Category: Theology

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Biblical Studies Science and Religion Theology

Enns, "The Evolution of Adam": A Preliminary Thought

I received Peter Enns’ book “The Evolution of Adam:  What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins” today, and read through the Introduction and the last few chapters. I admire Pete.  His work has helped me a great deal, and though I don’t know him well, I consider him one of my “theological friends.”

There is a great deal of wisdom in Pete’s book on this important and difficult subject.  His Biblical scholarship is clear and sensible.  It seems to me obvious, as Pete describes, that Paul’s use of “Adam” in the New Testament is quite different than what the “original author(s)” of the Genesis 1-4 narratives had in mind.  It also seems to me plain, as Pete describes, that Paul thought of “Adam” as a “literal” first man, and that Paul had no notion at all of a group of early hominids or something along those lines.  A proper hermeneutical appropriation of these texts for our understanding today — a “good reading” — requires us to recognize this and not to read our science into the texts.  At the same time, we cannot in good conscience ignore or rewrite well established empirical findings of the natural sciences.

But I’m going to differ with Pete on the conclusion he draws from this:  he thinks any effort to think of “Adam” as a literal person is ad hoc and doomed, and that the better approach is to think of Paul’s use of Adam merely as an instance of accommodation.  I think that this presents, probably inadvertently, an overly static understanding of “revelation” and an overly mechanical understanding of the relationship between scripture and doctrine.

It seems to me that, although Pete begins to move beyond Reformation polemics by incorporating the New Perspective on Paul, he’s still stuck in a “flat” Reformed conception of the correspondence between scripture and doctrine and the role of “tradition” in forming scriptural interpretation and doctrine.  He employs the category of “accommodation,” but he still seems to assume that “interpretation” is a matter of understanding “what Paul thought” — with necessary adjustments for “accommodation” — and that “doctrine” is just what falls immediately out of one-to-one correspondence with “interpretation.”

But that is not really “spiritual” or “theological” interpretation.  It isn’t just about “what Paul thought,” but how the Church has employed Paul’s texts as the Church lived out its experience in the world.  And it seems to me that we should hear the Church’s strong witness to the belief, as it has reflected on Paul’s texts, that “sin” and “death” are at first rooted in our commonality in the first man, “Adam.”  (This is true of both the Eastern and Western Churches, but of course with differing perspectives on what this means, and of course there are Catholic and Eastern Orthodox scholars today who don’t consider a “literal” Adam important.)  This isn’t “ad hoc”; it’s a recognition that “theology” is much more than just a “plain reading” of the Bible.

It is manifestly true that the Church’s ongoing hermeneutical task — it’s hearing of the texts “ever and again” (to sound like Barth) in light of new knowledge and new experience — requires us to describe the Church’s doctrine in a way that accounts for all such truth.  Doctrine develops in that we continually seek to better understand the fullness of that which has been revealed. And so Pete is right that we today cannot merely say “there was a first man, Adam,” as Paul probably would have said if asked a question about human origins (Paul does not, we should note, ever address such questions directly).

But our job in constructing doctrine and theology is never just to restate “what Paul (or John or Mark or Luke or Peter or Moses or Q or P….) said.”  Our job is to offer the best synthetic descriptions of the mysteries of creation, sin, and redemption that we can muster, without eliding anything we believe is true.

So, I am much more comfortable with synthetic descriptions that take “Adam” as all at once “real person” and “symbol.”  If the modern natural sciences suggest that this “Adam” must have been somehow connected with a larger population of evolving hominids (as it seems strongly to do), that is curious but on reflection not terribly troubling.  The claim is not that “Genesis teaches” or “Paul teaches” or the “Bible teaches” anything about evolving hominids, but neither does Genesis or Paul or the Bible exclude anything about them, because it suggests nothing about them at all. “Hominids” were not on the ancient writers’ and redactors’ radar screens.

What the Church has heard consistently as it has listened to scripture is that the history of “humanity” is marred at its very root, in “Adam.”  What the Church has developed as it has listened to scripture is a metaphysically thick conception of “humanity” that goes beyond yet is rooted in the text of scripture. The idea that we should think of “Adam” as the first “true human,” the first to participate in the Divine life and to enjoy all the faculties of the human “soul,” seems to me most fruitful.  True, this is not exactly what the authors and editors of Genesis 1-4, or Paul, probably had in mind, but it builds through centuries reason and experience with the voice of the Holy Spirit on what Genesis and Paul said.

That is how “theology,” as opposed to “Biblicism,” works.  Pete applies this deftly to inter-testamental hermeneutics and in particular to Paul’s creative appropriation of Genesis 1-4.  Pete is reaching for the same thing with respect to the Church’s theological hermeneutics, but it seems to me that he is always falling back into the box of older Reformed assumptions about scripture’s sufficiency and perspicuity, compounded perhaps by the divide between “Theology” and “Biblical Studies” about the shape and role of Biblical interpretation.  I suggest we need to get beyond those divides to practice “theological” interpretation.

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Hermeneutics Patristics Theological Hermeneutics Theology

The Fathers on Scripture

I’m auditing a Themes in Patristic Theology class at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary with Dr. John Behr.  A good portion of the first class was a reading of Melito of Sarids’ homily On Pascha.  There is some controversy about whether Melito was anti-Semitic, but as Fr. Behr explained it, the references to “Israel” in this text are really references to us, the hearers, as we approach the table:  we are the reason Christ died.

Here are some notes on on the lecture about the Fathers’ approach to scripture:

1.  Scripture is cryptic.  “If it were not cryptic, it wouldn’t be scripture.”  “You don’t have to work at interpreting a shopping list.”

2.  Scripture is harmonious.  It all speaks about Christ.

3.  Scripture is contemporary — it wasn’t written primarily for the benefit of the original hearers, but primarily for our benefit.

4.  Scripture is inspired, and inspiration is inseparable from how Christ opens the book to us.  It requires an “inspired” reading which turns on an ongoing encounter with Christ.  Christ is not a “lens” through which we view scripture, but is already present in scripture.  Scripture is a sort of thesaurus or treasury of Christ.

My sensibility as a theological interpreter who wants to be conversant with Biblical Studies might lead me to place more emphasis on the text’s reception by the original hearing community.  But with the Fathers, and Barth, and all good theological interpreters, notice this sense that scripture’s power isn’t so much in its static content as in its life as the reader encounters Christ in and through the text.

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Science and Religion Theology

The Unintended Reformation: Science

I’m enjoying Brad S. Gregory’s excellent new book The Unintended Reformation:  How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society.  Gregory demonstrates how the metaphysical revolution of late scholasticism — nominalism, voluntarism, and the univocity of being — influenced the broader culture at the time of the Reformation, including through the Reformation itself.  With respect to religion and science, Gregory notes that

the alleged incompatibility of science and religion derives not from science but in the first instance from a seemingly arcane metaphysical presupposition of some medieval scholastic thinkers.  Yet it would be misleading to attribute it exclusively to the ideas of intellectual elites.  Their views reinforced what would seem to be the general influence of linguistic grammar on conceptions of God, regardless of the historical period in question.  Few things are as difficult as keeping clear about the distinction between God and creation as understood in traditional Christianity, and hence few things are as intuitive as unself-consciously regarding God as a quasi-spatial part within the whole of reality.  Despite their formal, grammatical similarity, ‘the book is on the table’ and ‘God is in heaven’ are not comparable statements in Christian metaphysics.  But beginning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, influential thinkers reinforced the default tendency in discourse about God and in effect made them comparable.

[T]he widespread acceptance of a new metaphysics set the stage for conceptions in modern science about the mutual exclusivity of natural causality and transcendent, divine presence.

Great stuff.

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Biblical Studies Theological Hermeneutics Theology

Christian Smith and "The Bible Made Impossible": Comments on Some Reviews

The Englewood Review of Books today offers a good review by Michael Bowling of Christian Smith’s book The Bible Made Impossible.

When I first read Smith’s book, I thought he had nailed some important points, but that he had overlooked the important “theological interpretation” approach that animates a diverse group of contemporary readers (for example, the authors of the excellent Brazos Theological Commentary series). I was interested, then, to read Wheaton professor Daniel Treier’s summary in Books & Culture of the recent theological interpretation conference at Regent College, in which Treier briefly addresses Smith’s book.  Treier is a leading evangelical advocate of theological interpretation.

On the whole, I think Treier’s comments are good.  However, I think Treier is mistaken to attribute all the problems Smith observes to “sociological” factors. The issue is surely theological: the weak ecclesiology and nominalist / voluntarist God of much of Protestantism and particularly of modern evangelicalism.

Treier notes that Smith’s newly-adopted Catholic tradition also has its problems — a proposition no one could dispute.  But if, as Treier suggests, the celibate male Priesthood has caused problems (if Treier is referring here to the Clergy sex abuse scandals, the causal link in fact is unclear at best), then those are inherently theological as well.  (A pinched theology of sexuality?)

I believe Hans Boersma’s “Heavenly Participation” is on the right track.   (There is an excellent and friendly exchange between Treier and Boersma in the current Christian Scholars Review.)  Whatever the “Priesthood of all Believers” means, the individualistic heritage of the Reformation needs to be reformed and re-sourced.  And “sola scriptura,” practiced as it usually is as “sol_o_” scriptura, is neither theologically sound nor “Biblical” (see Acts 15) nor historically accurate nor — not surprisingly, as this always flows from theology — sociologically viable.

 

Categories
Beauty of the Christian Faith Spirituality Theology

The Ocean of Orthodoxy

If I’m honest, I have to admit that the word “orthodoxy” makes me nervous.  It conjures a long history of violence and oppression — inquisitions, burnings at the stake, religious wars, bonfires of the vanities, anathemas and counter-anathemas, and the more subtle manipulations and exclusions of the various petty tyrants, troglodytes and buffoons who are stock characters in anyone’s experience who has lived in any branch of the Church for a while.

But if I consider it more carefully, “orthodoxy” in the best sense is like the sea.

My family has vacationed at the New Jersey shore for over forty-five years.  If I stand on the beach, at the edge of the sea, if I breath slowly and deeply, I participate with every sense in the beautiful, untamed life of this amazing planet.  Sunlight warms my face and illumines my gaze; sand and water scrub and cool my feet; moist, salty air fills my nose and lungs; the rhythmic surf washes over my ears and stills my mind.  I am contented with the givenness of this creaturely space, gazing on its boundless horizon, contemplating its incomprehensible lifespan, participating in the gift of fecund being.

The same is true if I come to the Creed in wonder, seeking understanding.  The reality narrated in the Creed, like the sea, is given, a gift.  It provides the grammatic, incarnational structure for contemplation of the incomprehensible Triune God, complete and at peace, creating, self-emptying in incarnation, giving fellowship and community, restoring, healing, re-creating and making things right in love.  It summarizes the experience of countless others who have stood at the shore of this magnificent sea, and invites me to participate in the very life of God — where the Father brings life from nothing, the Son speaks Wisdom to chaos, the Spirit hovers over the womb of the world.

This is why “orthodoxy,” in this best sense — the sense of the heart of a story shaped by the God who gave Himself on the cross — is a gift to be welcomed.  Here, I rest, I explore, I marvel, I am freed from my self to find myself in life beyond my self.  Here, I glimpse the simple unity of faith, hope, beauty, truth, and love.

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Theology

Voluntarism, Nominalism, and God's Will

“God can do ANYTHING he wants.”  So say Preston Sprinkle and Francis Chan in their book “Erasing Hell.”  It’s fair to say that this proposition is the cornerstone of Sprinkle and Chan’s theodicy of Hell.  “Won’t God get what he wants?”  So asks Rob Bell in his book “Love Wins.”  It’s also fair to say that this question, along with the belief that God wants everyone to be saved, is the cornerstone of Bell’s theodicy of Hell.

Both Sprinkle / Chan and Bell focus on God’s will.  But is there something missing from their theodicies?   Theologically, the question concerns the relation of God’s will to His nature.  Philosophically, the question relates to whether “universal” substances exist apart from their particular instantiations (“universals”), or whether substances are merely names for particular instances of things (“nominalism”).

Consider an apple.  What is an apple?  Is this particular apple on my kitchen table one instantiation of the substance “apple” – a substance with some sort of universal metaphysical  (“beyond-“ or “above-“ physical) properties that are shared by all apples?  Or is “apple” simply a name I apply to this object before me as a result of some observable similarities with other objects (other things we also call “apple”) that have no metaphysical connection to the “apple” on my table?

For many who claim a modern scientific worldview, there are only particular objects called “apple,” which are more or less related to other particular objects in morphology and chemical composition, all of which are categorized as “apples” for the sake of convenience.  What is “real,” in this view, is merely chemistry and physical laws, not any substance “apple.”  In contrast, for those who believe in universal properties, “apple” implies properties that are real and transcendent of any one apple.  This apple on my table has properties such as “red” in common with other apples because those common properties transcend any one particular apple.  (For a good overview of the problem of “universals,” see the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

The modern nominalist view of “nature” derives from and is related to nominalist and “voluntarist” views of God in late medieval philosophy.  The medieval scholastic philosophers wrestled with this question:  Is God’s will a product of God’s rational nature, such that God only calls things “good” that are substantively “good”?  Or is God’s will utterly unconstrained, such that God is free to call “good” whatever He desires to call “good,” without any limiting principle (referred to as “voluntarism”)?

One of the key figures in the development of these ideas was the monk and philosopher William of Ockham (c. 1288-1348).  Ockham took a strong – some would argue extreme – view of Divine sovereignty in relation to morality and ethics.  Here is an example of Ockham’s voluntarist approach:

I say that although hate, theft, adultery and the like have a bad circumstance annexed de communi  lege [“by the common law”] so far as they are done by someone who is obliged by divine precept to the contrary, nevertheless, in respect of everything absolute in those acts they could be done by God without any bad circumstance annexed. And they could be done by the wayfarer even meritoriously if they were to fall under a divine precept, just as now in fact their opposites fall under divine precept . . . But if they were thus done meritoriously by the wayfarer, then they would not be called or named theft, adultery, hate, etc., because those names signify such acts not absolutely but by connoting or giving to understand that one doing such acts is obliged to their opposites by divine precept.  (Ockham, Various Questions, Vol. 5 (emphasis added)).

For Ockham, then, there was no “absolute” notion of “the good.”  “Good” is just a word we apply to whatever God commands.  The parallels to both Sprinkle / Chan’s and Bell’s theodicies are obvious.

This sort of view sounds humble and pious.  Who are we to question God?  The problem, however, is that it begs the question of who “God” is.

Before the rise of nominalism, Christian theology generally held that God’s being and will are inseparable.   God is “simple” and does not have separate “parts” such as “being” and “will.”  This means that God wills and acts as He is.  If God acts in ways that are “loving,” it is because  in His Triune being, “God is love” (1 John 4:8); and if God acts in ways that are “just” it is because in His Triune being God is just.

To be sure, Christian theology has always held that God’s essential nature is fundamentally unknowable by human beings, because God is radically other than His creation.  However, many of the Church’s great thinkers believed we could know about God either through His “energies” in creation (e.g., many of the Eastern Fathers) or by “analogy” to the being of creation (e.g., Thomas Aquinas).  At the very least, the apophatic theologians held that we can speak about what God is not like.

Nominalism and voluntarism, in contrast, divorced God’s will from His being, and thus drastically limited the role of theology for ethics.  As theologian John Milbank notes,

In the thought of the nominalists . . . the Trinity loses its significance as a prime location for discussing will and understanding in God and the relationship of God to the world.  No longer is the world participatorily enfolded within the divine expressive Logos, but instead a bare divine unity starkly confronts the other distinct unities which he has ordained. . . .  This dominance of logic and of the potential absoluta is finally brought to a peak by Hobbes:  ‘The right of Nature, whereby God reigneth over men, and punisheth those that break his Lawes, is to be derived, not from his creating them, as if he required obedience as of gratitude for his benefits; but from his Irresistible Power.’”  (John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, at pp. 15-16 (quoting Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.))

Catholic philosopher Edward Feser recently summarized the fruits of Ockham’s reductionism as follows:

the Renaissance humanists’ revolution in culture, Luther’s revolution in theology, Descartes’ revolution in philosophy, and Hobbes’s revolution in politics also have their roots in Ockhamism.  With the humanists this was manifested in their emphasis on man as an individual, willing being rather than as a rational animal.  In Luther’s case, the prospect of judgment by the terrifying God of nominalism and voluntarism – an omnipotent and capricious will, ungoverned by any rational principle – was cause for despair.  Since reason is incapable of fathoming this God and good works incapable of appeasing Him, faith alone could be Luther’s refuge.  With Descartes, the God of nominalism and voluntarism opened the door to a radical doubt in which even the propositions of mathematics – the truth of which was in Descartes’ view subject to God’s will no less than the contingent truths of experience – were in principle uncertain.  And we see the moral and political implications of nominalism in the amoral, self-interested individuals of Hobbes’s so-called “state of nature,” and in the fearsome absolutist monarch of his Leviathan, whose relationship to his subjects parallels that of the nominalist God to the universe.

I might not agree completely with Feser’s hasty appraisal of Luther.  Note, however, Feser’s reference to judgment by “the terrifying God of nominalism and voluntarism – an omnipotent and capricious will, ungoverned by any rational principle….”  If the governing principle of a theodicy is that “God can do ANYTHING he wants,” how does that theodicy avoid the capricious, irrational god of nominalism and voluntarism?  How could even someone presently confident of his election to salvation have any reason to believe that his election will not be suddenly and arbitrarily revoked on the last day?  Why should God keep His promises?  At the same time, if the governing principle is that “God always gets what he wants,” how can human beings retain any moral freedom or responsibility?

Note also Feser’s linkage between nominalism, voluntarism, and ethics.  If law and ethics derive from God’s commands, and God’s commands are the product of pure, ungoverned power and will, then what principle can check the tyranny of earthly rulers who claim absolute and unquestionable power on the basis of Divine right?

Finally, note Feser’s reference to epistemology.  This relates to the broad question of universals versus nominalism, because a belief in metaphysical universals suggests that God first conceives of and then brings into existence by His commands a reality with stability and purpose.   For Augustine and Aquinas, universals were Ideas in the mind of God, and so to investigate the order of things was to learn something of God.  For Ockham, there was no reason for any similarity between things other than God’s choice.  This lead Ockham to conceive of “science” as a strictly empirical and logical investigation into particular things, a move that led to the sort of empiricism in which God is no longer a necessary “hypothesis” (ala Pierre Simon-Laplace and Richard Dawkins).

As Protestant theologian Hans Boersma notes in his recent book Heavenly Participation:  the Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry, after voluntarism and nominalism, “nature, now separate from reason, became fundamentally unintelligible,” and “the link between divine will and divine knowledge, between God’s goodness and his truth” was severed.  The result was skepticism about any ability to reason about truth claims and “an emphasis on predestination in which God appeared to take arbitrary decisions about the eternal salvation and damnation of human beings.”  The response to this sort of problem is to recapture the deep theological resources of our faith, which begin and end in the being of the Triune God.

 

Categories
Law and Policy Theology

The Relationship Between Doctrine and Ethics

This is a new post I have up over on Jesus Creed.

It has been a while since I posted on Nicholas Wolterstorff’s  books Justice:  Rights and Wrongs and Justice in Love – life and work have been busy!  Today I return to the theme of “justice.”   However I will take a diversion from Wolterstoff’s particular thesis to address a question that underlies, and I think in some ways animates, his project:  the relationship of Doctrine to Ethics and Justice.  This seemingly arcane issue is timely and relevant because it goes to the heart of contemporary Evangelical debates such as Calvinism vs. Arminianism, the doctrine of final judgment and Hell, and gay marriage.

The question is this:  do Ethics serve as a control on Doctrine?  Or does Doctrine serve as a control on Ethics?  Or do Doctrine and Ethics stand in a perfectly harmonious relationship?  Or do Doctrine and Ethics stand in some more complex sort of relationship?

Rob Bell’s book Love Wins at times seems to suggest that Ethics control Doctrine.  That is, if our ethical beliefs are offended by some construction of the doctrine of final judgment, then that doctrinal construction is wrong.  Francis Chan’s book Erasing Hell and Mark Galli’s book God Wins at times seem to suggest that Doctrine controls Ethics.  That is, if the doctrine of God’s sovereignty says “God can do whatever he wants,” and the doctrine of scripture says God’s word is inviolable, then the doctrinal belief that God has ordained the damnation of the majority of humanity cannot be questioned, even if this offends our ethical beliefs.

So who is right?

A helpful sketch of the options can be found in Alan Torrance and Michael Banner’s introduction to the excellent volume The Doctrine of God and Theological Ethics.  Torrance and Banner trace the modern influence of the “Doctrine controls Ethics” theme to Emmanuel Kant.  For Kant, who sought to establish ethics on the foundation of “pure reason,” “[e]ven the holy one of the Gospel must be compared with our ideal of moral perfection, before he is recognized as such.”  The problem with this approach is that “God” becomes reducible to human reason – and thus ceases to be God.

Torrance and Banner cite Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonheoffer as champions of “Doctrine controls Ethics.”   Barth famously rejected any “natural theology” and therefore refused to locate ethics outside of dogmatics – “dogmatics itself is ethics,” Barth said.  Torrance and Banner do not mention Cornelius Van Til, whose presuppositionalist apologetic holds significant influence over American neo-Calvinists and many other Evangelicals.  Van Til thought Barth was a heretic, but he was cut from the same mold as Barth concerning the priority of Doctrine over Ethics.  The key difference was that Barth’s doctrine of revelation was Christological – for Barth, Christ was the ground of revelation and of ethics – whereas Van Til’s doctrine of revelation was Biblicist.  The problem with the “Doctrine controls Ethics” approach is that “Ethics” become reducible to the pure exercise of power – and thus cease to be Ethics.

As Torrance and Banner note, however, a “control” relationship between Doctrine and Ethics is not the only option.  Many great Christian thinkers have held that Doctrine and Ethics, properly understood, stand in a perfectly harmonious relationship.  This was the view of Thomas Aquinas, whose theory of “natural law” remains the basis for contemporary Roman Catholic social teaching and also informs many contemporary Evangelical ethicists.  For Aquinas, the “natural law” is part of the created order, which flows from the very being of God.  Natural law, as part of creation, is knowable through natural reason.  But the proper exercise of reason is never “pure reason,” apart from faith.  Reason is rather a preparation for contemplation of the deeper truths of faith, which enrich and go beyond, but never contradict, the truths of reason.  A problem with this approach is that it can tend to discount the effects of sin on nature and the consequent need for grace to overcome the corruption of nature.  (This perceived priority of nature over grace was a key point of disputation between Martin Luther and the the Catholic apologists who opposed him).

It is also possible, Torrance and Banner suggest, that Doctrine and Ethics could simply occupy entirely different spheres of knowledge.  In this heuristic, “Doctrine” is essentially the mystical contemplation of a God who is rationally unknowable, and Ethics represents what is necessary to get by in the material world.  Torrance and Banner cite the Germen pietist and Anabaptist quietist traditions as examples of this approach.  The emphasis for ethics here is withdrawal from the corruption of the world.  We might add that some Eastern Orthodox and Pentecostal approaches fit this mold.  (There is also, I think, a significant pietist / quietist strain in Mark Galli’s recent books, along with a “control” strain).

Finally, Torrance and Banner offer a hybrid approach, to which they clearly are partial:  “the relationship – or better, relationships – between doctrine and ethics are more various and subtle than can be represented by any one of the positions thus far mentioned, taken in isolation.”  This final position, they say, “will not simply reject these accounts; indeed it will think it likely that these accounts were founded on certain insights or seeming insights which must, in turn, be accommodated or accounted for in any satisfactory treatment of this matter.”

It probably would be no surprise to anyone who has read any of my essays and blogs that I tend to agree with this hybrid / dialectical approach, which of course must be carefully developed.  But what do you think of this sketch of different approaches to the relationship between Doctrine and Ethics?  How might a better understanding of the relationship between Doctrine and Ethics help inform our present debates about Calvinism, Hell, and social issues such as homosexuality or the welfare state?

 

Categories
Science and Religion Theology

Dallas Willard and Bill Hurlbut on Science and Faith

Here is Part 1 of a fascinating conversation between philosopher Dallas Willard and Stanford neurobiologist William Hurlbut, sponsored by the Trinity Forum.

Categories
Theological Hermeneutics Theology

Perspectives on Theological Hermeneutics Video

Here’s a video I did on theological hermeneutics for an adult class I’m teaching.

Categories
Biblical Studies Theology

On Theological Interpretation

Here is Brian Daley’s talk abstract from the Regent College Center for Catholic-Evangelical Dialogue conference on theological interpretation.  Looks like a great conference, wish I could go.  The theological interpretation movement, in my view, is one of the most fruitful efforts to understand scripture-as-scripture, avoiding the extremes of both literalistic and demythologizing heremeneutics.

Today, as a result of renewed interest in early Christian biblical interpretation, and of the widely shared sense that the historical-critical study of the Scriptures cannot, by itself, nourish the spiritual hunger of Christian disciples, many people who read the Bible as the norm of their faith and life are convinced that the only kind of interpretation that can do justice to the biblical text must be theological: a style of interpretation that takes God and God’s work in the world seriously, as the true shaper of the text and as its final meaning. Here, with the help of some of the Church Fathers, we will set out to ask what “theological interpretation of Scripture” might mean. The God proclaimed by the Christian Bible is a God who is always engaged with history, and with human beings: the God who creates, judges, heals, unifies, and steers the human race steadily towards union with Himself. Christians understand that this takes place because God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that it is in the history of creation and salvation itself that God’s Trinitarian identity has gradually become known: that what Patristic authors called “theology,” in the strict sense — speaking about God — itself becomes possible. For Christians, this takes place in the Church: the community of disciples unified by hearing and living from God’s Word, the place in which the scriptural canon is identified and its messages interpreted. Because we always live and speak in the context of history, we need to use all the tools of modern historical and philological scholarship to identify what any particular biblical text originally may have been intended to say; but we need also to hear that text in our own context of lived faith, if the text is to remain the saving Word of God for us, and not to be simply an ancient religious document. To read any particular passage of the Bible without historical and critical awareness may well prevent us from understanding its full meaning correctly; but to read it without faith, and apart from our own context within a worshipping community, keeps us from understanding that full meaning as a part of Holy Scripture, and as the Word of life.