know what interpretation involves. Likewise, the old adage that exegesis reads the text’s meaning in but eisegesis reads it out is too simple because every exegetical effort combines ex- and eisegesis. No one approaches a text with complete neutrality.

Complete neutrality, however, was the ideal of an earlier time. Thus Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer set himself such a goal in 1829, when he wrote the first volume of the now famous German commentary series that still bears his name. His Preface included the following remarks:

The interpreter of Paul, having thoroughly deprived himself of his own self, should have put on the whole individuality of the Apostle. . . . He should not think with his own head, nor feel with his heart. . . . Because of the meaning which the New Testament has for the Christian church . . . the exegesis of the New Testament as such has no system at all and may not have one . . . insofar as he is an exegete he is neither orthodox nor heterodox, neither supernaturalist nor rationalist . . . he is neither pious nor godless, neither moral nor immoral . . . for he has only the obligation to search out what the author says so that he might give this over as a pure result to the . . . dogmatician. . . . The relation of the explicated meaning to the teaching of philosophy, how it agrees with the dogmas of the church . . . —this is of no concern to the exegete as such.

Before we smile at an attitude so naively confident, let us remember that in a sense Meyer was asserting a vital Reformation principle—the independence of Scripture vis-à-vis the church and its ordinary theology. Nor should we forget that orthodoxy usually claims that the Bible contains nothing that does not support it, and that the task of the exegete is to exhibit this agreement. We need only recall the recent call for a “Conservative Translation of the Bible” and the controversy over how Isa 7:14 should have been translated by the RSV in order to realize that the independence of historical-critical exegesis has not yet been granted by many parts of the Christian church. What Meyer required, and what every exegete expects, is honest listening to what the Bible actually says, and understanding why it says it that way. This is nothing less than what that often castigated exegete, Karl Barth, has also said: that we should take the Bible at least as seriously as we take ourselves.

In other words, scientific exegesis has the right, even the duty, to pursue the text’s own meaning as carefully as possible, and to “let the chips fall where they may.” Thus far, Meyer was right. In addition, today we remind ourselves that if biblical study is not carried forward with a rigorous quest for the intended meaning of the text, we shall have compromised the canonical criterion by which the church can gauge her faithfulness. The independence of the exegete is not to be confused with academic irresponsibility. In fact, it has been precisely through relentless, independent biblical study that the church has been summoned once again to come to grips with what the Bible has to say.

What Meyer did not see, however, was that one cannot recover the meaning of the text by an exegesis that is disinterested, that precisely the identification with Paul that he demanded is precluded when the exegete himself is excluded. How am I to think Paul’s thoughts after him if I may not use my own head? If my self is not engaged? How is the interpreter to take the meaning from the text if he is forbidden to bring anything to it? Meyer did not see that two presuppositions controlled his demand: one, that ultimate questions could be so thoroughly dismissed from the mind of the exegete that he is free to recapture an objective past; two, that such a past would itself be an adequate source for subsequent meaning. But just as there is no presuppositionless thinking, so there is no presuppositionless exegesis. It is precisely this disturbing fact which makes our problem acute: what IS exegesis and how is it related to theology as such? If we can no longer think that an exegesis wholly free of presuppositions is either possible or desirable, are there any alternatives?

II

Looking briefly at several possibilities can help us move forward. The first was developed by the left wing of biblical criticism, on the assumption that scientific exegesis must carry on a continual war with the church and its interpretation. This can be seen clearly in what Albert Schweitzer taught us to call the Quest for the Historical Jesus. As the critical study of the Gospels advanced, not only did traditionalists defend these texts as completely reliable records of the life of Jesus, but some radicals completely rewrote the story of Jesus’ life, and a few claimed that he had never existed at all. What began as a creative reinterpretation of the Gospels by David Friedrich Strauss ended in a hodge-podge of data and innuendo published in the early years of this century by Arthur Drews in Germany and by William B. Smith, a mathematician at Tulane University. In all such works, there is the constant theme that scientific historical exegesis is inevitably pitted against the church’s theological tradition.

A second alternative was offered by what is known as historicism and it is associated with Adolf Harnack, the eminent church historian at Berlin. Though he too was critical of traditional dogma, he tried to serve the church by recalling it to what he believed was the original gospel of Jesus. In his epoch-making lectures, translated as What is Christianity? Harnack said, “The Christian religion is something simple and sublime—it means one thing and one thing only: eternal life in the midst of time, by the strength and under the eyes of God.” Harnack believed that the eternally valid gospel addressed the essentially unchanging man in changing circumstances. As a historian, he knew very well that the gospel too had become many things. How, then, did he determine which part of the gospel’s many changing expressions is eternally valid, and which part can be dismissed as expressing the historical circumstance in which it had been expressed, or as he put it, How does one separate the kernel from the husk? Harnack found the answer in history itself, as disclosed by historical research. “What was kernel here and what was husk, history has itself showed with unmistakable plainness, and by the shortest possible process. Husk was the whole of the Jewish limitations attaching to Jesus’ message. . . .” Thus Harnack peeled away the historical context of Jesus’ teaching to lay bare an eternally valid core which Paul’s mission to Gentiles transformed into a universal religion, which was again and again transformed. For Harnack, the exegetical task was to recapture the gospel’s original expression so that it could be the norm for later expressions. Thus historical research could disclose the true and living center of the Christian religion. Within this everchanging, culturally conditioned Christianity there exists a constant element to which we can respond in faith—the kernel disclosed by history.

After the Great War showed what history could be, it is little wonder that the third alternative was a violent reaction to Harnack’s view. Thus in Barth’s 1919 commentary on Romans, the meaning-giving center of the Bible was not found through historical research, and thus dependent on man, but was the wholly free, unexpected Word of God in the Bible’s words. Not the kernel in the husk, but the direct, inbreaking Word of God which comes to man not as a datum to be analyzed but as a summons to be obeyed, precisely because it is a Word, which dissolves all notions about the search for a kernel because it is a Word from God. This, for Barth, is what the Bible attests and makes possible. The task of the exegete, then, is to press through the words of the text to the Word of God. All historical-critical work is at best only preliminary to listening for the Word in the words. Consequently, exegesis is theology and theology is exegesis. The dogmatician is nothing less than a systematic interpreter of Scripture.

How different from Meyer, who insisted that theology not contaminate exegesis! Yet, there is also a striking similarity between them. Meyer set out to exclude himself so he could think Paul’s thoughts. Barth, in his Preface to the second edition of his Romans commentary, claims access to Paul by just the opposite means. It is not by excluding his own interests but by a relentless pressing of the issues that he claims at last to have come to grips with the issues with which Paul grappled, and thus also to have eliminated the assumed difference that twenty centuries create between Paul and modern man. Not by disinterested analysis does one understand and interpret Paul, but by becoming existentially invnolved in the crisis of man before God. Only then does one lay hold of the Word in the words, and so become able to write a commentary with Paul and not merely on him. The identification with Paul that Meyer demanded is achieved by Barth because he rejected Meyer’s method. So also what Harnack sought—the confrontation of man as man with the eternal gospel—is unexpectedly reached by Barth who rejected Harnack’s method with equal vigor.

Some of those who looked for a fourth alternative found Rudolf Bultmann to be the New Moses who could lead us to the Promised Land. Bultmann has the distinct advantage of being both a master of the historical-critical method and of working consciously with a theological perspective. For Bultmann, there is only one exegetical method—the historical-critical one. More radically than most of his peers, he applies it rigorously to the New Testament. But instead of excluding his own theology, as Meyer required, he pursues historical criticism until he lays hold of the understanding of human existence implied in the text. Like Barth, Bultmann assumes at the outset that the New Testament is the unique bearer of God’s Word, and thus he refuses to treat it simply as a repository of early Christian ideas. But unlike Barth, Bultmann is not impatient to get the critical research done so that the real issues can be dealt with.

Interestingly, however, it is because Bultmann wants to take seriously both the historical-critical method and its results that he is under attack from theologians and exegetes alike. For as a result of his critical work, Bultmann has become aware that the New Testament presupposes an understanding of the world, of man, and of God that is so alien to ours that a real perception of the New Testament’s message is impossible. At the same time, because he sees the New...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Part 1: The Discipline of Hearing
• Part 2: The Presence of the Prior Word
• Part 3: The Word as Criterion
• Part 4: A Word for Bearers of the Word
• Part 5: The Word Borne