or, Why Leithart is Probably Right

I would like to begin by thanking Peter Leithart for inviting me to contribute to this discussion, and especially for allowing me to be last in the order of responses.  Having the benefit of three reflections on Peter’s original posting has been helpful for clarifying the issues, and my response would have been much more difficult to write without them.  Like others who have preceded me, I have my own caveats to add, but they are more along the lines of friendly observations and comments, rather than a full-on critique.  And this is due to the fact that, while sympathetic to a few of the concerns raised by others, I find myself agreeing with the substance of what Leithart is arguing.

I do not take Leithart’s piece as an argument for the non-importance of rules, but an important reminder of their limits.  Alastair Roberts recognizes the theological and interpretive minimalism that characterizes the culture of Bible reading that dominates evangelical modernism, but does not want to throw the baby out with the bath water by doing away with rules altogether.  To be fair, I don’t think Leithart wants to do so either. However, Roberts does not probe the theological reasons why this minimalism continues to thrive in the grammatical historical commentaries evangelicals produce in our day.  He also suggests that this minimalism is not ‘integral’ to the grammatical historical method.  I have my doubts about that, mainly because it has gone through a post-Reformation metamorphosis that has fostered a built-in resistance to figural reading, or what Leithart styles typology.  What now passes for grammatical historical exegesis strikes me as a different bird than what folk like Luther meant by that phrase.[1]  

Speaking from my own experience as both a teacher and preacher in the Anglican-Episcopal tradition, when I’m preparing a sermon and consulting evangelical commentaries, I find them helpful for sorting out the meaning of words within sentences and larger literary contexts.  As an added bonus, though less frequently, I also find reflections on the larger literary structure of the passage.  I take all of this to be important, especially structural observations, because I was taught years ago (and therefore believe) that how well we understand a given passage or book is tied to our understanding of its structure.[2]  The least frequently occurring phenomenon of all is theological reflection, which means that the work of theological construction, especially with reference to the text’s christological witness, is something I typically have to supply.  And for someone who agrees with both Jesus and Leithart that the Torah and the prophets are fundamentally about Jesus the Christ promised in Israel’s scriptures (Luke 24), this strikes me as deeply problematic, if not also an indictment of evangelicalism and the culture of Bible reading its modern, ‘scientific’ retooling of grammatical historical exegesis has produced.

Asking why this is the case brings us to the substance of what Leithart is arguing, which can probably be summarized (albeit not exhaustively) in the statement that “We discern the Author’s full intent by being filled with the Author Himself. When Christ the Word dwells in us, we receive the written word rightly.” To my mind this is a very ‘Augustinian’ way of proceeding and since it is one that I also happen to agree with, one I’d like to expand on a bit. 

In his work On the Teacher (De Magistro), which was intended as a form of hermeneutical catechesis for his son Adeodatus, Augustine explores the question how the Bible discloses its sense to its readers.  In brief, his answer is that biblical texts disclose their sense through Spirit-effected faith and union with Christ the indwelling Teacher, which is also the means by which biblical texts transform their readers, reproducing Christ within the reader, as it were, through the pedagogy of Scripture.  That is, Christ is reproduced on a textual-figural level in Scripture, and then as we submit to the pedagogy of Scripture, Christ is reproduced in us.  The latter aspect is crucial, because the point of reading scripture is not simply to disclose information, leaving the reader uninterpreted and untouched, but to transform the reader.  In short, the key to reading Scripture is union with Christ the Teacher whom Scripture testifies to and discloses.  Call this ‘conversion’ if you like, but it seems to me that something like this has always been a part of the church’s approach to accessing the proper sense of the words given in Scripture.  Apart from union by faith with the Christ testified to in Scripture, its words will remain a puzzle to us.  We may understand them in a historically, socially, politically, or culturally conditioned sense, but their theological sense will elude us, and this is a real problem, because Scripture was given for the purpose of bringing us into communion with the triune God who speaks in Christ by the Spirit.

Though I don’t have time or space to make the case here, I might also add that for both Leithart and Augustine, this pedagogy also includes the sacraments of God’s grace in both testaments (cf. 1 Cor. 10), because scriptural Word and the Word made visible in the liturgy of the sacraments go together.  Leithart makes the argument that Bible and liturgy cannot be separated in the pedagogy of Scripture and the way in which it discloses Christ to us, and the catholic tradition of the church agrees.  In this regard, I’d like to add a few observations about the hermeneutical significance of sacrament of baptism, along with catechesis, for accessing the reality of Christ in Scripture, because it seems to me this coheres with Leithart’s argument regarding the dual importance of belonging to an ecclesial community and submitting oneself to teacher-mentors in the faith. 

Baptism inaugurates us into a scripturally ordered world known as the church, and I am among those who believe that Scripture authorizes the baptism of infants in the household of faith.  Somewhere I think I once read a statement by Leithart to the effect that “all baptism is infant baptism” (perhaps in a reflection on 2 Kings 5), and I’m inclined to agree.  Whether one is brought into the visible church as a child through baptism, followed by confession, or whether one comes into the visible church as an adult through confession followed by baptism, one comes as a ‘child’ that needs to be taught in either case.  Baptism and faith unite us to the ecclesial body of the risen Christ and its language for confessing Christ.  Although strictly speaking, neither the Hebrew of the OT nor the Greek of the NT is my ‘native’ language, through baptism and faith I nevertheless belong to that language in a way that outsiders do not, even if they happen to be native Hebrews or Greeks.  I do not come to the Bible as a tabula rasa, but as one who already belongs to an ordered world brought into being by Christ through the witness of the prophets (OT) and apostles.   And that ‘belonging’ makes a difference in how I will view the Bible, as well as how I read it.  I do not come to Scripture from the ‘detached’ perspective of modern scientific forms of exegesis, but as insider who already knows—through catechetical teachers, guides, and mentors—that Jesus is the promised Christ of Scripture.  This ‘pre-understanding’ forms the Rule by which all other interpretive rules and methods function, and apart from which they obscure rather than illumine what Scripture is about and the purpose for which it was given. 

In sum, baptism and catechesis in the tradition of the church recognized two things about biblical interpretation that scientific versions of grammatical historical method have lost touch with, namely, that reading Scripture according to the end for which it was given means belonging with, uniting with, and communing with, the Christ of which it speaks, and second, that this requires teachers and guides who have matured over time in their understanding of the mysteries of Christ given in Scripture. To read Scripture according to its given purpose requires that we be properly positioned, and that positioning and orientation happens through baptism (sacrament) and catechesis (teachers), not a ‘method’ of reading in the first instance, be it figural or grammatical historical.

I suspect I’m preaching to the choir on this, if not with respect to baptism, then at least with regard to the importance of teacher-mentors and the priority of union with Christ over method.  None of this is an argument against the proper use of ‘method,’ though there will always be disagreement over just what those methods should be.  Some methods are better than others—I prefer figural reading methods, because I think they are able to enclose the legitimate concerns of grammatical historical method while at the same time avoiding a tendency to lockup Scripture’s meaning in something moderns call ‘original historical context’ and ‘original intention.’  That said, to argue that the real issue at stake in reading the Bible is a matter of finding the proper controls strikes me as a misguided project that arose in late 18th century, when the success of modern science led many to model biblical interpretation on interpretive ideals drawn from the mathematization of the natural world.  The Bible became a set of algebraic equations, with every word assigned a ‘single’ meaning or denotation which it then became the job of grammatical historical exegetes to discover.  The figural connotations of these words, arising as they do from the fact that they are embedded in a larger canonical ordering of things, were dismissed as ‘speculation.’  A general tone deafness to Scripture’s theological dimension soon followed.

Of course the irony is that this experiment in scientific exegesis did not reduce speculative approaches to Scripture, as folk like Gabler had hoped, but opened the door to endless historical reconstruction projects of a speculative nature,[3] since this ‘background’ rather than Scripture’s own ordering of history was held to be the key to its meaning.  These projects now run on autopilot in most secular universities, but it has to be said that many seminaries have also joined the game, though in more conservative forms.   I do not wish to be misunderstood.  One can be learn things about Scripture from archaeology and the Bible’s external milieu.  The question is what freight this ‘background’—along with the methods it has fostered—is able to carry when it comes to interpreting Scripture. It seems to me that in this regard, Leithart is right to argue that we’ve placed a burden upon these methods they simply cannot bear.  But Leithart’s project is not simply a negative critique—it also offers a positive alternative, and it is not so much an ‘alternative’ as it is a recovery and continuation of the wisdom of the catholic tradition of the church in these matters.

Reading over the responses in the spirit of charity, I nevertheless found it hard to disentangle them from the project of modernity.  On my view, that project confused symptoms with causes, which is why focus shifted to the question of method. The lack of proper ‘method’ was not the cause underlying the misreading of Scripture, but the symptom of a deeper-lying cause.  The work by Augustine I referenced earlier repeatedly makes the point that the ability of words (verba) to teach us derives from their relation to the things (res) they signify. For this reason one who does not know the reality (res) of which Scripture speaks is not able to draw sense out of its words (Qui non intelligit res, non potest ex verbis sensum elicere). On this account, knowledge derives in the first instance from our union with the theological res disclosed in the words of Scripture, namely, Christ the indwelling Teacher who discloses to us Scripture’s proper sense.   Apart from this Scripture remains obscure and puzzling, and no amount of methodological refinement can overcome that truth.  This understanding of the way in which Scripture discloses its mysteries remained dominant in the church’s hermeneutics through the Reformation and into the early 17th century.  It is now dismissed as a non-scientific, method-less piece of pietism.  However I cannot see how modernity’s misplaced faith in ‘method’ has given us better readers of Scripture—if by the word ‘better’ we mean readers that grapple with the mysteries of Christ and God’s grace disclosed in both testaments.  I suppose it all comes down to the metric we use to quantify what a ‘better’ reading of Scripture consists in—in this regard, I can’t see that the modern fixation on method and controls has given us a better reading of Scripture, though it has increased our knowledge of the world outside the Bible.  In the process, we’ve thought ourselves ‘out of’ the world of Scripture and into another world where we enjoy the status of detached observers, out of the reach of Scripture’s judgment. 


Dr. Don Collett is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Trinity School for Ministry.


[1] I say this because I do not think that evangelicalism’s emaciated version of grammatical historical method lines up with, let alone continues, the grammatical historical approach of Reformational exegetes such as Luther and Calvin, the latter of which were much more in tune with the theological instincts of the church’s continuing catholic tradition when it came to interpreting and exegeting Scripture.

[2] This tends to reinforce the truth of Leithart’s argument about the importance of teacher-mentors.  I’ll have more to say about this as I go along.

[3] The speculative nature of these projects stems from the fact that the social, cultural, and historical context in which the words of Scripture originally functioned is no longer present. The context in which the words of Scripture have come down to us is a canonical-theological context, confessed as such by the church. This context includes history, but a history that has been ordered for ends that are peculiar to its theological purposes.

Next Conversation

or, Why Leithart is Probably Right

I would like to begin by thanking Peter Leithart for inviting me to contribute to this discussion, and especially for allowing me to be last in the order of responses.  Having the benefit of three reflections on Peter’s original posting has been helpful for clarifying the issues, and my response would have been much more difficult to write without them.  Like others who have preceded me, I have my own caveats to add, but they are more along the lines of friendly observations and comments, rather than a full-on critique.  And this is due to the fact that, while sympathetic to a few of the concerns raised by others, I find myself agreeing with the substance of what Leithart is arguing.

I do not take Leithart’s piece as an argument for the non-importance of rules, but an important reminder of their limits.  Alastair Roberts recognizes the theological and interpretive minimalism that characterizes the culture of Bible reading that dominates evangelical modernism, but does not want to throw the baby out with the bath water by doing away with rules altogether.  To be fair, I don’t think Leithart wants to do so either. However, Roberts does not probe the theological reasons why this minimalism continues to thrive in the grammatical historical commentaries evangelicals produce in our day.  He also suggests that this minimalism is not ‘integral’ to the grammatical historical method.  I have my doubts about that, mainly because it has gone through a post-Reformation metamorphosis that has fostered a built-in resistance to figural reading, or what Leithart styles typology.  What now passes for grammatical historical exegesis strikes me as a different bird than what folk like Luther meant by that phrase.[1]  

Speaking from my own experience as both a teacher and preacher in the Anglican-Episcopal tradition, when I’m preparing a sermon and consulting evangelical commentaries, I find them helpful for sorting out the meaning of words within sentences and larger literary contexts.  As an added bonus, though less frequently, I also find reflections on the larger literary structure of the passage.  I take all of this to be important, especially structural observations, because I was taught years ago (and therefore believe) that how well we understand a given passage or book is tied to our understanding of its structure.[2]  The least frequently occurring phenomenon of all is theological reflection, which means that the work of theological construction, especially with reference to the text’s christological witness, is something I typically have to supply.  And for someone who agrees with both Jesus and Leithart that the Torah and the prophets are fundamentally about Jesus the Christ promised in Israel’s scriptures (Luke 24), this strikes me as deeply problematic, if not also an indictment of evangelicalism and the culture of Bible reading its modern, ‘scientific’ retooling of grammatical historical exegesis has produced.

Asking why this is the case brings us to the substance of what Leithart is arguing, which can probably be summarized (albeit not exhaustively) in the statement that “We discern the Author’s full intent by being filled with the Author Himself. When Christ the Word dwells in us, we receive the written word rightly.” To my mind this is a very ‘Augustinian’ way of proceeding and since it is one that I also happen to agree with, one I’d like to expand on a bit. 

In his work On the Teacher (De Magistro), which was intended as a form of hermeneutical catechesis for his son Adeodatus, Augustine explores the question how the Bible discloses its sense to its readers.  In brief, his answer is that biblical texts disclose their sense through Spirit-effected faith and union with Christ the indwelling Teacher, which is also the means by which biblical texts transform their readers, reproducing Christ within the reader, as it were, through the pedagogy of Scripture.  That is, Christ is reproduced on a textual-figural level in Scripture, and then as we submit to the pedagogy of Scripture, Christ is reproduced in us.  The latter aspect is crucial, because the point of reading scripture is not simply to disclose information, leaving the reader uninterpreted and untouched, but to transform the reader.  In short, the key to reading Scripture is union with Christ the Teacher whom Scripture testifies to and discloses.  Call this ‘conversion’ if you like, but it seems to me that something like this has always been a part of the church’s approach to accessing the proper sense of the words given in Scripture.  Apart from union by faith with the Christ testified to in Scripture, its words will remain a puzzle to us.  We may understand them in a historically, socially, politically, or culturally conditioned sense, but their theological sense will elude us, and this is a real problem, because Scripture was given for the purpose of bringing us into communion with the triune God who speaks in Christ by the Spirit.

Though I don’t have time or space to make the case here, I might also add that for both Leithart and Augustine, this pedagogy also includes the sacraments of God’s grace in both testaments (cf. 1 Cor. 10), because scriptural Word and the Word made visible in the liturgy of the sacraments go together.  Leithart makes the argument that Bible and liturgy cannot be separated in the pedagogy of Scripture and the way in which it discloses Christ to us, and the catholic tradition of the church agrees.  In this regard, I’d like to add a few observations about the hermeneutical significance of sacrament of baptism, along with catechesis, for accessing the reality of Christ in Scripture, because it seems to me this coheres with Leithart’s argument regarding the dual importance of belonging to an ecclesial community and submitting oneself to teacher-mentors in the faith. 

Baptism inaugurates us into a scripturally ordered world known as the church, and I am among those who believe that Scripture authorizes the baptism of infants in the household of faith.  Somewhere I think I once read a statement by Leithart to the effect that “all baptism is infant baptism” (perhaps in a reflection on 2 Kings 5), and I’m inclined to agree.  Whether one is brought into the visible church as a child through baptism, followed by confession, or whether one comes into the visible church as an adult through confession followed by baptism, one comes as a ‘child’ that needs to be taught in either case.  Baptism and faith unite us to the ecclesial body of the risen Christ and its language for confessing Christ.  Although strictly speaking, neither the Hebrew of the OT nor the Greek of the NT is my ‘native’ language, through baptism and faith I nevertheless belong to that language in a way that outsiders do not, even if they happen to be native Hebrews or Greeks.  I do not come to the Bible as a tabula rasa, but as one who already belongs to an ordered world brought into being by Christ through the witness of the prophets (OT) and apostles.   And that ‘belonging’ makes a difference in how I will view the Bible, as well as how I read it.  I do not come to Scripture from the ‘detached’ perspective of modern scientific forms of exegesis, but as insider who already knows—through catechetical teachers, guides, and mentors—that Jesus is the promised Christ of Scripture.  This ‘pre-understanding’ forms the Rule by which all other interpretive rules and methods function, and apart from which they obscure rather than illumine what Scripture is about and the purpose for which it was given. 

In sum, baptism and catechesis in the tradition of the church recognized two things about biblical interpretation that scientific versions of grammatical historical method have lost touch with, namely, that reading Scripture according to the end for which it was given means belonging with, uniting with, and communing with, the Christ of which it speaks, and second, that this requires teachers and guides who have matured over time in their understanding of the mysteries of Christ given in Scripture. To read Scripture according to its given purpose requires that we be properly positioned, and that positioning and orientation happens through baptism (sacrament) and catechesis (teachers), not a ‘method’ of reading in the first instance, be it figural or grammatical historical.

I suspect I’m preaching to the choir on this, if not with respect to baptism, then at least with regard to the importance of teacher-mentors and the priority of union with Christ over method.  None of this is an argument against the proper use of ‘method,’ though there will always be disagreement over just what those methods should be.  Some methods are better than others—I prefer figural reading methods, because I think they are able to enclose the legitimate concerns of grammatical historical method while at the same time avoiding a tendency to lockup Scripture’s meaning in something moderns call ‘original historical context’ and ‘original intention.’  That said, to argue that the real issue at stake in reading the Bible is a matter of finding the proper controls strikes me as a misguided project that arose in late 18th century, when the success of modern science led many to model biblical interpretation on interpretive ideals drawn from the mathematization of the natural world.  The Bible became a set of algebraic equations, with every word assigned a ‘single’ meaning or denotation which it then became the job of grammatical historical exegetes to discover.  The figural connotations of these words, arising as they do from the fact that they are embedded in a larger canonical ordering of things, were dismissed as ‘speculation.’  A general tone deafness to Scripture’s theological dimension soon followed.

Of course the irony is that this experiment in scientific exegesis did not reduce speculative approaches to Scripture, as folk like Gabler had hoped, but opened the door to endless historical reconstruction projects of a speculative nature,[3] since this ‘background’ rather than Scripture’s own ordering of history was held to be the key to its meaning.  These projects now run on autopilot in most secular universities, but it has to be said that many seminaries have also joined the game, though in more conservative forms.   I do not wish to be misunderstood.  One can be learn things about Scripture from archaeology and the Bible’s external milieu.  The question is what freight this ‘background’—along with the methods it has fostered—is able to carry when it comes to interpreting Scripture. It seems to me that in this regard, Leithart is right to argue that we’ve placed a burden upon these methods they simply cannot bear.  But Leithart’s project is not simply a negative critique—it also offers a positive alternative, and it is not so much an ‘alternative’ as it is a recovery and continuation of the wisdom of the catholic tradition of the church in these matters.

Reading over the responses in the spirit of charity, I nevertheless found it hard to disentangle them from the project of modernity.  On my view, that project confused symptoms with causes, which is why focus shifted to the question of method. The lack of proper ‘method’ was not the cause underlying the misreading of Scripture, but the symptom of a deeper-lying cause.  The work by Augustine I referenced earlier repeatedly makes the point that the ability of words (verba) to teach us derives from their relation to the things (res) they signify. For this reason one who does not know the reality (res) of which Scripture speaks is not able to draw sense out of its words (Qui non intelligit res, non potest ex verbis sensum elicere). On this account, knowledge derives in the first instance from our union with the theological res disclosed in the words of Scripture, namely, Christ the indwelling Teacher who discloses to us Scripture’s proper sense.   Apart from this Scripture remains obscure and puzzling, and no amount of methodological refinement can overcome that truth.  This understanding of the way in which Scripture discloses its mysteries remained dominant in the church’s hermeneutics through the Reformation and into the early 17th century.  It is now dismissed as a non-scientific, method-less piece of pietism.  However I cannot see how modernity’s misplaced faith in ‘method’ has given us better readers of Scripture—if by the word ‘better’ we mean readers that grapple with the mysteries of Christ and God’s grace disclosed in both testaments.  I suppose it all comes down to the metric we use to quantify what a ‘better’ reading of Scripture consists in—in this regard, I can’t see that the modern fixation on method and controls has given us a better reading of Scripture, though it has increased our knowledge of the world outside the Bible.  In the process, we’ve thought ourselves ‘out of’ the world of Scripture and into another world where we enjoy the status of detached observers, out of the reach of Scripture’s judgment. 


Dr. Don Collett is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Trinity School for Ministry.


[1] I say this because I do not think that evangelicalism’s emaciated version of grammatical historical method lines up with, let alone continues, the grammatical historical approach of Reformational exegetes such as Luther and Calvin, the latter of which were much more in tune with the theological instincts of the church’s continuing catholic tradition when it came to interpreting and exegeting Scripture.

[2] This tends to reinforce the truth of Leithart’s argument about the importance of teacher-mentors.  I’ll have more to say about this as I go along.

[3] The speculative nature of these projects stems from the fact that the social, cultural, and historical context in which the words of Scripture originally functioned is no longer present. The context in which the words of Scripture have come down to us is a canonical-theological context, confessed as such by the church. This context includes history, but a history that has been ordered for ends that are peculiar to its theological purposes.

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