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October 1 - October 27, 2024
Theological education is but a noisy gong or clanging cymbal if it is not helping students to read the Bible well in order to understand God truly.
As we have seen, identity politics generates a self/other mentality that can have a polarizing tendency. Levin rightly sees that the purpose of social institutions is to form persons with the virtues necessary for their particular vocations:
Biblical scholars and theologians must go to church in order to understand that they ultimately serve not a special interest group (i.e., their own guild) but the church—the whole people of God.
The distinction between biblical scholars and theologians is not redundant, for exegetes focus on understanding
the biblical authors on their own terms, while theologians restate what the prophets and apostles say to make it intelligible and applicable in the present:
“flat-texters
“free-texters
Mere Christians, regardless of their disciplinary or confessional location, must “commit ourselves to act otherwise in the future.”
Both the church and the seminaries that train her pastors should be reading cultures that form readers to do justice to the letter of the text in the presence of Christ, the one whose voice is speaking in the Scriptures, the one who is the subject matter of the Scriptures, and the one to whom the Scriptures ultimately belong.
examine criteria for right reading.
specify what the literal sense is and to distinguish it from populist literalism and other misconceptions.
Both exegetes and theologians often assume we know what “literal” means. We do not.
philology,
fivefold typology of approaches to literality and commend a synthetic model that befits a mere Christian hermeneutic.
frame of reference
My fundamental claim is that disagreements regarding literal interpretation have to do with the different frames of reference readers employ.
“It happens that not a little light is thrown on the understanding of the sense of Scripture if we weigh up not only what is said, but also by whom it is said, to whom it is said, in what words it is said, at what time, and on what occasion; what proceeds, and what follows.”
The present chapter focuses on two other elements: what someone says (the “sense” of discourse) and what something is said about (the “referent” of discourse).
Christians who want to read the Bible theologically ask, “What do I love when I love the biblical words as the word of God?”
Hebrew and Greek.
If language exists to communicate what it can communicate, then Christian theologians contend that biblical language exists to communicate Christ.
The way forward is to show that the two principles, philological and christological, stand in complementary rather than competitive relation to one another.
The point is worth repeating: both biblical scholars and theologians can be biblical.
Theologians throughout church history have acknowledged the literal sense as the authoritative touchstone in doctrinal disputes.
It is one thing to have a high view of Scripture but quite another to read it rightly; alas, the one does not necessarily lead to the other.
distinguishing literal from literalistic
A “literalistic” interpretation tries to follow the way the words go without attending to the context of their use. As
Problems emerge when we fail to distinguish literalistic from literal readings.
nose of wax,
In scholarly treatments, literal interpretation typically focuses on the verbal, authorial, or historical dimension of an utterance.
verbal, (2) authorial,
historical, (4) literary, or (5) “ruled” sense.
Words have histories, with varied contexts and multiple uses; you can no more control the way words go than you can direct the wind (as we are seeing with literal itself).
Sentences alone are often not sufficient for understanding how the words go.
Meaning is an affair not of consciousness but of intentional communicative action: what authors do with words.
“The sense which the human author directly intended and which the written words conveyed.”
Can Christians read the Hebrew Scriptures as testimony to Jesus Christ without doing violence to the letter of the text? To put it bluntly, is the Old Testament literally about Jesus Christ?
We therefore need as many forms of criticism and frames of reference as are required to do justice to and understand what the Bible is, is doing, and is for. What Scripture is, is a many-splendored, multilayered thing; what it therefore calls for is a multilayered interpretive response.
“It was largely by reason of this centrality of the story of Jesus that the Christian interpretive tradition in the West gradually assigned clear primacy to the literal
sense in the reading of Scripture.”
“sacramental ontology” (Hans Boersma) or “Christian Platonism” (Craig Carter). They
“My Christian Platonist convictions persuade me that everything around us is sacramental, in the sense that everything God has created both points to him and makes him present.”
citing de Lubac’s notion that the New Testament is the mystery hidden within the “sacrament” of the Old Testament.
The literal sense is “the starting point (sacramentum) of a search for the greater, more christological reality (res) of the gospel.”
Each testament retains its own integrity, yet together they form an integral unity, held together by the reality that undergirds their joint witness: the person and work of Jesus Christ.
Levenson here points out that, in a real sense, Jews and Christians are reading different texts. For Jewish readers, the canonical context of Isaiah does not include the Gospels; for Christians, it must.
thick description
Better: the prophets knew what they were saying, but they did not know exactly what, or whom, they were speaking about. They understood the sense of their discourse but not its ultimate referent. This way of viewing the matter explains why we still need the hard
work of philology to clarify the sense of the words, and other frames of reference than Isaiah’s to understand the referent of his discourse that his words ultimately indicate.
Something similar takes place, I submit, when we read the Old Testament with a Christian frame of reference (the rule of faith).144 The image of Christ, the final referent of Scripture, is really there, and clearly visible—but only when we look along the letter of the text with the right frame of reference.
