In his two recent books, The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context and The Doctrine of Scripture, Brad East investigates questions of bibliology. While The Doctrine of Scripture presents a condensed and accessible exploration of the subject, The Church’s Book—with which this conversation is chiefly concerned—offers a far more sustained and focused treatment, placing the bibliologies of four prominent theologians in illuminating conversation—Karl Barth and, downstream from Barth’s work, John Webster, Robert Jenson, and John Howard Yoder. Through this curated conversation, East brings to the surface critical yet contrasting underlying ecclesial commitments that generate divergent bibliologies.
The importance and value of East’s work is not chiefly to be found in any constructive proposal in the field of bibliology—although it is not without them—but is rather diagnostic, in its capacity to identify the true source of many of the differences. East’s work in The Church’s Book is largely one of theological architectonics, of looking beyond the surface appearance of the structures of various theologies to discern the ways in which their weight is distributed and upheld, the lines of logical pressure that connect various doctrines together, and the principal load-bearing points. In this respect, it is a sort of meta-theology, a third-level discourse, beyond both the first-level discourse of Scripture in the life and worship of the Church, or the second-level discourse of typical theological reflection. It is a reflection upon our theologizing itself.
The usefulness of such work is most evident in its capacity to identify the theological commitments that give rise to our differences. Where such work is not adequately undertaken, theological discourse is less likely to be fruitful. As East concludes:
What Scripture is for depends on and follows from what the church is…. Relocate the discussion there, and the argument gains traction.
To gain traction, after all, is no small thing. [333]
Such ‘traction’ need not take the form of persuasion of alternative proposals. Often it may be more a matter of appreciating the critical character of various commitments that we and our interlocutors have made. Once the most significant junctures of divergence have been signposted, we can better retrace our steps of logic, and have our conversations at those points where the crucial decisions are actually made. Even if we all continue along the paths to which we earlier committed, we will do so with much greater understanding both of our own positions and those of our interlocutors.
Recent decades have witnessed a remarkable transformation in the receptivity of the academy to theological readings of Scripture, freed from the shackles of historical criticism that once bound it. The broad ‘theological interpretation of Scripture’ (TIS) movement exemplifies this new openness. East defines TIS as ‘an approach to Christian reading of the Bible as canonical Holy Scripture that relativizes historical-critical methods, foregrounds theological convictions and interests, and assumes a scripturally mediated communicative relation between the triune God and the church’ [15]. This movement has pushed back against the proprietary claims of biblical scholarship over the Scriptures, revisiting and retrieving older forms of scriptural reading, among which East lists ‘spiritual interpretation, figural reading, allegory, moral sense, lectio divina, trinitarian hermeneutics, Christological exegesis of the Old Testament, commentary disburdened of historical reconstruction, multiplicity of meanings, identification of God as the principal author of Scripture, and so on’ [19].
East’s work focuses upon a particular stream of theological reflection upon Scripture, which finds its source in the work of Karl Barth (1886-1968). The theology of Barth is seminal for the bibliologies of the three theologians East chooses as his interlocutors. The scale of Barth’s influence upon his successors cannot easily be overstated, being akin to that of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Significantly, it is largely Barth’s work that has prepared the ground for TIS within the academy. While non-Barthian conservative Christians are often beneficiaries of the greater hospitality of the guild to readings of Scripture that operate from strong traditional theological commitments, it is important that we recognize the origins, nature, and limits of this hospitality.
Like so many others, even among his greatest critics, Barth’s theological project establishes the questions and categories in terms of which Webster, Jenson, and Yoder’s projects proceed. Yet, as East observes,
All the more noteworthy, then, is the absence of Barth’s direct material influence on their thought, at least with regard to bibliology and ecclesiology. With the partial exception of Webster… none of their proposals on these loci could be described as “Barthian.” [254]
East begins with a discussion of Barth’s own bibliology. Barth’s commitment was to ‘wresting the Bible out of the critics’ hands, returning it to pride of place in the church’s pulpit, and stepping back to let it speak for itself’ [41]. This commitment was animated to no small degree by Barth’s foundational theological concern, that revelation is grounded in and communicative of God’s own self: ‘God reveals Himself. [God] reveals Himself through Himself. [God] reveals Himself’ [cited, 43]. The Scriptures are ‘prophetic and apostolic witness to divine revelation in Jesus Christ’ [45].
It is important that this all be understood against the backdrop of the once-regnant Protestant liberalism, which provided Barth’s foil. Barth’s work was by no means a complete rejection of historical criticism and it stands no less in opposition to fundamentalist as it does to liberal positions. Barth’s theology was not an utter repudiation of the entire Protestant liberal project so much as a movement through and beyond it—it is post-liberal and post-modern. While theological conservatives may find much to appreciate in Barth’s opposition to liberalism, they should not thereby assume his support of their own ‘fundamentalist’ convictions. They should also be alert to the ways in which many Barthian approaches to Scripture, despite their bracing assertions of divine revelation in the Holy Scriptures, the Scripture’s authority for the Church, and their theological weight in our thinking, can deflect attention from the reality that they are often operating with a relaxed agnosticism, unbelief, or ambivalence regarding the historicity of events and persons that Christians may traditionally have regarded as non-negotiable elements of belief. East criticizes John Webster on this front:
[R]egarding certain issues, there is a lack of texture, a propensity to deploy personified concepts, dogmatic synecdoches, and sweeping generalities that elide important ethical and theological questions. For example, Webster often refers to humanity as Adam’s children, and to Adam as the first human being, created good but fallen. It is unclear from Webster’s writings, however, what historical or theological force this is meant to have. Was there “an” Adam? Or is “Adam” a trope, a stand-in for our evolutionary ancestors? Are the doctrines of original sin and justification affected by evolutionary biology? What about traditional ways of reading the book of Genesis? So far as I can tell, Webster trades on the biblical and classical understanding of Adam without registering his judgments regarding debates from the last two centuries about Adam, Genesis, evolution, and historical criticism. [107]
Barth’s divergence from the Reformed tradition is especially noticeable in his resistance to inerrancy and his concern to maintain a clear distinction between the fallible human scriptures and the Word of God to which they truly ‘witness’. Barth was concerned to resist the divinization of the Scriptures, a divinization that seemed to be occurring when ‘non-communicable divine attributes such as infallibility and inerrancy’ were attributed to them [51]. For Barth, Scripture is mediate—a fallible creature of time and human agency—yet is nonetheless the authoritative instrument of Christ’s rule within his Church, behind which the Church cannot appeal.
The bibliologies of Webster, Jenson, and Yoder develop downstream from Barth’s theological project, yet differ markedly both from Barth’s and each other’s. East’s choice of these three figures is not merely on account of their theological stature. His project concerns the relationship between doctrines of Scripture and doctrines of the Church and Webster, Jenson, and Yoder represent three iterations of Barthian bibliologies, developed in terms of three divergent ‘ecclesial logics,’ which East terms ‘catholic,’ ‘reformed,’ and ‘baptist.’ In East’s taxonomy, ‘catholic’ refers to the ‘Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Oriental Orthodox, Coptic, Eastern, and … Anglican churches’ [33], which Jenson represents. ‘Reformed’ refers to churches in the magisterial Protestant tradition, with Webster as its representative. ‘Baptist’ refers to autonomous and independent free church traditions and Yoder’s bibliology operates within its ecclesial logic.
Treating each of these three bibliologies in turn, East exposes their underlying logic, identifying both their strengths and their deficiencies. He later brings them into conversation with each other, showing places where the deficiencies of one approach can be addressed in part by the insights of one or both of the others.
John Webster’s animating—and characteristically Reformed—concern is to maintain the absolute priority of God and the fact that the Church only exists as a creature of his Word, its being coming from outside of itself. East is concerned that his readers appreciate the ways in which Webster’s bibliology is here responding to theological pressures exerted by his doctrine of the Church. Webster’s ecclesial concern gives rise to a bibliology that stresses that Scripture is a form of divine action, yet which has the effect of obscuring or downplaying the human agencies involved in the production of its texts.
Relative to the church, therefore, the dogmatic effect is a distancing, a sort of alienation. Yes, Webster grants, our forebears in the faith did, in fact, write, edit, gather, and canonize these texts. But, he continues, that is not the source of the texts’ primary identity; nor does it determine their ultimate function and end. [119]
East argues that Webster’s bibliology is weak due to its failure to provide a strong account of human agency relative to the Scriptures. Whether in their production, their content, or their interpretation, Webster’s account of the Scriptures floats several feet off the ground of human embodiment, history, and action. His bibliology has little to say about the actual work of interpreting the Scriptures. The Scriptures that emerge in his account, due to its intense ‘God’s-eye view,’ are thin and abstract. Were Webster’s account a photofit of the Scriptures, you would be utterly unable to pick them out in a police line-up. None of the concreteness of the biblical texts is registered. The heat and dust of first century Palestine, blood, sweat, fat, grain, water, wine, foreskins, the law of Sinai, the lengthy genealogies of families, the detailed instructions for sacrifices, the detailed descriptions of the reigns of kings: all these dissolve into the vaguest of theological abstractions. Likewise, as, in order to return its authority and to emphasize its divine origin, the word of Scripture is rendered alien and extrinsic to the Church, it can come to float above the actual scriptural practices of the Church, only really connecting with them intermittently.
Robert Jenson’s bibliology, representing the catholic traditions, has a very different accent. For Jenson, the Bible is both a product of the Church and is the narrated world which the Church inhabits. Without denying that the Church in some manner receives the texts of Scripture, Jenson does not want us to lose sight of the Church’s agency: the Church, by its dogmatic decision, established the canon. Dogma also plays a constitutive role in the Church’s existence over time.
The church in its life comes, every so often, to climactic crossroads, where its answer to a question essential to the apostolic faith will decide its faithfulness to the gospel. The name for this answer is dogma. [132]
Such dogma is, alongside Scripture, authoritative. It is the church’s binding determination of the bearing of its interpretation of Scripture upon some controverted point. Alongside dogma, the Church’s teaching office is a further interpretative authority, adjudicating between competing claims concerning the interpretation of Scripture or dogma. Scripture, then, requires the exercise of various other norms and agencies to exercise its proper authority within the Church. The Bible is the Church’s book and it enjoys the freedom in the Spirit to read it as it determines in the course of its mission, without needing to justify itself before the bar of the historical critics or any other such agency.
Critical to Jenson’s account is the role played by the Holy Spirit through these human means and agencies:
Scripture, dogma, and holy orders are the field of the Spirit’s work: guarding the deposit of faith, building up the church in the knowledge of the gospel, empowering it for fidelity to its mission, granting it a share in the mind of Christ. In this respect, for example, to the question regarding “who is to defend the biblical text against its” possible misinterpretation, “the final answer is that the Spirit must do so.” [134]
As East observes, Jenson too often smuggles in his own tendentious theological claims under the guise of ‘the tradition.’ Jenson removes God from the place he occupies at the centre of bibliology in the work of such as Barth or Webster, with the Church taking that place. This is a consequence of his more historicized doctrine of God, a radicalization of an earlier Barthian move.
The final of the three theologians is John Howard Yoder (whose inclusion despite his horrific acts of sexual abuse East discusses in a lengthy excursus). Yoder represents a form of bibliology emerging within the context of a baptist ecclesial logic. Yoder’s bibliology is suspicious of church tradition, metaphysics, and elaborate theology while being appreciative of the grounding effect of historical criticism: ‘Its function is to concretize the Bible’s stories and instruction, to put sociopolitical flesh and bones on them, in order to make them even more relevant to today’s church than they have sometimes been thought to be’ [199]. History (and hence also historiography) is important for Yoder. It forces the Christian community to reckon with the concreteness and otherness of the text and with the objectivity of Christ and its own foundation. For Yoder, the Scripture is firmly located in the context of the Church’s communal life. The Scripture is written for the sake of the Church’s life, to be read within the context of the Church, according to its practices of reading. We must be wary of approaches to Scripture that are not alert to its ecclesial purpose. East summarizes:
The character of Scripture and its role in the church fall into place accordingly. Scripture is the story that tells of God’s mighty acts of liberation in the world, with Jesus as the story’s central protagonist and inner rationale. But more, Scripture is the Christian community’s memory of God’s life with the world, his relation to the community, and his saving acts. It is therefore the community-forming charter, baseline, and source for ongoing faithfulness to the normative way of Jesus. [217]
Yoder’s ecclesiology has a primitivist impulse, returning to the stories of Jesus and the earliest church as its model of faithfulness and the source of its self-understanding, a return corresponding to suspicion of later dogmatic developments, notably including the doctrine of the Trinity. Describing Yoder’s ‘deflationary’ bibliology, East observes that:
In an important sense, Yoder’s theology of the Bible is no theology at all; it is a particular application of the general way in which communities maintain self-identity across time through accountability to founding texts (texts, that is, that faithfully mediate founding events). [240]
As he brings these three accounts into conversation, East tries to demonstrate ways in which each can gain from the strengths of the others. Jenson’s account, for instance, challenges Webster’s stark opposition of divine and human action, suggesting ways to think and speak of Scripture that do not pit one of the two against the other: Scripture is a fully human text, while still being entirely divine speech. Yoder’s grounding in history is an antidote to Webster’s abstractions.
Jenson’s account is challenged by Yoder’s and Webster’s. Jenson’s emphasis upon the Spirit’s work in the Church raises the danger of the Scripture’s loss of its critical voice over against the Church, something that is very much maintained in Yoder’s theology. Similarly, Webster raises a strong caution against the way in which Jenson’s theological actualism can threaten the agency of God over against his Church.
Finally, Jenson and Webster have their correctives to offer to Yoder. East suggests that Jenson’s emphasis upon the Church’s agency relative to Scripture reveals the weaknesses of Yoder’s suspicion of the Church, its tradition, interpretative agency, and hermeneutical practices. Webster, for his part, exposes the limitations of Yoder’s deflationary account of Scripture and his wariness of metaphysics. In a concluding point that I find particularly suggestive, East remarks upon Webster’s distinctive emphasis upon the sinfulness of Scripture’s readers, the holiness of Scripture, and the corresponding humble comportment that we must exhibit towards it.
The rest of the book largely consists of some unfortunately fairly brief theological reflections from East upon various of the questions of bibliology that came into focus in the course of his study, which he categorizes in terms of five relationships: ‘that between (1) divine and human action; (2) the theological and the historical; (3) the metaphysical and the moral; (4) scriptural and ecclesial authority; and (5) determinate and open-ended meaning’ [272]. Briefly summarizing:
- We must bring a strong account of divine concurrence to bear upon our bibliology: ‘A single event, individual action, or complex process may simultaneously and wholly be the product of God and of human beings’ [273].
- Christians should respect, while retaining a wariness of and a deflated account of, historical-critical scholarship. It should assert its priority and greater scope over that of the discipline of history, while not avoiding its challenges.
- We must not pit the moral against the metaphysical, the practical against the speculative (oppositions exemplified in the contrast between so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ Christologies). The Scriptures ‘make claims of considerable ontological and metaphysical force’ [281] and, indeed, as we hold the moral and the metaphysical together, each will be the stronger for it.
- Despite the Scripture’s authority over it, the Church has a priority to Scripture, which is a passing and provisional reality, serving the Church in this present age. When the Scripture’s role has been completed, it will pass, while the Church formed by it will endure. This recognition increases our sense of the Scriptures as divinely-given texts designed to serve and to authorize the Church in its mission, granting the Church extensive interpretative authority in the Spirit.
- We should recognize the legitimacy of reading Scripture with a multiplicity of meanings. We have extensive freedom of interpretation, even if not an entirely blank cheque. Provided our readings accord with ‘evangelical faith and catholic truth’ [288] they are legitimate. Without denying the existence of definite historical-grammatical meaning in the text, we must recognize that ‘the reading of Scripture is a spiritual act, and the Spirit blows where he wills’ [290]. Indeed, East goes so far as to apply a form of Augustine’s famous dictum to the issue: ‘Believe, and read as you please’ [287].
One of the more helpful sections of East’s book comes near the end, where he gives models for the contrasting ecclesiologies of catholic, reformed, and baptist theologians and the bibliologies that they entail, illustrating the central thesis of his work that ecclesiologies give rise to bibliologies.
The catholic understanding of the relationship of the Church to Scripture he compares to that of a deputy: ‘Scripture is the directive or missive from a royal ruler sent with or to his official representative; this directive comprises instructions for the representative either to perform himself, or to relay to another in an official capacity, or to communicate to subordinates in her care or under her supervision’ [304]. Within such a model, the Church can both have some involvement in the writing of the directive and receive it from its master. On account of its deputized character, the Church enjoys considerable continuing authority, exercised through its tradition and teaching office.
The reformed understanding of this relationship, East compares to that of a beneficiary of a last will or testament. The once-and-for-all, fixed words of the divine testator are binding and must scrupulously be observed. The Church is the beneficiary of the testamentary text of the Scriptures, but submissive obedience to the divine word is imperative.
Finally, East compares the baptist understanding of the relationship to that of a vanguard in enemy territory and its commander’s orders. The orders lie at the heart of the vanguard’s mission and success is impossible if they are not faithfully executed. Nevertheless, considerable hermeneutical wisdom and prudence must be exercised in the vanguard’s democratized deliberations concerning the proper execution of these orders in the specificity of its diverse and varied contexts.
Within The Church’s Book, East effectively demonstrates his central thesis: our ecclesiologies greatly influence our bibliologies. Nevertheless, throughout the book, I could not escape a niggling sense of dissatisfaction with the manner East and his interlocutors approached the questions of bibliology. While East rightly accused Webster’s bibliology of lacking texture and being inappropriately abstract, this challenge has a broader force and also tells against East’s own approach.
In considering the sort of thing that the Scripture is and its relationship to the Church, East and his interlocutors give only the most cursory attention to the complex and variegated ways in which the Scripture was given to, received by, transmitted through, and functions within the Church and its life.
For instance, even as we appropriately claim that all Scripture is divinely inspired, by its own account it would seem to be quite diversely so. The tablets of the Law were written by the very hand of God (Exodus 32:15-16), while certain other covenant words were written by Moses at the Lord’s instruction and perhaps even direct dictation (e.g., Exodus 24:4; 34:27). The book of Leviticus consists of a series of lengthy divine speeches to Moses and Aaron. By contrast, the historical books do not seem to involve such dictation or recording of divine speech, but are records composed by human authors, albeit with very occasional suggestions of an omniscient narrator, perhaps implying direct divine revelation of certain details. While they are the word of God, they are not direct divine speech in the same manner. The same is even more evident in books such as Proverbs, in which the sage reflects upon the world with divinely-granted insight, which helps him to recognize realities that are in principle accessible to others, even apart from the research of historical sources or special revelation. There is no discussion of what it might mean for the word of the Lord to come to the prophet, or how and whether the literary features of an account of a prophetic vision are themselves revelation.
The voices of Scripture greatly vary, which itself seems to invite a richer theological account both of what it means to confess it to be the word of the Lord and of our relationship to it. At many points, the voice of Scripture is the first-person speech of the Lord, whereas at others, we hear the words of the psalmist or others. What does it mean that the ‘I’ of the psalm of lament is speaking the word of the Lord? Prosopological exegesis, for instance, creatively wrestles with some of these questions. Likewise, accounts of prophetic initiation suggest that the prophet is far more than a mere messenger boy for the Lord’s word. The Lord touches the prophet’s lips or places his burning word within the prophet’s heart. Ezekiel eats the book. The prophet himself becomes a divinely-given sign to his people and also experiences the divine word as commissioning and authorizing. In the prophetic literature in particular, the word of the Lord stands over against the people, frequently rebuking and challenging them, while in writings such as the psalms, the Spirit gives voice to the psalmist’s own heart and through him gives words to the hearts of later worshipers, conscripting their emotions in first-person expressions of praise. Meanwhile, the authorial voice and theological mind of the Apostle Paul is far more pronounced in his work than those of virtually any of the authors of the Old Testament literature. Such features of the biblical witness seem to me to invite reflection and potentially to offer illuminating perspectives upon questions at the heart of East’s project, yet are not explored.
The diverse forms of texts in Scripture also invite quite different modes of reading. In contrasting the hermeneutical approaches of Paul Griffiths and N.T. Wright, for instance, East reflects little upon the fact that the scriptures upon which these two scholars are focusing are exceedingly different. It is not surprising that a reading of the Song of Songs like Griffiths would be playful, creative, and figural, nor that a New Testament scholar such as Wright, dealing chiefly with the synoptic gospels and Pauline epistles, would be deeply concerned with questions of history and the grammar of the text. This is not to reject East’s point about the influence of divergent ecclesiologies upon these contrasting readings, but to observe the importance of factors such as genre.
The diverse forms of biblical texts can be seen in the many forms of their creation and performance. Some texts were recorded in material documents that were intended to serve as physical testimonies, witnessing to the covenant. Psalms were composed for singing, whereas the book of the Law was to be read as a covenant memorial at key occasions of national assembly. Some texts, such as Jeremiah, went through several recensions even during the lifetime of their original author. Indeed, Jeremiah also gives us a good example of how a physical manuscript can serve a quasi-agential role within a prophet’s mission. Furthermore, what ‘authorship’ entails is ambiguous in the case of several biblical texts.
Such considerations of Scripture’s diversity are not without their bearing upon questions of the relationship between the Scriptures and the Church or people of God. The Law, for instance, is the charter of Israel’s existence. Other texts serve as historical memorial, being told and retold in various forms in the life of the people. The words of the prophets, the memorial of the Lord’s deeds in the historical texts, and scripturally authorized ritual practices such as the Passover served to preserve Israel in its existence as a nation through the dissolution of exile and diaspora. Some texts, such as the Lord’s Prayer or the words of institution at the Last Supper, serve to authorize or establish central practices of the Church. That the Apostle Paul chose an epistolatory genre for his writings itself served the formation of the Church. Paul’s writings encouraged and employed the developing network between the earliest churches and other New Testament encyclicals constituted communications by which the Church, though spread across the Roman Empire and beyond, came to understand itself as a unified entity. Theologically, we should also reflect upon the way in which Paul can refer to the Corinthians as epistles of Christ, likely alluding to the promise of the new covenant: that the law would be written upon the heart of the people.
The Church’s relationship with the Scriptures should also be considered in light of its historic material role in preserving, transmitting, copying, gathering, and performing them. Long before pandect manuscripts of the Bible gathered all the texts of the Scriptures between two covers, the Church’s liturgy and life served to bind the many texts of Old and New Testaments into a single collection. Prior to the mass production of printed Bibles and the rise of general literacy allowed for widespread private ownership and readership of scriptures, the Church was the principal site where people would encounter the text, in hearing it being publicly read. Before the rise of secular scriptoria, almost every copy of the Scriptures was a unique product of a long ecclesial tradition of copying and preserving a genealogical line of manuscripts of the holy scriptures. The costliness of the medieval Bible, for instance, made it apt as a physical symbol of the treasured presence of the divine Word in the congregation. The material book continues to serve such a symbolic purpose in many traditions, where the Gospel is processed into the midst of the congregation, or, in some Jewish sects, where scriptures are bound to the body. The Scriptures are not merely abstract ‘texts’, but can be embodied and memorialized in specific manuscripts and books.
Different sorts of texts have different sorts of relationships to their users. A recipe book is not usually found on a bedside table, but in the kitchen, where its ‘reader’ follows its directions in the production of a dish. Likewise, while a play may be read as a book, it primarily belongs on the stage, not the shelf. The diverse genres and texts of the Scriptures should be regarded similarly. We do not need to engage in speculative reconstructions of the Sitz im Leben of various psalms to appreciate that their true home is in the living song of the congregation. Indeed, in Colossians 3:16, the Apostle Paul suggests that such psalm-singing is a mode in which Christ’s word indwells believers.
In the Church’s life and worship, the Scriptures have a rich and multifaceted presence. We are summoned with the words of Scripture, we confess our sins with the words of Scripture, we are absolved with the words of Scripture, we sing the words of the Scripture in the psalms, we hear the words of Scripture in its public reading, memorializing the great acts of the Lord recorded within it, we confess our faith in a summary of the witness of the Scriptures, we greet each other with words from the Scripture, we are exhorted and encouraged from the words of the Scriptures, we pray the words of the Scripture in the Lord’s Prayer, we celebrate the Supper according to the word of the Scripture, and we are blessed and commissioned by the word of the Scripture. Every part of the Church’s life and practice is pervaded by Scripture. It is the very fabric of our communications by which we are rendered a community. While East attends to contrasting approaches to exegesis, he does not sufficiently attend to the bibliological and ecclesial implications of other forms of scriptural practice, such as meditation or memorization.
I doubt that East would have much to disagree with much of the above. In many respects, rather than being observations that tell against his central thesis, they seem to me to afford much material with which to strengthen and develop it. Nevertheless, it seems to me that, first, without close consideration of such matters, we are ill-positioned to reflect upon the broader question of the relationship between the Church and the Scriptures. And, second, such consideration would yield a much richer account, which would be better situated to harmonize the genuine insights of several different theological accounts of Scripture.
East’s work, as I noted at the outset of this discussion, largely represents a third-level discourse, reflecting upon second-level theological discourses concerning bibliology. As such, it is a valuable and insightful work, besides being brilliantly argued and well-written. Even for those of us less persuaded by East’s positive proposals and too fundamentalist to be greatly enthused by Barthian and post-Barthian bibliologies there is much to appreciate within it. Yet, in his reflection upon second-level theological discourses it seems to me that East manifests the weakness of their reflection upon the first-level discourses of Scripture in its varied texts and performances. Bibliologies developed at a remove from the concrete and variegated reality of the Scripture will be limited in their capacity to give good accounts of it.
I want to thank East for his stimulating book and, further, for his interest in this conversation. I would be interested to hear his thoughts on my impressions. Am I being too harsh in my assessment, or perhaps fundamentally misapprehending the nature of these theological enterprises? If there is indeed a problem here, how structural is it? Are there examples of theologians who have perceived and sought to address it? What changes in the relevant fields would be conducive to better treatment of these issues? At what junctures would he push back against my claims? How might more attention to the actual forms of the Scripture and its performances be integrated into the sort of account of the relationship between the Church and the Bible that he is offering?
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast. He is also the contributing editor of the Politics of Scripture series on the Political Theology Today blog. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
In his two recent books, The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context and The Doctrine of Scripture, Brad East investigates questions of bibliology. While The Doctrine of Scripture presents a condensed and accessible exploration of the subject, The Church’s Book—with which this conversation is chiefly concerned—offers a far more sustained and focused treatment, placing the bibliologies of four prominent theologians in illuminating conversation—Karl Barth and, downstream from Barth’s work, John Webster, Robert Jenson, and John Howard Yoder. Through this curated conversation, East brings to the surface critical yet contrasting underlying ecclesial commitments that generate divergent bibliologies.
The importance and value of East’s work is not chiefly to be found in any constructive proposal in the field of bibliology—although it is not without them—but is rather diagnostic, in its capacity to identify the true source of many of the differences. East’s work in The Church’s Book is largely one of theological architectonics, of looking beyond the surface appearance of the structures of various theologies to discern the ways in which their weight is distributed and upheld, the lines of logical pressure that connect various doctrines together, and the principal load-bearing points. In this respect, it is a sort of meta-theology, a third-level discourse, beyond both the first-level discourse of Scripture in the life and worship of the Church, or the second-level discourse of typical theological reflection. It is a reflection upon our theologizing itself.
The usefulness of such work is most evident in its capacity to identify the theological commitments that give rise to our differences. Where such work is not adequately undertaken, theological discourse is less likely to be fruitful. As East concludes:
What Scripture is for depends on and follows from what the church is…. Relocate the discussion there, and the argument gains traction.
To gain traction, after all, is no small thing. [333]
Such ‘traction’ need not take the form of persuasion of alternative proposals. Often it may be more a matter of appreciating the critical character of various commitments that we and our interlocutors have made. Once the most significant junctures of divergence have been signposted, we can better retrace our steps of logic, and have our conversations at those points where the crucial decisions are actually made. Even if we all continue along the paths to which we earlier committed, we will do so with much greater understanding both of our own positions and those of our interlocutors.
Recent decades have witnessed a remarkable transformation in the receptivity of the academy to theological readings of Scripture, freed from the shackles of historical criticism that once bound it. The broad ‘theological interpretation of Scripture’ (TIS) movement exemplifies this new openness. East defines TIS as ‘an approach to Christian reading of the Bible as canonical Holy Scripture that relativizes historical-critical methods, foregrounds theological convictions and interests, and assumes a scripturally mediated communicative relation between the triune God and the church’ [15]. This movement has pushed back against the proprietary claims of biblical scholarship over the Scriptures, revisiting and retrieving older forms of scriptural reading, among which East lists ‘spiritual interpretation, figural reading, allegory, moral sense, lectio divina, trinitarian hermeneutics, Christological exegesis of the Old Testament, commentary disburdened of historical reconstruction, multiplicity of meanings, identification of God as the principal author of Scripture, and so on’ [19].
East’s work focuses upon a particular stream of theological reflection upon Scripture, which finds its source in the work of Karl Barth (1886-1968). The theology of Barth is seminal for the bibliologies of the three theologians East chooses as his interlocutors. The scale of Barth’s influence upon his successors cannot easily be overstated, being akin to that of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Significantly, it is largely Barth’s work that has prepared the ground for TIS within the academy. While non-Barthian conservative Christians are often beneficiaries of the greater hospitality of the guild to readings of Scripture that operate from strong traditional theological commitments, it is important that we recognize the origins, nature, and limits of this hospitality.
Like so many others, even among his greatest critics, Barth’s theological project establishes the questions and categories in terms of which Webster, Jenson, and Yoder’s projects proceed. Yet, as East observes,
All the more noteworthy, then, is the absence of Barth’s direct material influence on their thought, at least with regard to bibliology and ecclesiology. With the partial exception of Webster… none of their proposals on these loci could be described as “Barthian.” [254]
East begins with a discussion of Barth’s own bibliology. Barth’s commitment was to ‘wresting the Bible out of the critics’ hands, returning it to pride of place in the church’s pulpit, and stepping back to let it speak for itself’ [41]. This commitment was animated to no small degree by Barth’s foundational theological concern, that revelation is grounded in and communicative of God’s own self: ‘God reveals Himself. [God] reveals Himself through Himself. [God] reveals Himself’ [cited, 43]. The Scriptures are ‘prophetic and apostolic witness to divine revelation in Jesus Christ’ [45].
It is important that this all be understood against the backdrop of the once-regnant Protestant liberalism, which provided Barth’s foil. Barth’s work was by no means a complete rejection of historical criticism and it stands no less in opposition to fundamentalist as it does to liberal positions. Barth’s theology was not an utter repudiation of the entire Protestant liberal project so much as a movement through and beyond it—it is post-liberal and post-modern. While theological conservatives may find much to appreciate in Barth’s opposition to liberalism, they should not thereby assume his support of their own ‘fundamentalist’ convictions. They should also be alert to the ways in which many Barthian approaches to Scripture, despite their bracing assertions of divine revelation in the Holy Scriptures, the Scripture’s authority for the Church, and their theological weight in our thinking, can deflect attention from the reality that they are often operating with a relaxed agnosticism, unbelief, or ambivalence regarding the historicity of events and persons that Christians may traditionally have regarded as non-negotiable elements of belief. East criticizes John Webster on this front:
[R]egarding certain issues, there is a lack of texture, a propensity to deploy personified concepts, dogmatic synecdoches, and sweeping generalities that elide important ethical and theological questions. For example, Webster often refers to humanity as Adam’s children, and to Adam as the first human being, created good but fallen. It is unclear from Webster’s writings, however, what historical or theological force this is meant to have. Was there “an” Adam? Or is “Adam” a trope, a stand-in for our evolutionary ancestors? Are the doctrines of original sin and justification affected by evolutionary biology? What about traditional ways of reading the book of Genesis? So far as I can tell, Webster trades on the biblical and classical understanding of Adam without registering his judgments regarding debates from the last two centuries about Adam, Genesis, evolution, and historical criticism. [107]
Barth’s divergence from the Reformed tradition is especially noticeable in his resistance to inerrancy and his concern to maintain a clear distinction between the fallible human scriptures and the Word of God to which they truly ‘witness’. Barth was concerned to resist the divinization of the Scriptures, a divinization that seemed to be occurring when ‘non-communicable divine attributes such as infallibility and inerrancy’ were attributed to them [51]. For Barth, Scripture is mediate—a fallible creature of time and human agency—yet is nonetheless the authoritative instrument of Christ’s rule within his Church, behind which the Church cannot appeal.
The bibliologies of Webster, Jenson, and Yoder develop downstream from Barth’s theological project, yet differ markedly both from Barth’s and each other’s. East’s choice of these three figures is not merely on account of their theological stature. His project concerns the relationship between doctrines of Scripture and doctrines of the Church and Webster, Jenson, and Yoder represent three iterations of Barthian bibliologies, developed in terms of three divergent ‘ecclesial logics,’ which East terms ‘catholic,’ ‘reformed,’ and ‘baptist.’ In East’s taxonomy, ‘catholic’ refers to the ‘Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Oriental Orthodox, Coptic, Eastern, and … Anglican churches’ [33], which Jenson represents. ‘Reformed’ refers to churches in the magisterial Protestant tradition, with Webster as its representative. ‘Baptist’ refers to autonomous and independent free church traditions and Yoder’s bibliology operates within its ecclesial logic.
Treating each of these three bibliologies in turn, East exposes their underlying logic, identifying both their strengths and their deficiencies. He later brings them into conversation with each other, showing places where the deficiencies of one approach can be addressed in part by the insights of one or both of the others.
John Webster’s animating—and characteristically Reformed—concern is to maintain the absolute priority of God and the fact that the Church only exists as a creature of his Word, its being coming from outside of itself. East is concerned that his readers appreciate the ways in which Webster’s bibliology is here responding to theological pressures exerted by his doctrine of the Church. Webster’s ecclesial concern gives rise to a bibliology that stresses that Scripture is a form of divine action, yet which has the effect of obscuring or downplaying the human agencies involved in the production of its texts.
Relative to the church, therefore, the dogmatic effect is a distancing, a sort of alienation. Yes, Webster grants, our forebears in the faith did, in fact, write, edit, gather, and canonize these texts. But, he continues, that is not the source of the texts’ primary identity; nor does it determine their ultimate function and end. [119]
East argues that Webster’s bibliology is weak due to its failure to provide a strong account of human agency relative to the Scriptures. Whether in their production, their content, or their interpretation, Webster’s account of the Scriptures floats several feet off the ground of human embodiment, history, and action. His bibliology has little to say about the actual work of interpreting the Scriptures. The Scriptures that emerge in his account, due to its intense ‘God’s-eye view,’ are thin and abstract. Were Webster’s account a photofit of the Scriptures, you would be utterly unable to pick them out in a police line-up. None of the concreteness of the biblical texts is registered. The heat and dust of first century Palestine, blood, sweat, fat, grain, water, wine, foreskins, the law of Sinai, the lengthy genealogies of families, the detailed instructions for sacrifices, the detailed descriptions of the reigns of kings: all these dissolve into the vaguest of theological abstractions. Likewise, as, in order to return its authority and to emphasize its divine origin, the word of Scripture is rendered alien and extrinsic to the Church, it can come to float above the actual scriptural practices of the Church, only really connecting with them intermittently.
Robert Jenson’s bibliology, representing the catholic traditions, has a very different accent. For Jenson, the Bible is both a product of the Church and is the narrated world which the Church inhabits. Without denying that the Church in some manner receives the texts of Scripture, Jenson does not want us to lose sight of the Church’s agency: the Church, by its dogmatic decision, established the canon. Dogma also plays a constitutive role in the Church’s existence over time.
The church in its life comes, every so often, to climactic crossroads, where its answer to a question essential to the apostolic faith will decide its faithfulness to the gospel. The name for this answer is dogma. [132]
Such dogma is, alongside Scripture, authoritative. It is the church’s binding determination of the bearing of its interpretation of Scripture upon some controverted point. Alongside dogma, the Church’s teaching office is a further interpretative authority, adjudicating between competing claims concerning the interpretation of Scripture or dogma. Scripture, then, requires the exercise of various other norms and agencies to exercise its proper authority within the Church. The Bible is the Church’s book and it enjoys the freedom in the Spirit to read it as it determines in the course of its mission, without needing to justify itself before the bar of the historical critics or any other such agency.
Critical to Jenson’s account is the role played by the Holy Spirit through these human means and agencies:
Scripture, dogma, and holy orders are the field of the Spirit’s work: guarding the deposit of faith, building up the church in the knowledge of the gospel, empowering it for fidelity to its mission, granting it a share in the mind of Christ. In this respect, for example, to the question regarding “who is to defend the biblical text against its” possible misinterpretation, “the final answer is that the Spirit must do so.” [134]
As East observes, Jenson too often smuggles in his own tendentious theological claims under the guise of ‘the tradition.’ Jenson removes God from the place he occupies at the centre of bibliology in the work of such as Barth or Webster, with the Church taking that place. This is a consequence of his more historicized doctrine of God, a radicalization of an earlier Barthian move.
The final of the three theologians is John Howard Yoder (whose inclusion despite his horrific acts of sexual abuse East discusses in a lengthy excursus). Yoder represents a form of bibliology emerging within the context of a baptist ecclesial logic. Yoder’s bibliology is suspicious of church tradition, metaphysics, and elaborate theology while being appreciative of the grounding effect of historical criticism: ‘Its function is to concretize the Bible’s stories and instruction, to put sociopolitical flesh and bones on them, in order to make them even more relevant to today’s church than they have sometimes been thought to be’ [199]. History (and hence also historiography) is important for Yoder. It forces the Christian community to reckon with the concreteness and otherness of the text and with the objectivity of Christ and its own foundation. For Yoder, the Scripture is firmly located in the context of the Church’s communal life. The Scripture is written for the sake of the Church’s life, to be read within the context of the Church, according to its practices of reading. We must be wary of approaches to Scripture that are not alert to its ecclesial purpose. East summarizes:
The character of Scripture and its role in the church fall into place accordingly. Scripture is the story that tells of God’s mighty acts of liberation in the world, with Jesus as the story’s central protagonist and inner rationale. But more, Scripture is the Christian community’s memory of God’s life with the world, his relation to the community, and his saving acts. It is therefore the community-forming charter, baseline, and source for ongoing faithfulness to the normative way of Jesus. [217]
Yoder’s ecclesiology has a primitivist impulse, returning to the stories of Jesus and the earliest church as its model of faithfulness and the source of its self-understanding, a return corresponding to suspicion of later dogmatic developments, notably including the doctrine of the Trinity. Describing Yoder’s ‘deflationary’ bibliology, East observes that:
In an important sense, Yoder’s theology of the Bible is no theology at all; it is a particular application of the general way in which communities maintain self-identity across time through accountability to founding texts (texts, that is, that faithfully mediate founding events). [240]
As he brings these three accounts into conversation, East tries to demonstrate ways in which each can gain from the strengths of the others. Jenson’s account, for instance, challenges Webster’s stark opposition of divine and human action, suggesting ways to think and speak of Scripture that do not pit one of the two against the other: Scripture is a fully human text, while still being entirely divine speech. Yoder’s grounding in history is an antidote to Webster’s abstractions.
Jenson’s account is challenged by Yoder’s and Webster’s. Jenson’s emphasis upon the Spirit’s work in the Church raises the danger of the Scripture’s loss of its critical voice over against the Church, something that is very much maintained in Yoder’s theology. Similarly, Webster raises a strong caution against the way in which Jenson’s theological actualism can threaten the agency of God over against his Church.
Finally, Jenson and Webster have their correctives to offer to Yoder. East suggests that Jenson’s emphasis upon the Church’s agency relative to Scripture reveals the weaknesses of Yoder’s suspicion of the Church, its tradition, interpretative agency, and hermeneutical practices. Webster, for his part, exposes the limitations of Yoder’s deflationary account of Scripture and his wariness of metaphysics. In a concluding point that I find particularly suggestive, East remarks upon Webster’s distinctive emphasis upon the sinfulness of Scripture’s readers, the holiness of Scripture, and the corresponding humble comportment that we must exhibit towards it.
The rest of the book largely consists of some unfortunately fairly brief theological reflections from East upon various of the questions of bibliology that came into focus in the course of his study, which he categorizes in terms of five relationships: ‘that between (1) divine and human action; (2) the theological and the historical; (3) the metaphysical and the moral; (4) scriptural and ecclesial authority; and (5) determinate and open-ended meaning’ [272]. Briefly summarizing:
- We must bring a strong account of divine concurrence to bear upon our bibliology: ‘A single event, individual action, or complex process may simultaneously and wholly be the product of God and of human beings’ [273].
- Christians should respect, while retaining a wariness of and a deflated account of, historical-critical scholarship. It should assert its priority and greater scope over that of the discipline of history, while not avoiding its challenges.
- We must not pit the moral against the metaphysical, the practical against the speculative (oppositions exemplified in the contrast between so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ Christologies). The Scriptures ‘make claims of considerable ontological and metaphysical force’ [281] and, indeed, as we hold the moral and the metaphysical together, each will be the stronger for it.
- Despite the Scripture’s authority over it, the Church has a priority to Scripture, which is a passing and provisional reality, serving the Church in this present age. When the Scripture’s role has been completed, it will pass, while the Church formed by it will endure. This recognition increases our sense of the Scriptures as divinely-given texts designed to serve and to authorize the Church in its mission, granting the Church extensive interpretative authority in the Spirit.
- We should recognize the legitimacy of reading Scripture with a multiplicity of meanings. We have extensive freedom of interpretation, even if not an entirely blank cheque. Provided our readings accord with ‘evangelical faith and catholic truth’ [288] they are legitimate. Without denying the existence of definite historical-grammatical meaning in the text, we must recognize that ‘the reading of Scripture is a spiritual act, and the Spirit blows where he wills’ [290]. Indeed, East goes so far as to apply a form of Augustine’s famous dictum to the issue: ‘Believe, and read as you please’ [287].
One of the more helpful sections of East’s book comes near the end, where he gives models for the contrasting ecclesiologies of catholic, reformed, and baptist theologians and the bibliologies that they entail, illustrating the central thesis of his work that ecclesiologies give rise to bibliologies.
The catholic understanding of the relationship of the Church to Scripture he compares to that of a deputy: ‘Scripture is the directive or missive from a royal ruler sent with or to his official representative; this directive comprises instructions for the representative either to perform himself, or to relay to another in an official capacity, or to communicate to subordinates in her care or under her supervision’ [304]. Within such a model, the Church can both have some involvement in the writing of the directive and receive it from its master. On account of its deputized character, the Church enjoys considerable continuing authority, exercised through its tradition and teaching office.
The reformed understanding of this relationship, East compares to that of a beneficiary of a last will or testament. The once-and-for-all, fixed words of the divine testator are binding and must scrupulously be observed. The Church is the beneficiary of the testamentary text of the Scriptures, but submissive obedience to the divine word is imperative.
Finally, East compares the baptist understanding of the relationship to that of a vanguard in enemy territory and its commander’s orders. The orders lie at the heart of the vanguard’s mission and success is impossible if they are not faithfully executed. Nevertheless, considerable hermeneutical wisdom and prudence must be exercised in the vanguard’s democratized deliberations concerning the proper execution of these orders in the specificity of its diverse and varied contexts.
Within The Church’s Book, East effectively demonstrates his central thesis: our ecclesiologies greatly influence our bibliologies. Nevertheless, throughout the book, I could not escape a niggling sense of dissatisfaction with the manner East and his interlocutors approached the questions of bibliology. While East rightly accused Webster’s bibliology of lacking texture and being inappropriately abstract, this challenge has a broader force and also tells against East’s own approach.
In considering the sort of thing that the Scripture is and its relationship to the Church, East and his interlocutors give only the most cursory attention to the complex and variegated ways in which the Scripture was given to, received by, transmitted through, and functions within the Church and its life.
For instance, even as we appropriately claim that all Scripture is divinely inspired, by its own account it would seem to be quite diversely so. The tablets of the Law were written by the very hand of God (Exodus 32:15-16), while certain other covenant words were written by Moses at the Lord’s instruction and perhaps even direct dictation (e.g., Exodus 24:4; 34:27). The book of Leviticus consists of a series of lengthy divine speeches to Moses and Aaron. By contrast, the historical books do not seem to involve such dictation or recording of divine speech, but are records composed by human authors, albeit with very occasional suggestions of an omniscient narrator, perhaps implying direct divine revelation of certain details. While they are the word of God, they are not direct divine speech in the same manner. The same is even more evident in books such as Proverbs, in which the sage reflects upon the world with divinely-granted insight, which helps him to recognize realities that are in principle accessible to others, even apart from the research of historical sources or special revelation. There is no discussion of what it might mean for the word of the Lord to come to the prophet, or how and whether the literary features of an account of a prophetic vision are themselves revelation.
The voices of Scripture greatly vary, which itself seems to invite a richer theological account both of what it means to confess it to be the word of the Lord and of our relationship to it. At many points, the voice of Scripture is the first-person speech of the Lord, whereas at others, we hear the words of the psalmist or others. What does it mean that the ‘I’ of the psalm of lament is speaking the word of the Lord? Prosopological exegesis, for instance, creatively wrestles with some of these questions. Likewise, accounts of prophetic initiation suggest that the prophet is far more than a mere messenger boy for the Lord’s word. The Lord touches the prophet’s lips or places his burning word within the prophet’s heart. Ezekiel eats the book. The prophet himself becomes a divinely-given sign to his people and also experiences the divine word as commissioning and authorizing. In the prophetic literature in particular, the word of the Lord stands over against the people, frequently rebuking and challenging them, while in writings such as the psalms, the Spirit gives voice to the psalmist’s own heart and through him gives words to the hearts of later worshipers, conscripting their emotions in first-person expressions of praise. Meanwhile, the authorial voice and theological mind of the Apostle Paul is far more pronounced in his work than those of virtually any of the authors of the Old Testament literature. Such features of the biblical witness seem to me to invite reflection and potentially to offer illuminating perspectives upon questions at the heart of East’s project, yet are not explored.
The diverse forms of texts in Scripture also invite quite different modes of reading. In contrasting the hermeneutical approaches of Paul Griffiths and N.T. Wright, for instance, East reflects little upon the fact that the scriptures upon which these two scholars are focusing are exceedingly different. It is not surprising that a reading of the Song of Songs like Griffiths would be playful, creative, and figural, nor that a New Testament scholar such as Wright, dealing chiefly with the synoptic gospels and Pauline epistles, would be deeply concerned with questions of history and the grammar of the text. This is not to reject East’s point about the influence of divergent ecclesiologies upon these contrasting readings, but to observe the importance of factors such as genre.
The diverse forms of biblical texts can be seen in the many forms of their creation and performance. Some texts were recorded in material documents that were intended to serve as physical testimonies, witnessing to the covenant. Psalms were composed for singing, whereas the book of the Law was to be read as a covenant memorial at key occasions of national assembly. Some texts, such as Jeremiah, went through several recensions even during the lifetime of their original author. Indeed, Jeremiah also gives us a good example of how a physical manuscript can serve a quasi-agential role within a prophet’s mission. Furthermore, what ‘authorship’ entails is ambiguous in the case of several biblical texts.
Such considerations of Scripture’s diversity are not without their bearing upon questions of the relationship between the Scriptures and the Church or people of God. The Law, for instance, is the charter of Israel’s existence. Other texts serve as historical memorial, being told and retold in various forms in the life of the people. The words of the prophets, the memorial of the Lord’s deeds in the historical texts, and scripturally authorized ritual practices such as the Passover served to preserve Israel in its existence as a nation through the dissolution of exile and diaspora. Some texts, such as the Lord’s Prayer or the words of institution at the Last Supper, serve to authorize or establish central practices of the Church. That the Apostle Paul chose an epistolatory genre for his writings itself served the formation of the Church. Paul’s writings encouraged and employed the developing network between the earliest churches and other New Testament encyclicals constituted communications by which the Church, though spread across the Roman Empire and beyond, came to understand itself as a unified entity. Theologically, we should also reflect upon the way in which Paul can refer to the Corinthians as epistles of Christ, likely alluding to the promise of the new covenant: that the law would be written upon the heart of the people.
The Church’s relationship with the Scriptures should also be considered in light of its historic material role in preserving, transmitting, copying, gathering, and performing them. Long before pandect manuscripts of the Bible gathered all the texts of the Scriptures between two covers, the Church’s liturgy and life served to bind the many texts of Old and New Testaments into a single collection. Prior to the mass production of printed Bibles and the rise of general literacy allowed for widespread private ownership and readership of scriptures, the Church was the principal site where people would encounter the text, in hearing it being publicly read. Before the rise of secular scriptoria, almost every copy of the Scriptures was a unique product of a long ecclesial tradition of copying and preserving a genealogical line of manuscripts of the holy scriptures. The costliness of the medieval Bible, for instance, made it apt as a physical symbol of the treasured presence of the divine Word in the congregation. The material book continues to serve such a symbolic purpose in many traditions, where the Gospel is processed into the midst of the congregation, or, in some Jewish sects, where scriptures are bound to the body. The Scriptures are not merely abstract ‘texts’, but can be embodied and memorialized in specific manuscripts and books.
Different sorts of texts have different sorts of relationships to their users. A recipe book is not usually found on a bedside table, but in the kitchen, where its ‘reader’ follows its directions in the production of a dish. Likewise, while a play may be read as a book, it primarily belongs on the stage, not the shelf. The diverse genres and texts of the Scriptures should be regarded similarly. We do not need to engage in speculative reconstructions of the Sitz im Leben of various psalms to appreciate that their true home is in the living song of the congregation. Indeed, in Colossians 3:16, the Apostle Paul suggests that such psalm-singing is a mode in which Christ’s word indwells believers.
In the Church’s life and worship, the Scriptures have a rich and multifaceted presence. We are summoned with the words of Scripture, we confess our sins with the words of Scripture, we are absolved with the words of Scripture, we sing the words of the Scripture in the psalms, we hear the words of Scripture in its public reading, memorializing the great acts of the Lord recorded within it, we confess our faith in a summary of the witness of the Scriptures, we greet each other with words from the Scripture, we are exhorted and encouraged from the words of the Scriptures, we pray the words of the Scripture in the Lord’s Prayer, we celebrate the Supper according to the word of the Scripture, and we are blessed and commissioned by the word of the Scripture. Every part of the Church’s life and practice is pervaded by Scripture. It is the very fabric of our communications by which we are rendered a community. While East attends to contrasting approaches to exegesis, he does not sufficiently attend to the bibliological and ecclesial implications of other forms of scriptural practice, such as meditation or memorization.
I doubt that East would have much to disagree with much of the above. In many respects, rather than being observations that tell against his central thesis, they seem to me to afford much material with which to strengthen and develop it. Nevertheless, it seems to me that, first, without close consideration of such matters, we are ill-positioned to reflect upon the broader question of the relationship between the Church and the Scriptures. And, second, such consideration would yield a much richer account, which would be better situated to harmonize the genuine insights of several different theological accounts of Scripture.
East’s work, as I noted at the outset of this discussion, largely represents a third-level discourse, reflecting upon second-level theological discourses concerning bibliology. As such, it is a valuable and insightful work, besides being brilliantly argued and well-written. Even for those of us less persuaded by East’s positive proposals and too fundamentalist to be greatly enthused by Barthian and post-Barthian bibliologies there is much to appreciate within it. Yet, in his reflection upon second-level theological discourses it seems to me that East manifests the weakness of their reflection upon the first-level discourses of Scripture in its varied texts and performances. Bibliologies developed at a remove from the concrete and variegated reality of the Scripture will be limited in their capacity to give good accounts of it.
I want to thank East for his stimulating book and, further, for his interest in this conversation. I would be interested to hear his thoughts on my impressions. Am I being too harsh in my assessment, or perhaps fundamentally misapprehending the nature of these theological enterprises? If there is indeed a problem here, how structural is it? Are there examples of theologians who have perceived and sought to address it? What changes in the relevant fields would be conducive to better treatment of these issues? At what junctures would he push back against my claims? How might more attention to the actual forms of the Scripture and its performances be integrated into the sort of account of the relationship between the Church and the Bible that he is offering?
Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham) is adjunct Senior Fellow at Theopolis and is one of the participants in the Mere Fidelity podcast. He is also the contributing editor of the Politics of Scripture series on the Political Theology Today blog. He blogs at Alastair’s Adversaria and tweets using @zugzwanged.
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