Four Views on Moving Beyond the Bible to Theology (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology)

by Zondervan

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

How can a young church keep its way straight as it wends its way through contexts that the Word of God never mentions? What does it mean to be biblical in the twenty-first century?

living biblically is a matter not only of volition, but of cognition, affection, and imagination as well, or that living biblically is ultimately a community project, not the accomplishment of an individual.

It’s all about right interpretive reason, about knowing how to move from sacra pagina (holy Scripture) to sacra doctrina (holy teaching). The issue is not whether but how the Bible exercises its authority despite its historical and cultural distance. We can eliminate the two extremes: that what the biblical authors say has antiquarian interest only, and that everything the biblical authors say is transculturally normative. What we need are biblical principles for discerning the Word of God in the words of man, the theologically normative from the anthropologically relative.

Who is in the best position to lead us to the promised land of right reading, to use the Bible to illumine our pathway through territories known and unknown? Who holds the keys to the kingdom of biblical interpretation? There are many academic pretenders to the theological throne. My own view is that theological interpretation of Scripture—reading the Bible in the church to hear God—is a joint project.

sacra pagina is profitable for sacra doctrina, which in turn is profitable for sacra vita (holy living), which includes sanctification and shalom. Theology is “practical” in the fullest, most robust sense: it is a matter not of building systems of ideas so much as it is of world-building, or rather, of building up the world into the fullness of Christ (Eph. 1:22–23). Being biblical, then, ultimately refers to what may be termed a “political” task: building the city of God amidst the ruins of the city of Man.

DMin over PhD?

The gospel is the good news that God the Father has said and done things in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit for the salvation of the world.

What the church seeks to understand is essentially a true story: the history of God’s dealings with his creatures. By story I am thinking not of a particular kind of literary genre so much as a series of events that, when taken together as a unified drama, serve as a lens or interpretative framework through which Christians think, make sense of their experience, and decide what to do and how to do it.

Going beyond the Bible biblically is ultimately a matter of participating in the great drama of redemption of which Scripture is the authoritative testimony and holy script. The Bible communicates divine doctrina that instructs the church in the way of the divine drama. Theology involves not only theoretical but theatrical reasoning: practical reasoning about what to say and do in particular situations in light of the gospel of Jesus Christ;

THEODRAMA

This is the key section contrasting and setting forth Vanhoozer's thodrama methodology as superior to thee other ways of moving from text to theology.

Theology is merely the shadow cast by the theodrama; God’s doing—God’s speech and action—is prior to the church’s response.

Theater occurs when one or more persons “present” themselves to others.10 And so it is with the drama of redemption.

Drama involves external, bodily activity that makes known one’s inner life or spirit.

God’s being is in Christ, revealing and reconciling himself to the world.

Though these approaches rightly recognize that the Bible is “the great story and plot of all time and space,”13 they differ over how best to understand what makes the story authoritative.

If there is a weakness, it is that Vos does not show the church how to go beyond the sacred page, for the simple reason that the church today shares the same redemptive-historical context with the authors of the New Testament: “We ourselves live just as much in the N.T. as did Peter and Paul and John.”16 Whether other contexts (i.e., technological, cultural, intellectual) have a bearing on the church’s life and thought is something that Vos does not explicitly address.

See my note on the footnote.

However, drama does better in reminding us that the whole into which we are to participate is a unified action, and that we are to participate in active faith. It is not enough to be spectators or hearers of the Word only; we must be actors and doers as well.

Story becomes drama when one enters into it, body and soul.

It is not always easy, however, to decide what the principle behind the text is or how to apply it anew.18 In a dramatic paradigm, by way of contrast, the point is not to extract a principle through some procedure but to become a wiser person precisely by considering particular instances of canonical wisdom: not abstract truth but concrete wisdom-in-act.

See my note on tthee footnote.

The church’s script is not an inert object for critical analysis but an invitation to dialogue and participation. Biblical discourse—what the writers say about what they have seen and heard—is the basis for fellowship with the authors and, ultimately, with the triune God

The Bible is God's invitation to dialogue and participation (so communion).

To look into the mirror of the text only to forget what one sees there is to be a hearer only, thus short-circuiting the process of interpretation that is intended to produce “doers who act” (1:25 NRSV).

as Calvin says, “All right knowledge of God is born of obedience.”

the most important form our biblical interpretations take is that of lived performance. “No one can appreciate the full truth of the Christian revelation unless he or she is a player within its distinctive dynamics—participating in the drama of God’s self-communication to the world and living out its implications in committed action.”

“Do this” (1 Cor. 11:24–25). The church performs her faith and participates in the theodrama each time people come together and share the Lord’s Supper. In eating the bread and drinking the cup, the church commemorates the climax of the theodrama and anticipates its end.

To understand is to acquire “a set of capacities for action in relation to something.” 26 That which faith seeks to understand is, as we have seen, the theodrama—what God is saying and doing and what the people of God must say and do in response.

Give your church a set of capacities for action in relation to the theodrama.

sacred teaching given for the purpose of communicating the main idea of the play and hence for providing instruction on how rightly to participate in the drama of redemption.

Kierkegaard is well aware, however, that sinners resist doctrinal direction: “We pretend to be unable to understand [the Bible] because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly.”

Egalitarians with 1 Timothy 2.12

Doctrine exists not to increase the church’s inventory of information but to cultivate theodramatic wisdom: the ability to make right judgments, to say and do the right think, vis-à-vis not only the created but the re-created or eschatological order of things, the order of things “in Christ.”

Church over academy. DMin over PhD. Pastorate over professorship.

The purpose of doctrine, then, is to make us wise unto Christ: the center, climax, and central content of the theodrama.

Doctrine helps the church to move forward with her script by providing answers to the following questions: Where are we in the theodrama? What kind of scene are we playing? Who are we? In what kind of plot are our lives entangled? What time is it? What act and scene of the drama of redemption a...

Why are we, the church, here? The answer to that question takes the form of a mission statement: we are here to participate rightly in God’s triune mission to the world.

The essential insight is that there are some texts—musical scores, play scripts—whose interpretation, and perhaps meaning, depend on doing something with them.

how do the biblical texts generate understanding and what is the nature of that understanding? Biblical scholarship is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the understanding that faith seeks. Yet there is something further to be done with the holy script after exegesis and analysis, not least because the holy script contains more than information. Indeed, the biblical discourse is part and parcel of the theodrama, for the Bible both recounts the action and is itself an element in the action. strictly speaking, however, we do not perform the discourse per se but the theodrama it describes and enacts.

Discourse projects a world “in front of” the text—a possible state of affairs or a possible way of looking at things that readers can contemplate or imagine. To understand a text, then, is to engage the world “in front of” it, the world it dangles in front of the reader’s wondering eyes. So, too, with Scripture: we achieve understanding not by processing its information but by “inhabiting” the world it projects.

If pastor-theologians minister understanding then we must not only give information but direction and shaared experiences of inhabiting the world that the text projects.

To return to the initial objection that biblical interpretation is not a matter of performing texts: strictly speaking, we do not perform the text/script but the world/theodrama that the text/script presupposes, entails, and implies. The task of understanding is to “unfold” (to open or spread out) what has been “infolded” (implied) in the discourse—the world “of” the text. “The unfolding of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple” (Ps. 119:130). Readers gain understanding when they appropriate—perform!—the worldview proposed by the biblical text by actively following its direction of thought and its design for living. Performative understanding is therefore not a matter of replicating the author’s situation (the world behind the text), or of repeating the author’s words, but of unfolding what the author says (about the theodrama) into one’s own situation (the world in front of the text).

When Ryan asked me whether we should meet daily like the initial church did in the temple he was asking if we should perform the world of the text (Jerusalem, not the world behind the text, Luke to theophilus) whereas we're to take our cues from the text and the world behind and of the text to perform it appropriately in our specific world in front of the text.

to perform that.41

See my note on the footnote.

What Christian readers of Scripture are ultimately trying to understand are not principles so much as the divine play described, implied, and projected by the script.

Reading Scripture in the church is not merely a matter of replicating authorial intentions but of realizing them.

The world of the text—which is to say, the world implied by the text—is in fact a description of the way the world really is and is becoming. For the world implied—or to use a more familiar theological term, revealed—by the biblical texts is in fact the real world, the only world there is, as it already/not yet is “in Christ.”

To read the book of Revelation with understanding means adopting an apocalyptic way of being in the world. This means being aware that our theodramatically charged present looks both to the past (the “already” or historical aspect of Christ’s work) and to the future (the “not yet” aspect of Christ’s work). What God communicates with sundry voices and in diverse ways through Scripture is ultimately this theodramatic vision of the world being made new. In speaking of “performing” the script, then, I have in mind not reproducing the world behind the text or of recreating the scenes depicted in the text but rather of living in a way that conforms to the world as it is being transformed “in Christ.” Not every performance by the church correctly enacts the world implied by her script. Misunderstanding happens. Some interpreters will misconstrue the discourse and move beyond Scripture in ways that miss the Way. The criterion for normative appropriation, I submit, is a function of what I shall term the implied canonical reader.

The ideal reader, however, is the one implied and intended by the discourse itself: one who completely understands not only the explicit message of the text but its implications as well; one who has the linguistic and literary competence to follow all the author’s directions.43 According to Markus Bockmuehl, the ideal reader of the New Testament (1) has a personal stake in the truthful reference of what the text asserts, (2) has undergone an intellectual and spiritual conversion to the gospel, (3) acknowledges the texts as authoritative, (4) belongs to a church, and (5) is illumined by the Holy Spirit.44 In short, the ideal reader is a disciple, one “drawn into an act of reading that involves an active part on stage rather than the discreet view from the upper balcony.”

The church should be that community that conforms to the implied canonical reader who knows how to follow the direction not only of specific texts, but of the larger story of Scripture of which they are a part.

Healthy church.

Taking the implied canonical reader as our norm, then, we may say that understanding involves grasping the author’s communicative intent, discerning meaningful patterns, and relating each canonical part to the canonical whole.

Content, context, covenant/canon is magisterial. Confession in culture is ministerial.

Specifically, the implied canonical reader knows where she is in the theodrama—in which scene and which act—and how she should respond.

Vos, Hamilton, and JMac may get the act right but not the scene.

Note that “living the Bible” is not quite the same thing as “applying the Bible.” How can we “apply” the story of Paul and Silas in prison (Acts 16:16–34) today? It’s straightforward—if one is ever in first-century Philippi in prison for exorcising the demon of a slave girl and there was an earthquake during your midnight hymn-sing! A canonical performance, however, is neither strict replication of a prior blueprint nor application of a principle. It is rather a lived demonstration of theodramatic understanding. The story in Acts 16 shows us the kind of world we live in and the kind of thing God does in the world and the kind of people we are to be in response. To read this passage wisely is not to apply but to appropriate its message and hence “of being transformed by watching/hearing it properly, as a word about who this God is that we are trying to know and love.”

Against appication and for canonically performing, or, appropriation.

by cultivating minds nurtured on the canon. The aim of the drama-of-redemption approach is to train and discipline the believer’s mind, heart, and imagination to think, desire, see—and then do—reality as it is in Jesus Christ. Moving “beyond” the sacred page involves more than applying it; it involves renewing and transforming people’s habits of seeing, thinking, and acting. Scripture is not merely a vehicle for conveying information.

Minds nurtured on the canon must read the text carefully (Hays’s descriptive task) and place it in canonical context (Hays’s synthetic task). As to relating the text to our situation (Hays’s hermeneutic task), this requires “an integrative act of the imagination” whereby the community views itself as indwelling the world implied by the biblical texts.49 It is just here that the norm of the implied canonical reader comes into its own. Finally, what Hays calls the pragmatic task (“living the text”) we have treated under the rubric of performative understanding.

Content (descriptive), canon (synthetic), confession/culture (hermeneutic), competence (pragmatic).

Jesus is able to answer the key questions—Who am I? What am I to do?—because he knows the answer to the prior question: Of what story do I find myself a part?

What we have to learn is a whole pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting that corresponds to the nature of the coming kingdom of God,

Disciples must practice the three Ds: they must discern, deliberate on, and do what citizens of the kingdom of God would do in this or that situation. To be sure, it is not a matter of literally replicating what Jesus did; we don’t need to die on wooden crosses as criminals in order to be crucified daily. But we do need to discern, deliberate on, and do what it means to be crucified with Christ (Gal. 2:20) and to die daily (1 Cor. 15:31).