The place of theology in exegesis: reflections inspired by Kevin DeYoung
I have seen several references – all positive – on FB & Twitter to a recent blog post by Kevin DeYoung, in which he asserts that, for evangelicals, systematic theology is the result of exegesis, and then argues that theology should in turn shape exegesis. His point is a fairly standard one: all reading is shaped by our preconceptions, so allowing our theology to be involved is a good idea. As I say, people I respect have praised the post; I find DeYoung’s account of the relation of Scripture to theology inadequate, however. DeYoung begins: Systematic theology looks at the whole Bible and tries to understand all that God says on a given subject (e.g., sin, heaven, angels, justification). Exegesis is what you do when you look at a single text of Scripture and try to understand what the author–speaking in a specific culture, addressing to a specific audience, writing for a specific purpose–intended to communicate. Good systematic theology will be anchored in good exegesis. The sum of the whole is only as true as the individual parts. No Christian should be interested in constructing a big theological system that grows out of a shallow and misinformed understanding of the smaller individual passages. I don’t know of any evangelical pastor or scholar who disagrees with these sentiments. OK, I am an evangelical scholar, and I disagree with at least one thing DeYoung says – his opening sentence. Or rather, I don’t disagree with what it says, but it does not say so much that it is dangerously misleading. Theology is not primarily an exercise in collating Scriptures, although good theology is certainly attentive to that. In a sense, real theology is what you do after the Scriptures have been collated. On all interesting matters, the witness of the Bible is complex – on many it can appear contradictory. God is sovereign, but human beings are free to chose as they will; Jesus is one with the Father, but says ‘the Father is greater than I’; God created all things good, but the world is broken by the power of evil; a final judgement and separation will come, but God will be all-in-all, and every knee will bow; the list could go on and on… Theology is the task of coping with such complexity, and with the apparent contradictions. It is about the construction of conceptual schemes which enable all, not just some, of the texts to be taken seriously. The Trinitarian and Christological debates of the early centuries are deeply exegetical, in the sense that they turn on differing attempts to make sense of a (fairly quickly defined) set of apparently-contradictory texts. All the significant contributions to the arguments are essentially lists of proposed exegeses of texts, indeed. In each case, however, there is also the development of a conceptuality which will shape the exegesis, and offer exegetical possibilities that were not available before. A couple of examples: first, Hilary of Poitiers is completely concerned with exegetical arguments in his reflections of the Trinitarian debates collected in De Trinitate; however, as he becomes more familiar with the Greek debates, he realises that certain arguments are not helpful (dropping the old Latin ‘X from X’ arguments, for instance). In Book VII, he suddenly stops, and offers careful reflection on how God is named, and what ‘birth’ means when applied to the divine. This gives him a set of concepts which allow for more adequate exegesis of texts he has already considered, which he then turns to offer. Similarly, if we look at the Cappadocian theology that led to the Constantinopolitan settlement, it is about the development of concepts which will allow texts to be read better. This is true whether one agrees with Zizioulas that their core achievement was the development of a relational ontology, or whether one follows more recent historians of doctrine in finding accounts of how language applied to the divine to be central. At the same time, adopted concepts limit possible exegesis. This is true of those judged by the tradition to be in error – Eunomius has a neoplatonic account of language which makes him unable to accept anything like Nicene doctrine – and by those judged to be impeccably orthodox: Athanasius and Basil both work with a two-state ontology (the only possible ways of existence are eternal, necessary, divine being, and time-bound, contingent, created being; there are no middle ranks) which rules out a whole series of possible accounts of the Father-Son relation which were being explored by their contemporaries. Because of this, theology has to be attentive, and in a sense responsible, to those conceptual possibilities that are live in...
Read MoreJustice and the gospel: Bruce Longenecker on Paul and the poor.
Joel Willits offers a review of my former colleague Bruce Longenecker’s recent book Remember the Poor: Paul, Poverty, and the Greco-Roman World (Eerdmans) over at Euangelion. I have not yet seen a copy, but Bruce was working in these directions before he left St Andrews for Baylor, and I think I can guess something of how the argument goes: although there is not an enormous amount of emphasis in the NT texts on Paul’s ongoing concern for the collection for the church in Jerusalem, or for caring for economically-disadvantaged members of the community, there is some; if we consider the then-prevalent assumption amongst devout diaspora Jews (like Paul…) that charity was an essential component of acceptable worship, then we can reconstruct on the basis of the evidence we do have a picture of concern for the poor, and particularly concern that the gentile churches should relieve the poverty of the mother church in Jerusalem, as being central to Paul’s vision of his own mission, and of the Christian identity of the churches he founded. Rather like Finney refusing to allow someone to profess Christianity without committing to the abolitionist cause, Paul could not conceive of a church that was not involved in (what we would now call) social justice; it is as intrinsic to the gospel as worship, discipleship, and mission – actually, it just is worship, discipleship, and mission, in Paul’s view. As Joel points out, this is a timely reminder. Joel himself has recently offered a substantial review of Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert’s What is the Mission of the Church?, which is only the latest of a stream of publications arguing that social justice, whilst perhaps commendable, is no part of the core business of a Christian community. I understand the concern that, sometimes, justice has been perceived as an easier and less costly practice than other forms of gospel witness, and so has been allowed to displace them. The answer to this, though, is not so to swing the pendulum as to neglect this aspect of gospel witness instead. The bloodless conquest of the Empire by the early church was in large part achieved by a sustained and serious practice of social justice; bishops took the title ‘lovers of the poor,’ and lived it so well that, over a century or so, they constructed a new and previously-unimagined political power-base that propelled them to positions of prominence in almost every city of the Empire (Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, is very good on this; start around pp. 90-100). Human hearts were conquered by the fearless witness of the martyrs; but the culture was conquered – whilst the church was still a minority movement – by a faithful practice of social justice. Paul consulted once with Peter and James and John about the ethical implications of belief in Jesus; one thing only was agreed to be non-negotiable by all four of them: ‘remember the poor’ (Gal. 2:10). This is at the heart of the...
Read MoreCan you Adam-and-Eve it?
[For non-UK readers, ‘Adam-and-Eve’ is traditional London Cockney rhyming slang for ‘believe’.] Various sources, print and online, highlight a debate that has taken off in the States on the question of the historicity of Adam and Eve as the two parents of the human race. At least one tenured scholar at Calvin College has apparently lost his job over the question. (Google will get you to lots of sources on the question; I couldn’t find one that summed up both the issues and the recent events in an even-handed way, so I decided not to post a link – if someone else knows of a good one, by all means put it in a comment.) On the one hand, we have a claim that the sequencing of human genomes has provided a body of data that is incompatible with an account of human origins from a single couple; on the other, a claim that belief in a historic Adam and Eve is necessary to the gospel. My scientific expertise, such as it is (an undistinguished performance in a physics degree from Cambridge in the fairly distant past), and my knowledge of journalistic reports of academic research (which is rather more expert and recent) both lead me to suppose that reports asserting scientific certainty are unlikely to be accurate (particularly on an issue where repeated and controlled experiments are impossible; I presume the scientific consensus is more like ‘every plausible model we’ve proposed for the data we have demands multiple ancestor-pairs, and we’ve proposed a lot of models,’ which is certainly a significant claim, but falls some distance from proof, even in the weakened and imprecise sense that word usually carries in science). My topic in this blog, however, is theology, and so the other side of the debate is the one I will discuss. On what basis might we propose that it is important that Adam and Eve were historical figures? Two seem possible: a theological basis; and an exegetical basis. It might be that we can’t make sense of the gospel unless humanity shares a common ancestor; or it might be that the point is incidental to the gospel, but clearly taught in Scripture, and so should be believed (that Jesus was born of a woman is central to the gospel; that his mother’s name was Mary is incidental, but nonetheless to be held to be true). Are there plausible arguments in either direction? Theologically, the best candidate seems to be that some explanation needs to be given for universal falleness/sinfulness, in the face of the necessary teaching that God’s initial creation was good; it seems that some are therefore suggesting that it is necessary to postulate a single ancestor, who sinned, and whose guilt and brokenness was then transmitted through processes of biological reproduction to the rest of the human race. This argument, however, is implausible on a number of grounds. First, the biological transmission of guilt and sinfulness is not a necessary claim. Within the Reformed tradition, federal Calvinism more-or-less denies the point in terms. Adam is established head of the human race by divine decree, not by biological priority: our fates are bound up with his fate because God has determined it to be so, not because of any process of genetics. (Of course, most classical federal Calvinists happened to believe in the biological priority of Adam and Eve, but this was in a sense incidental to their argument, as was the sinfulness of Eve: Adam alone was the federal head. Had it been the case that Eve surrendered to the serpent’s blandishments but failed to convince Adam to follow her, she would presumably have been held guilty of her sin, but her children would have been free of taint, as they were ‘in Adam’ and Adam had not fallen.) Second, the biological transmission of guilt and sinfulness is not just not a necessary claim, but a rather difficult one. To put the point bluntly, moral standing is not encoded in genetic material. More pointedly, Christian anthropology has classically, rightly or wrongly, supposed a human being to be composed of body and soul (or body, soul, and spirit); the body, on this account, is the product of sexual union; the soul either created directly by God and infused into the body, or pre-existing in heaven and joined to the body in utero. But the soul is the primary seat, at least, of moral standing, and so to assume that the biological generation of the body somehow necessarily infects the directly-created, or other-sourced, soul seems difficult. (Even Augustine, so brilliant a mind, struggled and probably failed on this point: he suggested...
Read MoreHow much Scripture to preach on?
It won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who knows me, virtually or in real life, that one of the (fairly few) things that annoy me about the contemporary, ‘soft-charismatic’ style of worship that represents the British Baptist mainstream these days is the relative lack of Scripture heard in the services. I’ve written elsewhere about my desire to return to, at least, ‘Old Testament, Epistle, Gospel’ patterns of lectionary reading as opposed to just reading the passage preached on. (We’re just back from holiday in the Lake District, which allowed us to return to the delightful little fellowship at Hawkshead Hill Baptist Church. Three passages of Scripture, read and allowed to mutually interpret, during the sermon; another read and used to shape the worship. Many fellowships could learn from that…) I observe further a strange phenomenon, that in contemporary church life in Britain, the more a particular church/preacher trumpets their high view of Scripture, the less actual Scripture we hear read in their services. The reason for this is rather simple: there is an recent British tradition of ‘expository’ (meaning of scare quotes will become obvious) preaching, traceable back to Martyn Lloyd-Jones, although not much further, and presently reinforced by currently-popular neo-Reformed writings, that measures commitment to Scripture by, roughly, how slowly you preach through it. The practice of spending several years preaching through Romans or Philippians verse by verse-fragment demonstrates, it is held, a high view of Scripture because it is being taken seriously, mined slowly for all of its meaning. I confess to being profoundly unimpressed by this argument, I take it as a theologically-necessary claim that it is impossible to mine the Scripture for all of its meaning; we might get, by such slowness, everything a particular preacher has been able to discover from Scripture, but that is a rather different, and much less interesting, body of insight. And it seems like bad, or at least lazy, preaching. The preacher’s task is to determine and proclaim God’s word for this people, in this place, at this time; to do this, she must necessarily be selective. Her text might well, for instance, be significant in offering a refutation of Melchior Hoffmann’s Christological errors, and at points in history (even British Baptist history), that might have been vital. It is not now. It should be left out, so that what is vital is not obscured in the noise. Further, it has always seemed to me that (roughly) the less Scripture preached on, the more there is a danger of the sermon becoming thematic, rather than expository. I once had the misfortune to worship in a church where the preacher had been working desperately slowly through Colossians; the Sunday I was present (I never returned…) he had reached the injunction ‘Fathers, do not exasperate your children’ in 3:21, and was giving four Sundays to this verse, to examine ways in which we might ‘exasperate’ our children. (He had twenty. All beginning with the same letter.) None of this, of course, was exegesis of Colossians; the text had become the occasion for a thematic discourse on child-rearing. Earlier sermons in the series would, of necessity, have been thematic discourses on Christology, or sanctification. Such thematic sermons might be Biblical, instructive, or edifying (although the one I heard failed fairly badly on each of these criteria); they are not the mark of a commitment to the disciplined interpretation of Scripture as the foundation of the church. The church in question would have described itself as thoroughly committed to Scripture and to expository preaching, but their practice meant that there was no exposition of Scripture at all in their pulpit. I take it (whilst being aware of arguments, ancient and postmodern, to the contrary) that the task of exegesis is, roughly, the determining of the meaning inherent in a chunk of text. (And the task of exposition is the restatement, illustration, defence, and application of this meaning.) Meaning inheres in texts at almost every level, from the whole down. At one extreme, we can ask ‘what does Paradise Lost mean?’ and give a reasoned and defensible answer. Indeed, such work of precis, summary, or abstract is a standard task, set by instructors to teach students the reading and writing of English (and, I presume, other languages), and routinely engaged in by journalists, academics, and other professional writers (‘In his speech he argued…’ ‘This book claims …’ or consider the endlessly popular form of the book review). At the other extreme, how small a text-fragment may still contain meaning? The obvious answer is the sentence; after all, the grammatical function of the sentence is, roughly, to...
Read MoreA meditation on the indicative mood
I won’t name the liturgical resource, because it is a good one, a very good one, and does not deserve to be vilified for one slip, but I was glancing through it, and lighted upon the Pentecost service. ‘Consider,’ it invited us, ‘Jesus’ command in Acts 1:8…’Acts 1:8 reads: ἀλλὰ λήμψεσθε δύναμιν ἐπελθόντος τοῦ ἀγίου πνεύματος ἐφ ὑμᾶς καὶ ἔσεσθέ μάτυρες ἔν τε Ἰερουσαλὴμ καὶ [ἐν] πάση τῆ Ἰουδαία καὶ Σαμαρεία καὶ ἔως ἐσχάτου τῆς γῆς. (‘But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be witnesses in Jerusalem,and in all Judea, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth’–my tr.) Forgive the grammarian in me, but this is all in the indicative mood, not the imperative mood; there is no ‘command’. Jesus is here stating realities, not issuing instructions. I suspect that the most common way of eviscerating the gospel in our churches is this: making indicatives imperatives. We turn promise into command; gospel into law. I know why we do it: anyone who has been a pastor does. We struggle with people who take the gospel for granted, and we want to illustrate to them the radical claims of Christ on their lives. I won’t even say that the instinct is wrong (although I will confess to giving in to it far too often and far too readily in my own ministry); but turning Biblical promises into demands is no way to deal with it. When Jesus says ‘you will…’ he means–you will. Not ‘you might’, or ‘you should’, or even ‘if you do x you will’, but ‘you will’. And so for the rest of Scripture. And so Acts 1:8: the promise, to the eleven at least, and I suspect to all Christians (I take it that all who have come to Christ in penitence and faith, been baptized and received into the church have received the gift of the Spirit here promised), is that they will be witnesses. This is not an instruction that we should evangelise, but a promise that, somehow, at some level, in some way, despite so much of what we are and do, when people encounter us, they will see a glimpse of Jesus. I wonder if we took this promise seriously as a promise, believed that Christian people will witness to Jesus regardless, whether our evangelistic strategies would look...
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