It is nothing but a pleasure to be read by Alastair Roberts. Every author, besides hoping for a readership beyond blood relatives and best friends, daydreams of being taken seriously by serious readers. To be taken seriously is not to be agreed with; it is to be understood on one’s own terms, as a necessary condition of critique. It is to be gotten right. Roberts has gotten me right.
Even better than charity in understanding, though, is pushing the conversation forward. That, likewise, Roberts has done. I thank him for it.
As he notes toward the end of his careful exposition of The Church’s Book, both his criticisms and his larger theological and disciplinary questions are ones with which I am liable to agree. And I do, more or less completely. Since this is a conversation and not an argument, then, the following will be less a tit-for-tat reply than a set of reflections prompted by Roberts that, I hope, is responsive to his queries and occasional dissatisfactions. Whether or not they provide some measure of satisfaction, I look forward to his reply.
*
Let me begin with some background. This book is a major revision of my doctoral dissertation, the original research and writing of which took place in the decade leading up to 2017. Like many others who received graduate training in Bible or theology during this time, I was attracted to “theological interpretation of Scripture” (TIS) as a way to move past the long-standing hostilities between biblical scholars and systematic theologians. The former were freed to read the Bible theologically; the latter were freed to read the Bible period.
As Roberts observes, guild squabbles in the upper echelons of elite academic institutions neither exhaust nor define what Christians in general are doing, much less are permitted to do, at any one time. Pastors and scholars alike have been reading the Bible theologically without ceasing for centuries. But no one is immune from cultural pressures; historical criticism comes for us all. In my experience, some of the most ardent supporters of either historical criticism or of modernist hermeneutics (but I repeat myself) are evangelicals and other low-church types. It’s hard to resist the lure of respectability. Moreover, as I argue in the book, there is an intrinsic and not only an extrinsic relationship between Protestantism, particularly of the non-confessional or non-creedal sort, and “the assured deliverances” of modern biblical scholarship. The church is never without some magisterial authority, infallible or no. The only question is whether it’s acknowledged.
In any case, what eventually became this book has its origins in a time when TIS was ascendant. Its star has dimmed somewhat since then, if I’m not mistaken, but that’s neither here nor there to the point. Rather, I share this background to clarify the nature and scope of the book’s modest intervention. At the time, I noticed that participants in the TIS “movement,” for lack of a better word, were speaking past one another. Often as not, their projects were divergent, even opposed. In an aside, Stephen Fowl had remarked that perhaps these divergences were rooted in confessional differences—that is, in ecclesiology. That’s what I set about exploring in this book: Proximately, are disagreements in TIS rooted in disagreements about the church? Ultimately, is conflict in bibliology traceable to deeper conflict in ecclesiology?
I came to see that it is. At a minimum, then, my hope is that taking this fact into account might enable more fruitful theological debate. Intelligible disagreement is far to be preferred to mutual incomprehension. If the book could have wider import than that, it would be to clear the ground anew for distinctively and substantively catholic and reformed doctrines of Scripture and of its faithful Christian interpretation. I leave it as an open question whether such doctrines from non-creedal, non-confessional, low-church traditions—what Americans typically mean by “evangelicals,” that unwieldy and tempestuous family James McClendon once labeled “small-b baptists”—would necessarily be different from magisterial Protestant proposals, or merely a subset thereof.
*
Roberts is kind enough to mention my first book, The Doctrine of Scripture, which this exchange is not about, though it is relevant to it. It was published first, but I wrote it after The Church’s Book. In that sense the two are a pair, and the first constitutes a sort of sequel out of order. I wrote it in a cheerful but mulishly constructive spirit: an utterly positive presentation of Christian doctrine without all the methodological throat-clearing of the “first” (i.e., second) book. There isn’t anything meta about it; it’s one hundred percent first- and second-order discourse: Christian faith seeking theological understanding of the living word of the Lord Jesus to his body and bride, the church. It presupposes many things: the truth of the Christian confession; the fact of the canon’s being God’s word; the inspiration of the prophets and apostles; the sacred tradition of the church; the prayers and sacraments of the church; and (as a baseline) the authority of the seven ecumenical councils. It looks to patristic and medieval exegesis and commentary as exemplars and guides, gifts of the Spirit to the pilgrim people of Christ. It tries to avoid polemic and instead, where possible, revels in the beauty and goodness of Holy Scripture. That reveling is sometimes conceptual but always, I trust, close to the surface of the sacred page and, I pray, close to the heart of the saints.
I say all this, not for Roberts’ sake, but for readers. Much of my response to his questions is simply to point to what I’ve done there. Not that I have answered every question. But I’ve taken a shot at them. I’ve not remained at the third-order level forever. I’ve come down from the postliberal mountain and quarreled with the many Aarons of biblical scholarship, or at least sought to do so. And I’ve done so in half the space, in a style fit for seminarians and pastors and not only fellow academics accustomed to the crutches of jargon and excessive footnotes.
I will not copy and paste the arguments of that book here, but I will gesture in the direction of a few proposals I hash out there or elsewhere.
First, I argue for an expanded grammar with which to describe the source, production, and canonical form of the Bible. For Roberts is right (again). The internal diversity of Scripture is extraordinary, and too little remarked upon in theological accounts of its origins and role in the church. At the same time, the whole of Scripture is breathed upon by the Spirit; the whole of Scripture is the word of God to the people of God; the whole of Scripture is holy, catholic, and a faithful witness to the gospel of Christ. Setting these two claims next to each other—internal diversity, on one hand, and plenary inspiration, on the other—makes clear how ineffective the single term “inspiration” is for the task of holding them together. Either it retains its circumscribed sense, in which case we lack other load-bearing terms to designate what else constitutes the canon as the church’s Holy Scripture; or it partakes of conceptual mission creep, in which case it comes to mean everything and therefore nothing.
I suggest we expand our bibliological terminology. Following John Webster, we may describe the entire movement from the very first revelations or oral retellings of scriptural events and experiences all the way to the return of Christ himself as the sanctification of Scripture: its millennia-spanning setting-apart by God for the purposes of his will. Within this movement there are discrete episodes as well as drawn-out historical sequences in which and by which God acts—sometimes immediately, usually mediately through the free actions of rational creatures—to effect in time the eventual product of a volume of texts that will serve as an instrument of his living speech. What are some of these?
A detailed answer is forthcoming in an article due this fall. In brief, it involves a toggle between the making and the receiving of Scripture. Importantly, though, the making is not finished until canonization is complete. Only then may the canon qua canon be received. That latter act of reception consists of transmissio, lectio, and illuminatio: church preserves, translates, and hands on God’s word written; she hears and reads it in liturgy and study; and in all these things she is filled and guided by the light of the Holy Spirit.
As for the making of Scripture, I take from Paul Griffiths the term “confection.” Griffiths lifts the word from its proper sacramental context, which describes the “making” of the eucharistic elements to be the body and blood of Christ, and applies it to the “making” of the human words of the prophets and apostles to be the divine word of the risen Christ. From there, I subdivide the Lord’s work of confecting the scriptures into two complex actions: inspiration and chrismation. The former covers the whole sweep from primitive revelatory events and experiences, through oral traditions, to inscription and redaction: the final form of the text. Given its prominence in formal doctrines of Scripture, inspiration calls for little comment (except to clarify that it covers far more than the discrete event of putting ink to parchment). Chrismation demands more, however, since it is little remarked upon, yet the most vulnerable to critique.
For the Bible is not “just there” at the death of the last apostle. It takes centuries for the texts that later form what we call the New Testament to disseminate widely, to be used liturgically, to be approved officially, to be grouped collectively—in a word, to be listed authoritatively with neither omissions (like Revelation) nor additions (like Hermas). This is a time marked by transmission, interpretation, commentary, and preaching, but two tasks in particular, initiated and accompanied by the Spirit, are key. One is a kind of probatio or period of testing: the church discerns the voice of Christ in these, and not other, texts of ancient and trusted provenance. The other is canonization. But both the church’s act of discernment and her act to form a canon (however technically provisional until the prompting of the Reformers) must be more than merely human acts; they must be occasions of the Spirit’s work in and through the church’s ordained authorities; they must, in short, be trustworthy: ecclesial decisions to which the faithful may justly give assent henceforth and for all time, about which clergy and lay alike may say, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…”
As I said above, my term for this period, from St. John the Seer to (say) St. Athanasius’s festal letter of 367 or (instead) St. Augustine’s Hippo synods in the early fifth century, is chrismation. Following Griffiths, I mix sacramental metaphors by depicting the final act of Scripture’s production with the term the Eastern Orthodox use for the completion of the sacrament of baptism. By the oil of chrism, the baptizand is both sealed and perfected; by the closing of the canon, so are the scriptures. Although the authoritative texts the canon comprises had already been written, the authoritative collection of texts was not yet a reality. It had to be made; it had to be finished. Yet, again, it is not the church’s act alone that draws this work to a close. It is the Spirit’s work, principally and preveniently, for only the Spirit, as in the sacrament, is able to make holy. The church is but a minister of his awesome might.
At which point the matter is concluded, for the Spirit has spoken by his servants, the apostles’ successors. The canon is no longer to be debated, but only to be received, and with gratitude: Thanks be to God!
*
Doubtless I have given Roberts more than he asked for, and perhaps not what he asked for at all. Let me draw a connection, then. With an enlarged theological vocabulary for portraying how God is involved in the formation and reception of the canon by God’s people, we are better equipped for taking the next step: namely, a more granular treatment of the different ways different parts of inspired Scripture are inspired Scripture. I will admit at this point that I lack any particularly novel ideas. In fact, what I want to know is Roberts’ own ideas, because I suspect he has them. I will venture one cursory thought, however, before raising some questions of my own.
It seems to me that the quadriga of the Middle Ages is relevant to this issue. By this I mean that the twofold heuristic of a literal and spiritual sense, with the spiritual sense in turn encompassing the allegorical, the tropological, and the anagogical, was developed exactly as a response to the very interpretive questions Roberts raises. How can Leviticus, or Kings, or the Song be the Lord’s word to me, a gentile, who neither lives in the Land nor sacrifices at the Jerusalem temple nor is a subject of the Davidic monarchy? (Granted, we’re all subjects of Messiah’s monarchy: but then, that’s already to read the Old Testament in light of the New!) The premodern answer, ramified with greatest sophistication in the West in the line that runs from St. Augustine to St. Thomas, is that the Bible in general means different things to different people depending on who and when and where they are; and, in particular, what any one passage of the Bible means depends in part on its genre. Moral exhortation has no tropological sense; it is itself direct paraenesis. Tropology applies to historical narrative. Likewise, a Psalm ordinarily has no historical sense; its manner of signifying Christ is distinct from stories about David and his mighty men. Those persons and events in the world to which the signs of Scripture refer are, by God’s sovereign power, themselves living signs; and what they speak of is Mary’s son. Their eloquence is boundless, for those with ears to hear. Not so with the Psalms, which thus call for an alternative hermeneutic. Hence Augustine’s totus Christus: the voice of the Psalms is always the voice of the incarnate Lord, either the head or the body. It requires close attention to the text to discern which is which, and why.
*
That’s one answer, or a gesture in the direction of one. Let me now ask some questions, which arise from larger discussions in both books.
If it is true that different parts of Scripture are Scripture differently, what are the implications for both the authority and the attributes of Scripture? As I mentioned a moment ago, gentile Christians are used to Scripture’s differentiated authority in practice, given that they (we) are not Torah observant. In one sense, then, some part of the Bible “does not apply,” owing to one’s time, place, or genealogy. The Law of Moses is still the word of the Lord, and it surely has something for me to attend to—for from it and through it I may be instructed, enlivened, convicted, rebuked, judged, enlightened, or otherwise brought to spiritual ecstasy by the Lord of Sinai—but its plain sense, in the form of obligations or prohibitions, does not bind me.
I wonder how far this commonsense hermeneutical observation extends. Does it apply to the New Testament? Does it (ever) apply to tacit doctrines or explicit commands in the apostolic writings? By what theological or other criteria would we make such a judgment?
These questions raise an important set of issues for bibliology. Of these, the most pressing to my mind concerns the clarity, and thus the sufficiency, of Scripture. Given what we have canvassed so far, it would seem that the average reader of the Bible may reasonably find it difficult to discover the import of a passage for her life and faith. Would we be justified, therefore, in following Fowl and claiming that the sense of Scripture, just as it stands on the page, is underdetermined? If not, why not? If so, what would it mean to call the Bible clear or sufficient?
Consider a concrete example. In a recent book, The Doctrine of Scripture: An Introduction, Mark D. Thompson offers a lovely, readable, and representatively Reformed account of the Bible. In his treatment of Scripture’s perspicuity, he offers a few definitions (sometimes alluding to other publications of his); here’s the most finely grained: “The clarity of Scripture is that quality of Scripture which, arising from the fact that it is ultimately God’s effective communicative act, ensures the meaning of each biblical text, when viewed in the context of the canonical whole, is accessible to all who come to it in faith.” [125]
I find this a remarkable claim. I also find it wholly unpersuasive. I have never encountered more than a few weak precedents for it prior to the sixteenth century, whether in the West or in the East. Is it true that clarity must apply to each and every biblical text? Must it entail universal accessibility? Assuming we are speaking of adult believers with unimpaired cognitive abilities and a modicum of education (which is far from all Christians!), does clarity necessarily imply that no one who comes to any biblical text in faith (whether as reader or hearer) will fail to access “the meaning” of the text? Might the Lord, in his freedom, speak to a believer through a text in such a way that the content of his speech is distinct from “the meaning” of the selfsame text?
These questions, however sharply phrased they sound, are not meant to impeach Thompson. I’m grateful for his candor. As Roberts knows, I reject this account of the Bible’s clarity in both of my books. I think it is empirically false, theologically unnecessary, and unrequired by the teaching of Scripture itself. Perhaps that’s just to say that I’m not Reformed.
But perhaps not. I would very much like to know what Roberts thinks. Would he offer an alternative account of clarity (or its analogue, sufficiency)? If, after all, the Bible’s extraordinary internal diversity of genres, authors, cultures, languages, and so on requires a differentiated account of the Bible’s inspiration and authority, then it seems to follow that, when ordinary believers come to the text, they will—more than occasionally—have a tough go of it. As I see it, that toughness is lessened considerably by the teaching office of the church and the authority of sacred tradition. They provide the guardrails for faithful hearing of God’s word. They provide the rules within which reading is lawful. They provide the map that orients the baptized in a sometimes bewildering landscape. They are the Spirit’s directions for not getting lost; for holding sound doctrine even when the text is decidedly unclear.
And all this, because Scripture’s import is, at least at times, at least in certain places, underdetermined—that is, apart from the interposition of Spirit-led leaders of the church, past and present. Who’s to say, all on its own, what Jesus’s claim about no one being good but God or the Father being greater than he means absent Nicaea and Constantinople? This is why the ideology of modernist biblical criticism is such a problem. It radicalizes the primitivist impulse to such an extent that a virtue is made of reading the texts of Scripture as if church history never happened. Indeed, as if the church never existed in the first place.
I know that such a vision of biblical interpretation could not be further from Roberts’ own. I mention it in order to understand: What authority does tradition bear on faithful reading of Scripture? Is Thompson’s definition of clarity correct? Is clarity meant to be a practical doctrine in the first place, or something else? How to keep it from bending toward a Christian hermeneutical individualism—every one of us a theological Descartes, alone in a dark room with a Bible and nothing else, quite intentionally, there to help us?
*
Let me close with a few odds and ends.
First, I commend to Roberts and to readers an important recent book on these matters: Joseph K. Gordon’s Divine Scripture in Human Understanding: A Systematic Theology of the Christian Bible. There Gordon gives careful attention to matters of history, genre, and transmission that I neglect in my own books. He does so, though, with an equally substantive philosophical and theological framework for conceptualizing the artifact of Scripture as a simultaneously human and divine document, with help from Bernard Lonergan. Take and read!
Second, I am in fervent agreement with Roberts regarding what Luke Timothy Johnson calls the “talismanic” role of Scripture in the life of public worship and private devotion. In our world of cheap mass-produced objects, including Bibles, and now smartphone apps with a thousand versions of the scriptures, we have utterly lost the spirit of veneration with which believers have for centuries comported themselves in relation to the canon, precisely in its physicality. That is a loss. Those churches that have not disburdened themselves of the liturgical choreography proper to the presence of the sacred page in the midst of the assembly retain at least a semblance of such veneration. The rest of us find ourselves back to square one. To be sure, we can begin inching back in the right direction. (Try kissing your Bible sometime; don’t kiss your iPhone.) But I wonder: What does Roberts make of various online forms of liturgical, devotional, and scriptural mediation? I am skeptical in the extreme, and have written as much. What about Roberts? In his corner of the internet, he commands a growing empire of podcasts, videos, and writings that reach an audience of thousands. I personally know a number of pastors and lay Christians who benefit a great deal from his work, and I’m grateful for it. But what are his hesitations, wonderings, or doubts about the marriage of digital and text, of screens and pages, of internet and canon? I’m eager to learn.
Third, Roberts asks me about the state of the field, what changes might push it in the right direction, and what theologians are doing laudatory work at the intersection of Bible, church, and theology without the pathologies we are both worried about. Regarding the last, a passel of names certainly comes to mind (in no particular order!): Katherine Sonderegger, John Behr, Willie James Jennings, Susannah Ticciati, Matthew Levering, Ian McFarland, Amy Peeler, Thomas Joseph White, Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Paul Griffiths, Peter Leithart, Frances Young, Andrew Davison, Wesley Hill, Hans Boersma, Rowan Williams, Madison Pierce, Kevin Vanhoozer, Kirsten Sanders, Scott Swain, Darren Sarisky, Tyler Wittman. (Also the authors of Echoes of Exodus; has Roberts heard of them?) As for the field, I haven’t a clue. One of the great blessings of not being housed in an elite institution, though I have benefitted from more than one such institution in my training, is that I lack any insights into where the field is or where it’s going. I therefore have no notion of how we might try to nudge it. I say it is a blessing because it frees you—which is to say, me—simply to get on with the work. God will sort the rest out, including the tempests in the teapot we call the Christian academy.
But that’s enough for now. Roberts has my thanks. I look forward to his response.
Brad East is assistant professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of The Doctrine of Scripture and the editor of Robert Jenson’s The Triune Story: Collected Essays on Scripture. His work has been published in Modern Theology, International Journal of Systematic Theology, Scottish Journal of Theology, and Pro Ecclesia, as well as The Christian Century, Commonweal, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, and more.
It is nothing but a pleasure to be read by Alastair Roberts. Every author, besides hoping for a readership beyond blood relatives and best friends, daydreams of being taken seriously by serious readers. To be taken seriously is not to be agreed with; it is to be understood on one’s own terms, as a necessary condition of critique. It is to be gotten right. Roberts has gotten me right.
Even better than charity in understanding, though, is pushing the conversation forward. That, likewise, Roberts has done. I thank him for it.
As he notes toward the end of his careful exposition of The Church’s Book, both his criticisms and his larger theological and disciplinary questions are ones with which I am liable to agree. And I do, more or less completely. Since this is a conversation and not an argument, then, the following will be less a tit-for-tat reply than a set of reflections prompted by Roberts that, I hope, is responsive to his queries and occasional dissatisfactions. Whether or not they provide some measure of satisfaction, I look forward to his reply.
*
Let me begin with some background. This book is a major revision of my doctoral dissertation, the original research and writing of which took place in the decade leading up to 2017. Like many others who received graduate training in Bible or theology during this time, I was attracted to “theological interpretation of Scripture” (TIS) as a way to move past the long-standing hostilities between biblical scholars and systematic theologians. The former were freed to read the Bible theologically; the latter were freed to read the Bible period.
As Roberts observes, guild squabbles in the upper echelons of elite academic institutions neither exhaust nor define what Christians in general are doing, much less are permitted to do, at any one time. Pastors and scholars alike have been reading the Bible theologically without ceasing for centuries. But no one is immune from cultural pressures; historical criticism comes for us all. In my experience, some of the most ardent supporters of either historical criticism or of modernist hermeneutics (but I repeat myself) are evangelicals and other low-church types. It’s hard to resist the lure of respectability. Moreover, as I argue in the book, there is an intrinsic and not only an extrinsic relationship between Protestantism, particularly of the non-confessional or non-creedal sort, and “the assured deliverances” of modern biblical scholarship. The church is never without some magisterial authority, infallible or no. The only question is whether it’s acknowledged.
In any case, what eventually became this book has its origins in a time when TIS was ascendant. Its star has dimmed somewhat since then, if I’m not mistaken, but that’s neither here nor there to the point. Rather, I share this background to clarify the nature and scope of the book’s modest intervention. At the time, I noticed that participants in the TIS “movement,” for lack of a better word, were speaking past one another. Often as not, their projects were divergent, even opposed. In an aside, Stephen Fowl had remarked that perhaps these divergences were rooted in confessional differences—that is, in ecclesiology. That’s what I set about exploring in this book: Proximately, are disagreements in TIS rooted in disagreements about the church? Ultimately, is conflict in bibliology traceable to deeper conflict in ecclesiology?
I came to see that it is. At a minimum, then, my hope is that taking this fact into account might enable more fruitful theological debate. Intelligible disagreement is far to be preferred to mutual incomprehension. If the book could have wider import than that, it would be to clear the ground anew for distinctively and substantively catholic and reformed doctrines of Scripture and of its faithful Christian interpretation. I leave it as an open question whether such doctrines from non-creedal, non-confessional, low-church traditions—what Americans typically mean by “evangelicals,” that unwieldy and tempestuous family James McClendon once labeled “small-b baptists”—would necessarily be different from magisterial Protestant proposals, or merely a subset thereof.
*
Roberts is kind enough to mention my first book, The Doctrine of Scripture, which this exchange is not about, though it is relevant to it. It was published first, but I wrote it after The Church’s Book. In that sense the two are a pair, and the first constitutes a sort of sequel out of order. I wrote it in a cheerful but mulishly constructive spirit: an utterly positive presentation of Christian doctrine without all the methodological throat-clearing of the “first” (i.e., second) book. There isn’t anything meta about it; it’s one hundred percent first- and second-order discourse: Christian faith seeking theological understanding of the living word of the Lord Jesus to his body and bride, the church. It presupposes many things: the truth of the Christian confession; the fact of the canon’s being God’s word; the inspiration of the prophets and apostles; the sacred tradition of the church; the prayers and sacraments of the church; and (as a baseline) the authority of the seven ecumenical councils. It looks to patristic and medieval exegesis and commentary as exemplars and guides, gifts of the Spirit to the pilgrim people of Christ. It tries to avoid polemic and instead, where possible, revels in the beauty and goodness of Holy Scripture. That reveling is sometimes conceptual but always, I trust, close to the surface of the sacred page and, I pray, close to the heart of the saints.
I say all this, not for Roberts’ sake, but for readers. Much of my response to his questions is simply to point to what I’ve done there. Not that I have answered every question. But I’ve taken a shot at them. I’ve not remained at the third-order level forever. I’ve come down from the postliberal mountain and quarreled with the many Aarons of biblical scholarship, or at least sought to do so. And I’ve done so in half the space, in a style fit for seminarians and pastors and not only fellow academics accustomed to the crutches of jargon and excessive footnotes.
I will not copy and paste the arguments of that book here, but I will gesture in the direction of a few proposals I hash out there or elsewhere.
First, I argue for an expanded grammar with which to describe the source, production, and canonical form of the Bible. For Roberts is right (again). The internal diversity of Scripture is extraordinary, and too little remarked upon in theological accounts of its origins and role in the church. At the same time, the whole of Scripture is breathed upon by the Spirit; the whole of Scripture is the word of God to the people of God; the whole of Scripture is holy, catholic, and a faithful witness to the gospel of Christ. Setting these two claims next to each other—internal diversity, on one hand, and plenary inspiration, on the other—makes clear how ineffective the single term “inspiration” is for the task of holding them together. Either it retains its circumscribed sense, in which case we lack other load-bearing terms to designate what else constitutes the canon as the church’s Holy Scripture; or it partakes of conceptual mission creep, in which case it comes to mean everything and therefore nothing.
I suggest we expand our bibliological terminology. Following John Webster, we may describe the entire movement from the very first revelations or oral retellings of scriptural events and experiences all the way to the return of Christ himself as the sanctification of Scripture: its millennia-spanning setting-apart by God for the purposes of his will. Within this movement there are discrete episodes as well as drawn-out historical sequences in which and by which God acts—sometimes immediately, usually mediately through the free actions of rational creatures—to effect in time the eventual product of a volume of texts that will serve as an instrument of his living speech. What are some of these?
A detailed answer is forthcoming in an article due this fall. In brief, it involves a toggle between the making and the receiving of Scripture. Importantly, though, the making is not finished until canonization is complete. Only then may the canon qua canon be received. That latter act of reception consists of transmissio, lectio, and illuminatio: church preserves, translates, and hands on God’s word written; she hears and reads it in liturgy and study; and in all these things she is filled and guided by the light of the Holy Spirit.
As for the making of Scripture, I take from Paul Griffiths the term “confection.” Griffiths lifts the word from its proper sacramental context, which describes the “making” of the eucharistic elements to be the body and blood of Christ, and applies it to the “making” of the human words of the prophets and apostles to be the divine word of the risen Christ. From there, I subdivide the Lord’s work of confecting the scriptures into two complex actions: inspiration and chrismation. The former covers the whole sweep from primitive revelatory events and experiences, through oral traditions, to inscription and redaction: the final form of the text. Given its prominence in formal doctrines of Scripture, inspiration calls for little comment (except to clarify that it covers far more than the discrete event of putting ink to parchment). Chrismation demands more, however, since it is little remarked upon, yet the most vulnerable to critique.
For the Bible is not “just there” at the death of the last apostle. It takes centuries for the texts that later form what we call the New Testament to disseminate widely, to be used liturgically, to be approved officially, to be grouped collectively—in a word, to be listed authoritatively with neither omissions (like Revelation) nor additions (like Hermas). This is a time marked by transmission, interpretation, commentary, and preaching, but two tasks in particular, initiated and accompanied by the Spirit, are key. One is a kind of probatio or period of testing: the church discerns the voice of Christ in these, and not other, texts of ancient and trusted provenance. The other is canonization. But both the church’s act of discernment and her act to form a canon (however technically provisional until the prompting of the Reformers) must be more than merely human acts; they must be occasions of the Spirit’s work in and through the church’s ordained authorities; they must, in short, be trustworthy: ecclesial decisions to which the faithful may justly give assent henceforth and for all time, about which clergy and lay alike may say, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…”
As I said above, my term for this period, from St. John the Seer to (say) St. Athanasius’s festal letter of 367 or (instead) St. Augustine’s Hippo synods in the early fifth century, is chrismation. Following Griffiths, I mix sacramental metaphors by depicting the final act of Scripture’s production with the term the Eastern Orthodox use for the completion of the sacrament of baptism. By the oil of chrism, the baptizand is both sealed and perfected; by the closing of the canon, so are the scriptures. Although the authoritative texts the canon comprises had already been written, the authoritative collection of texts was not yet a reality. It had to be made; it had to be finished. Yet, again, it is not the church’s act alone that draws this work to a close. It is the Spirit’s work, principally and preveniently, for only the Spirit, as in the sacrament, is able to make holy. The church is but a minister of his awesome might.
At which point the matter is concluded, for the Spirit has spoken by his servants, the apostles’ successors. The canon is no longer to be debated, but only to be received, and with gratitude: Thanks be to God!
*
Doubtless I have given Roberts more than he asked for, and perhaps not what he asked for at all. Let me draw a connection, then. With an enlarged theological vocabulary for portraying how God is involved in the formation and reception of the canon by God’s people, we are better equipped for taking the next step: namely, a more granular treatment of the different ways different parts of inspired Scripture are inspired Scripture. I will admit at this point that I lack any particularly novel ideas. In fact, what I want to know is Roberts’ own ideas, because I suspect he has them. I will venture one cursory thought, however, before raising some questions of my own.
It seems to me that the quadriga of the Middle Ages is relevant to this issue. By this I mean that the twofold heuristic of a literal and spiritual sense, with the spiritual sense in turn encompassing the allegorical, the tropological, and the anagogical, was developed exactly as a response to the very interpretive questions Roberts raises. How can Leviticus, or Kings, or the Song be the Lord’s word to me, a gentile, who neither lives in the Land nor sacrifices at the Jerusalem temple nor is a subject of the Davidic monarchy? (Granted, we’re all subjects of Messiah’s monarchy: but then, that’s already to read the Old Testament in light of the New!) The premodern answer, ramified with greatest sophistication in the West in the line that runs from St. Augustine to St. Thomas, is that the Bible in general means different things to different people depending on who and when and where they are; and, in particular, what any one passage of the Bible means depends in part on its genre. Moral exhortation has no tropological sense; it is itself direct paraenesis. Tropology applies to historical narrative. Likewise, a Psalm ordinarily has no historical sense; its manner of signifying Christ is distinct from stories about David and his mighty men. Those persons and events in the world to which the signs of Scripture refer are, by God’s sovereign power, themselves living signs; and what they speak of is Mary’s son. Their eloquence is boundless, for those with ears to hear. Not so with the Psalms, which thus call for an alternative hermeneutic. Hence Augustine’s totus Christus: the voice of the Psalms is always the voice of the incarnate Lord, either the head or the body. It requires close attention to the text to discern which is which, and why.
*
That’s one answer, or a gesture in the direction of one. Let me now ask some questions, which arise from larger discussions in both books.
If it is true that different parts of Scripture are Scripture differently, what are the implications for both the authority and the attributes of Scripture? As I mentioned a moment ago, gentile Christians are used to Scripture’s differentiated authority in practice, given that they (we) are not Torah observant. In one sense, then, some part of the Bible “does not apply,” owing to one’s time, place, or genealogy. The Law of Moses is still the word of the Lord, and it surely has something for me to attend to—for from it and through it I may be instructed, enlivened, convicted, rebuked, judged, enlightened, or otherwise brought to spiritual ecstasy by the Lord of Sinai—but its plain sense, in the form of obligations or prohibitions, does not bind me.
I wonder how far this commonsense hermeneutical observation extends. Does it apply to the New Testament? Does it (ever) apply to tacit doctrines or explicit commands in the apostolic writings? By what theological or other criteria would we make such a judgment?
These questions raise an important set of issues for bibliology. Of these, the most pressing to my mind concerns the clarity, and thus the sufficiency, of Scripture. Given what we have canvassed so far, it would seem that the average reader of the Bible may reasonably find it difficult to discover the import of a passage for her life and faith. Would we be justified, therefore, in following Fowl and claiming that the sense of Scripture, just as it stands on the page, is underdetermined? If not, why not? If so, what would it mean to call the Bible clear or sufficient?
Consider a concrete example. In a recent book, The Doctrine of Scripture: An Introduction, Mark D. Thompson offers a lovely, readable, and representatively Reformed account of the Bible. In his treatment of Scripture’s perspicuity, he offers a few definitions (sometimes alluding to other publications of his); here’s the most finely grained: “The clarity of Scripture is that quality of Scripture which, arising from the fact that it is ultimately God’s effective communicative act, ensures the meaning of each biblical text, when viewed in the context of the canonical whole, is accessible to all who come to it in faith.” [125]
I find this a remarkable claim. I also find it wholly unpersuasive. I have never encountered more than a few weak precedents for it prior to the sixteenth century, whether in the West or in the East. Is it true that clarity must apply to each and every biblical text? Must it entail universal accessibility? Assuming we are speaking of adult believers with unimpaired cognitive abilities and a modicum of education (which is far from all Christians!), does clarity necessarily imply that no one who comes to any biblical text in faith (whether as reader or hearer) will fail to access “the meaning” of the text? Might the Lord, in his freedom, speak to a believer through a text in such a way that the content of his speech is distinct from “the meaning” of the selfsame text?
These questions, however sharply phrased they sound, are not meant to impeach Thompson. I’m grateful for his candor. As Roberts knows, I reject this account of the Bible’s clarity in both of my books. I think it is empirically false, theologically unnecessary, and unrequired by the teaching of Scripture itself. Perhaps that’s just to say that I’m not Reformed.
But perhaps not. I would very much like to know what Roberts thinks. Would he offer an alternative account of clarity (or its analogue, sufficiency)? If, after all, the Bible’s extraordinary internal diversity of genres, authors, cultures, languages, and so on requires a differentiated account of the Bible’s inspiration and authority, then it seems to follow that, when ordinary believers come to the text, they will—more than occasionally—have a tough go of it. As I see it, that toughness is lessened considerably by the teaching office of the church and the authority of sacred tradition. They provide the guardrails for faithful hearing of God’s word. They provide the rules within which reading is lawful. They provide the map that orients the baptized in a sometimes bewildering landscape. They are the Spirit’s directions for not getting lost; for holding sound doctrine even when the text is decidedly unclear.
And all this, because Scripture’s import is, at least at times, at least in certain places, underdetermined—that is, apart from the interposition of Spirit-led leaders of the church, past and present. Who’s to say, all on its own, what Jesus’s claim about no one being good but God or the Father being greater than he means absent Nicaea and Constantinople? This is why the ideology of modernist biblical criticism is such a problem. It radicalizes the primitivist impulse to such an extent that a virtue is made of reading the texts of Scripture as if church history never happened. Indeed, as if the church never existed in the first place.
I know that such a vision of biblical interpretation could not be further from Roberts’ own. I mention it in order to understand: What authority does tradition bear on faithful reading of Scripture? Is Thompson’s definition of clarity correct? Is clarity meant to be a practical doctrine in the first place, or something else? How to keep it from bending toward a Christian hermeneutical individualism—every one of us a theological Descartes, alone in a dark room with a Bible and nothing else, quite intentionally, there to help us?
*
Let me close with a few odds and ends.
First, I commend to Roberts and to readers an important recent book on these matters: Joseph K. Gordon’s Divine Scripture in Human Understanding: A Systematic Theology of the Christian Bible. There Gordon gives careful attention to matters of history, genre, and transmission that I neglect in my own books. He does so, though, with an equally substantive philosophical and theological framework for conceptualizing the artifact of Scripture as a simultaneously human and divine document, with help from Bernard Lonergan. Take and read!
Second, I am in fervent agreement with Roberts regarding what Luke Timothy Johnson calls the “talismanic” role of Scripture in the life of public worship and private devotion. In our world of cheap mass-produced objects, including Bibles, and now smartphone apps with a thousand versions of the scriptures, we have utterly lost the spirit of veneration with which believers have for centuries comported themselves in relation to the canon, precisely in its physicality. That is a loss. Those churches that have not disburdened themselves of the liturgical choreography proper to the presence of the sacred page in the midst of the assembly retain at least a semblance of such veneration. The rest of us find ourselves back to square one. To be sure, we can begin inching back in the right direction. (Try kissing your Bible sometime; don’t kiss your iPhone.) But I wonder: What does Roberts make of various online forms of liturgical, devotional, and scriptural mediation? I am skeptical in the extreme, and have written as much. What about Roberts? In his corner of the internet, he commands a growing empire of podcasts, videos, and writings that reach an audience of thousands. I personally know a number of pastors and lay Christians who benefit a great deal from his work, and I’m grateful for it. But what are his hesitations, wonderings, or doubts about the marriage of digital and text, of screens and pages, of internet and canon? I’m eager to learn.
Third, Roberts asks me about the state of the field, what changes might push it in the right direction, and what theologians are doing laudatory work at the intersection of Bible, church, and theology without the pathologies we are both worried about. Regarding the last, a passel of names certainly comes to mind (in no particular order!): Katherine Sonderegger, John Behr, Willie James Jennings, Susannah Ticciati, Matthew Levering, Ian McFarland, Amy Peeler, Thomas Joseph White, Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Paul Griffiths, Peter Leithart, Frances Young, Andrew Davison, Wesley Hill, Hans Boersma, Rowan Williams, Madison Pierce, Kevin Vanhoozer, Kirsten Sanders, Scott Swain, Darren Sarisky, Tyler Wittman. (Also the authors of Echoes of Exodus; has Roberts heard of them?) As for the field, I haven’t a clue. One of the great blessings of not being housed in an elite institution, though I have benefitted from more than one such institution in my training, is that I lack any insights into where the field is or where it’s going. I therefore have no notion of how we might try to nudge it. I say it is a blessing because it frees you—which is to say, me—simply to get on with the work. God will sort the rest out, including the tempests in the teapot we call the Christian academy.
But that’s enough for now. Roberts has my thanks. I look forward to his response.
Brad East is assistant professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of The Doctrine of Scripture and the editor of Robert Jenson's The Triune Story: Collected Essays on Scripture. His work has been published in Modern Theology, International Journal of Systematic Theology, Scottish Journal of Theology, and Pro Ecclesia, as well as The Christian Century, Commonweal, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, and more.
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