Divine Scripture in Human Understanding

A Systematic Theology of the Christian Bible

Joseph K. Gordon

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780268105181, 9780268105174
• eBook ISBN: 9780268105204
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

In six closely-reasoned chapters, Joseph Gordon presents a detailed account of a Christian doctrine of Scripture in the fullest context of systematic theology.

Divine Scripture in Human Understanding addresses the confusing plurality of contemporary approaches to Christian Scripture—both within and outside the academy—by articulating a traditionally grounded, constructive systematic theology of Christian Scripture. Utilizing primarily the methodological resources of Bernard Lonergan and traditional Christian doctrines of Scripture recovered by Henri de Lubac, it draws upon achievements in historical-critical study of Scripture, studies of the material history of Christian Scripture, reflection on philosophical hermeneutics and philosophical and theological anthropology, and other resources to articulate a unified but open horizon for understanding Christian Scripture today.

Following an overview of the contemporary situation of Christian Scripture, Joseph Gordon identifies intellectual precedents for the work in the writings of Irenaeus, Origen, and Augustine, who all locate Scripture in the economic work of the God to whom it bears witness by interpreting it through the Rule of Faith. Subsequent chapters draw on Scripture itself; classical sources such as Irenaeus, Origen, Augustine, and Aquinas; the fruit of recent studies on the history of Scripture; and the work of recent scholars and theologians to provide a contemporary Christian articulation of the divine and human locations of Christian Scripture and the material history and intelligibility and purpose of Scripture in those locations. The resulting constructive position can serve as a heuristic for affirming the achievements of traditional, historical-critical, and contextual readings of Scripture and provides a basis for addressing issues relatively underemphasized by those respective approaches.

CHAPTER ONE

Scripture at the Level of Our Times

Situation, Exigencies, and Thesis

The problem of reading the Holy Book—if you have faith that it is the Word of God—is the most difficult problem in the whole field of reading. There have been more books written about how to read Scripture than about all other aspects of the art of reading together. The Word of God is obviously the most difficult writing men can read; but it is also, if you believe it is the Word of God, the most important to read.

—Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book

Determining the function and role of Scripture in Christian life and thought and articulating the precise parameters of interpretation of the Bible have been perennial challenges for the Christian community.¹ Contemporary Christians must face such challenges head-on, though, if they are to maintain the conviction that Scripture is indeed the written Word of God. The challenges are especially acute today, when there are dozens of competing approaches to Scripture in academic, ecclesial, and secular settings. As Robert Sokolowski declares, our present postmodern situation provides “an embarrassment of riches” for understanding the Bible.² Popular and technical literature devoted to promoting the meaning and use of Christian Scripture has proliferated in recent years. Within academic or scholarly study of the Christian Bible, this literature can be divided roughly into three major families of approaches: historical-critical, contextual, and primarily theological. This tripartite typology is admittedly imprecise.³ Even given its imprecision, though, it is useful to the extent that it identifies family resemblances characteristic of contemporary scholarly interpretive approaches to the study of the Christian Bible.

I discuss each of the three approaches briefly below, but it is important to first note that these approaches have emerged as scholars interested in the Christian scriptures have engaged and appropriated recent developments in philosophical reflection on textual interpretation and on the general conditions and possibilities of human understanding. The most pressing challenge of our contemporary situation is to measure up to the significance of the fact that all human understanding is tied to specific times and places and to think through how this judgment should affect Christian engagement with Scripture.⁴ “Historical consciousness” names this dimension of contemporary reflection; contemporary readers and hearers of texts have become acutely mindful that all human meanings are nested in historical, cultural, social, and linguistic contexts.⁵ The texts of Scripture bear the marks of their specific times and places. And the human readers of these texts always interpret them from somewhere and never from nowhere.⁶ The judgment of the need to attend to the locatedness of all human expressions and interpretations has received helpful exposition in the work of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hans Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and various postmodern philosophers such as Stanley Fish and Jacques Derrida.⁷ Any full account of reading and understanding a text well must attend to the insights of such seminal figures.⁸ Human understanding of the world and of texts that precede us is inescapably shaped, if not determined, by our cultural and linguistic formation in communities of understanding. As the product of human understanding in distinct cultural settings, “concepts have dates.”⁹

While early Christian interpreters were not entirely naive regarding the historical and cultural differences between their own worlds of meaning and the worlds they encountered in Scripture, the recent emphasis on historical consciousness has instigated a much more thoroughgoing investigation of the diverse ancient historical, social, and cultural worlds reflected in Scripture than took place in premodern engagement with Scripture. The relatively recent major discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Oxyrhynchus papyri, the Nag Hammadi texts, the Codex Sinaiticus, and countless other ancient artifacts and texts from antiquity, coupled with the fruition of such historical consciousness, have made possible the concerted and disciplined consideration of the Bible as a historical anthology of texts that reflect multiple different ancient social, cultural, and linguistic worlds of meaning.¹⁰ Focus on the original historical settings of Christian Scripture and the concern to avoid anachronism are the characteristic features of the family of contemporary hermeneutical approaches designated by the label “historical criticism.”¹¹ Given that human beings who produced, edited, and passed on the scriptures are situated within and bear the marks of their distinct times and places, historical critics ask what we can understand and what judgments we can make about the authors of these texts and the functions of these texts in the ancient “worlds” from which such documents emerged. Practitioners of historical criticism concern themselves with the tasks of understanding the texts within their hypothetically reconstructed original settings of composition, redaction, interpretation, and use. They raise and answer questions concerning what we can know about the worlds of meaning “behind” the texts and the relationship of the texts themselves to these backgrounds. Historical-critical work has borne much fruit in helping contemporary readers understand the biblical texts in their own contexts.¹² It is not, however, without its problems.

Though the analysis of the historical uniqueness of the cultures attested in Scripture has its own intrinsic value, its processes and results build “an impenetrable wall” between the texts and contemporary people.¹³ Historical scholarship makes demands upon readers and interpreters that can only be met through the study of ancient languages and cultures; as such, it threatens to take Scripture out of the hands of everyday Christian believers. Even within the confines of the guilds of biblical scholarship, narrative criticism and the applications of structuralism and semiotics to biblical texts have emerged to remedy some atomizing tendencies common within historical criticism and to address the perceived failure of historical criticism to edify religious communities.¹⁴ Narrative approaches give direct attention not to the worlds of meaning “behind the texts” but instead to those worlds of meanings and values projected or “created by” the texts of Scripture themselves. Such literary approaches have frequently emphasized the usefulness of the texts as they stand for challenging readers to ascend to new and fuller horizons of understanding and acting in the world.

In recent years a number of so-called contextual approaches to the study of Scripture have emerged and gained influence in academic biblical scholarship. Though all reading, as I have noted above, is necessarily contextual, the aforementioned “contextual” approaches attend not primarily to the worlds in which ancient texts were produced or to the worlds that they depict but instead focus on “the worlds in front of the texts.” Such reading strategies focus on the concerns that culturally and socially located readers—especially those who have suffered from disenfranchisement and marginalization—bring to the texts from their own horizons of experience and meaning. As noted above, the commitments, values, beliefs, and practices of readers themselves inevitably affect reading and interpretation.¹⁵ Practitioners of contextual reading approaches have also challenged the hegemony of historical criticism within the guild of academic biblical scholarship by drawing attention to the fact that practitioners of the latter approach have frequently been insufficiently attentive to their own social and cultural locations and the effects of their situatedness upon their interpretive work. Because they have not been sufficiently attentive to their own social and cultural locations, historical critics have often unreflectively endorsed androcentric and narrowly Western perspectives. The pretension of historical criticism to total neutrality has revealed itself as a farce. The claim that neutral, bias-free study of Scripture is possible and that historical criticism is its embodiment dissemblingly masks the commitments necessarily involved in historical-critical engagement with Scripture.¹⁶

In addition to the development of historical criticism and contextual approaches, a rapidly growing number of historical and constructive studies on the explicitly theological nature of the task of Christian interpretation of Christian Scripture have appeared during the past twenty years.¹⁷ These efforts stem, in part, from an ecumenical groundswell of interest in both academic and ecclesial contexts in drawing on the riches of the Christian past in order to aid the task of reuniting scriptural exegesis and theology. These new theological approaches promote an emphasis on the need for Christians to identify the constitutively Christian dimensions of Christian scriptural interpretation. In Engaging Scripture, Stephen Fowl captures the emphases of these new theological approaches well. Christian interpretation of Scripture, he writes, at least in order to be distinctively Christian, “needs to involve a complex interaction in which Christian convictions, practices, and concerns are brought to bear on scriptural interpretation in ways that both shape that interpretation and are shaped by it.”¹⁸

Many of these theologically focused studies have attempted to recover aspects of premodern approaches to the function and role of Scripture in the day-to-day lives of Christian communities.¹⁹ Other recent studies have laudably sought to recover and present the achievements of premodern figures and movements in order to address contemporary questions about the nature and interpretation of Scripture.²⁰ The relationship of these three families of approaches to one another is unclear, even to those who affirm the relative legitimacy of each. A multifaceted question arises: How should these various approaches—historical critical, contextual, and theological—be related to one another, and how should they inform contemporary engagement with and use of Scripture in Christian communities today?²¹

The problem of knowing precisely what to do with Scripture and how to interpret it is not restricted, of course, to the academy. The various approaches that have recently emerged in the academic study of Scripture have trickled down to various ecclesial communities with varying effects.²² A significant number of studies have appeared in recent years that examine the ecclesial dimensions of Christian reading and the place of Christian Scripture in Christian community. This literature includes constructive studies, works that attempt to retrieve and employ aspects of premodern understandings of the relationship between Scripture and church, congresses of specific ecclesial traditions, and ecumenically inclined dialogues between different ecclesial communities.²³ New interfaith initiatives, such as Scriptural Reasoning groups, have also brought individuals and groups from different religious traditions together—particularly from the three Abrahamic traditions—to read the respective holy books of represented participants.²⁴

While the Bible is perhaps not as “strange[ly] silent” in many mainline Protestant churches as it was forty years ago, there is often still confusion about how to integrate the ongoing, and so changeable, achievements of historical approaches to Scripture with traditional practices of reverence for Scripture as the written Word of God.²⁵ As the New Testament scholar Dale Martin has recently argued, the historical-critical training that many clerical leaders received in seminary has proven impotent as an aid for effective preaching.²⁶ Contemporary evangelical groups in America, particularly communities that hold to “high views” of the authority of Scripture, are aptly characterized by what Christian Smith has called “pervasive interpretive pluralism.”²⁷ Despite the fact that these Christian groups universally agree that Scripture should be authoritative, they exhibit a great deal of diversity in their understandings of its content and application.²⁸

The problem of interpretive plurality, of course, is not restricted to evangelical groups.²⁹ Nor is it the only problem that contemporary Christian communities face regarding the use and interpretation of Scripture. Stephen Prothero’s Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t draws attention to the widespread phenomenon of biblical illiteracy characteristic of American Christianity.³⁰ Despite the fact that significant percentages of Americans—whether evangelical, mainline Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, or other—affirm the authority and centrality of Scripture for their faith, knowledge of its contents is low and is decreasing across the ecclesial spectrum.³¹

When contemporary readers, whether scholars, laypeople, exegetes, or theologians, do engage Scripture, they are frequently perplexed by the “strange new world[s]” that they encounter depicted within it.³² The historical, moral, and even religious distance that has opened up between the worlds of meaning mediated by the texts of Scripture—to the extent that we can understand them and make correct judgments about them—and the worlds of meaning that most contemporary readers inhabit have proven stupefying to countless Christian believers.³³ The most pressing concerns are moral in nature. What are Christians to do with an authoritative Scripture that seems to depict God as not only condoning, but even sanctioning slavery, wanton violence, genocide, patriarchy, and racism?³⁴ That such difficult “texts of terror” have been invoked to justify atrocities in history requires attention and a response from anyone who would seek to understand and articulate the authority of Christian Scripture in the contemporary world.³⁵ Given not only the distance and strangeness of the worlds of the Bible, but its witness to and ostensible approval of moral atrocities, one historical critic has suggested that the discipline of historical criticism should have the task of completely dismantling the cultural cachet of the Christian Bible as its only end.³⁶ To accept such a proposal is not an option for contemporary Christians committed to Scripture and its authority. But how are they to understand it? What are they to do with it?

The sheer plurality of approaches to th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Advance Prise
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• CHAPTER ONE. Scripture at the Level of Our Times: Situation, Exigencies, and Thesis
• CHAPTER TWO. Historical Precedents: The Rule of Faith in Irenaeus, Origen, and Augustine
• CHAPTER THREE. The Location of Scripture I: The Economic Work of the Triune God
• CHAPTER FOUR. The Location of Scripture II: Human Persons and Human Meaning in History
• CHAPTER FIVE. Scripture in History I: The Realia of Christian Scripture
• CHAPTER SIX. Scripture in History II: The Intelligibility of Christian Scripture
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Scriptural Index