Appendix: The theological interpretation of Scripture
Appendix
The theological interpretation of
Scripture
My wife is a fashion designer and college teacher of fashion. To be a good designer, she tells me, you need to listen to the fabric. You need to engage the fabric on its terms. You can’t stitch leather the way you stitch knits. A different needle is needed. An ordinary needle would break. Biblical theology likewise is a discipline that seeks to listen to its fabric. The fabric is the Word of God written. In practice this means placing a biblical text or passage in its context in its literary unit or argument in its book in the canon within the flow of revealed redemptive history. Presuppositions are always at work, of course, as I endeavoured to make clear in the introductory chapter of this study. By way of reminder, evangelical biblical theology presupposes the living God who speaks and acts, the unity of Scripture, inspiration and the canon. Scripture then is not reducible to an anthology of ancient Near Eastern and early church texts but is the inspired – in the strong Pauline theopneustos sense – Word of God, albeit in human words (concursus). Put another way, we try to be good phenomenologists of the text. I like the way the Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel summed up phenomenology: knowing what you see rather than seeing what you know. I once worked with a Bible teacher who found the same meaning in every text, whether in Genesis, Isaiah or Mark: read your Bible, say your prayers, share your faith, have fellowship with other Christians, and give to the work. He saw what he knew rather knew what he saw. Happily what he knew had good biblical warrant, but not in the texts he was expounding, I would argue. So, as much as lies within us, we seek to see what is actually there in the text before us.
Evangelical systematic theology also appeals to what is there but goes further than the descriptive. It is a normative or prescriptive discipline. Systematic theology wants to find out what we ought to believe (our head), what we ought to value (our heart) and how we ought to live (our hands and feet) as the sacred text is brought to bear on the broken world in which we live and are to serve. However, to do so responsibly systematic theology needs to know how to listen to the fabric. This is where the discipline of biblical theology is vital to the discipline of systematic theology. The traditional way to do systematic theology is to make a claim and supply proof texts (dicta probantia) to back it up. For example, take the claim that Christ is God incarnate. The classic proof text is John 1:14, ‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.’ It might appear like this: ‘Christ is God incarnate’ (John 1:14). I am sure many a reader has had the experience of looking up the string of proof texts in a standard systematic theology text and being mystified as to the relevance of some of them to the claim. Now proof texts are needed. You can’t say everything at once. I remember a student in England who had been warned off systematic theology by his pastor, who valued only biblical theology. The student was having problems of a practical kind. If he was asked after church about an issue, people simply didn’t have the time to take the tour with him from Genesis to Revelation to find out what all the relevant texts had to say. Some kind of synthesis, some kind of theological shorthand, was needed. Systematic theology supplies that shorthand.
Systematic theology’s proof texts, however, need to be derived from the application of a sound biblical theology method. Let us return to John 1:14. If I am challenged on appealing to that text as a systematic theologian I would seek to show that it is part of an argument beginning at John 1:1, in eternity as it were, and ending in time, with John 1:14–18. In other words our text is integral to the Prologue of John and is the climax of the story of how God seeks to dwell in the midst of his people. This story started in the garden (Eden), continued with Israel (esp. tabernacle and temple) and climaxed in Jesus Christ. Incarnation is the zenith of divine presence. To use Brian Rosner’s way of expressing it – I am appealing to John 1:14 in the light of the Bible’s ‘overarching narrative and Christocentric focus’. In other words a text needs not only to be seen in its context but also seen in its literary unit, in its book in the canon and with the flow of redemptive history firmly in mind.
Biblical theology serves systematic theology in another way. Here my example is that great gospel benefit of the forgiveness of our sins. Read your standard systematic theology texts and you would not know how important as a biblical motif the forgiveness of our sins is, but Luke-Acts, which constitutes about a third of the New Testament, is clear. The risen Christ thematizes the forgiveness of sins as the great gospel benefit in Luke 24:47 (the Great Commission Lucan style), and in Acts we see it held out both to Jews (Acts 2:38 – Pentecost) and Gentiles (Acts 10:43 – Cornelius). In the light of the overarching narrative of Scripture, which identifies the God to whom we pray, we can see why this benefit is so important. God is not only love (1 John 4:8), but is also light (1 John 1:5). How can a holy God dwell with an unholy people? Sin needs to be addressed. The Word become flesh is the linchpin to that address: his coming, his cross and his coming to life again. In other words biblical theology helps systematic theology get the proportions right in its accents. This is an exceedingly important contribution. In my opinion there is a crying need for a systematic theology text to be written that does just that.
A final question to consider – what has all the above to do with the increasingly influential notion of the theological interpretation of Scripture? Are biblical theology and the theological interpretation of Scripture synonymous? I like to distinguish the two tasks. Other theologians appear to treat them more as synonymous (e.g. Brian S. Rosner). I am aware that I am being stipulative in arguing this. Biblical theology on the one hand helps me to know what I see, whereas the theological interpretation of Scripture helps me to know how to serve the church with what I see as I endeavour to bring the text and the present together in a meaningful fashion. For example, John 1:14 viewed through the theological interpretation of Scripture’s lens cannot be merely described as the climax of a biblical theology of presence, true though that is. The theological interpretation of Scripture also wants to say that John 1:14 tells of a God who so loved the world that he came himself and tabernacled among us. We do not live in a divinely abandoned landscape, adrift in space as cosmic flotsam and jetsam. Put another way the theological interpretation of Scripture draws out the larger implication of the text of Scripture, or of several texts of Scripture that have been placed in a conversation with each other with an eye on the flow of redemptive history. Bernard Ramm’s wise words on the subject are worth quoting once more: ‘The great theologian differs from the ordinary in the former’s ability to draw out these larger implications of the text. It was in men like Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Barth that the genius of theological exegesis [or what I prefer to call the theological interpretation of Scripture] came into its own.’ The disciplines of biblical theology and the theological interpretation of Scripture are thus in my view complementary. Both disciplines are indispensible. Put yet another way, when systematic theology uses biblical theology to connect text and present in a normative fashion, we are engaged in the theological interpretation of Scripture.