With apologies to Martin Luther, some eighteen months ago, I created �Table Talk,� a center for threaded discussion on our seminary�s Intranet. Open to staff, students, and faculty across our three campuses, �Table Talk� has become the locus of debate on all sorts of topics�pacifism, library hours, capital punishment, Harry Potter, the nature of the atonement, infant baptism, and more. Running like a scarlet thread through most every conversation (grade inflation and the quality of food in the student center come to mind as exceptions!) has been the question of theological method. More specifically, a common motif to which conversation returns again and again is the role of Scripture in theological discourse. At times, the issue is focused on such mundane infractions as misquoting a biblical text or erroneously attributing to the Bible one�s favorite aphorism. At such moments, some referee blows the whistle and, apart from the embarrassment that generally follows, no harm is done. (Thankfully, virtual conversation hides many a red face.) More momentous, and pressing, are those occasions where theological hermeneutics, the theological use of Scripture itself, is on the table, where the direction of the debate turns on the nature of appeal to Scripture.

����������� With regard to issues in theological hermeneutics, �Table Talk� within our seminary community is little more than a microcosm of the larger world of the church and the theological academy at the turn of the third millennium. Although most Christians would presume some integral relationship between Scripture and theology, the nature of this relationship today is far from clear and variously assessed. Does the Bible function as final court of appeal? Epistemic foundation? Criterion? Source? Norm? Resource? Canon? Reservoir of truth claims? The pathway from biblical text to Christian theology, if there is one, has neither been well-identified nor well-marked. Indeed, only a decade ago, Brevard Childs could write of the �iron curtain� separating the two disciplines, biblical studies and systematic theology.^[1] Evidence of this seemingly impregnable wall is difficult to overlook�whether one is the theological student searching for ways to connect one part of the seminary curriculum with the other or the scholar trained according to accredited standards that guard the one discipline from what are typically regarded as the naive or imperialistic efforts of the other. Childs himself has been a participant in the venture to address this barrier, which in recent years has been subject to increasing efforts to overcome it.^[2]

����������� The purpose of this essay is to address the troubled relationship between Christian Scripture and systematic theology in a programmatic way. Following Colin Gunton, by �systematic theology,� I refer to that theology which is concerned (1) to elucidate in coherent fashion the internal relations of one aspect of belief to other potentially related beliefs; (2) to demonstrate an understanding of the relation between the content of theology and �the sources specific to the faith�; and (3) to evince an awareness of the relation between the content of theology and general claims for truth in human culture, not least those of philosophy and science.^[3] That is, I am concerned especially with the contemporary task of constructive theology and ethics, and not in a particular way with the formulation of dogma.^[4] I engage in this conversation as a biblical scholar, as a person concerned with the faith, life, and witness of the church, and as a person formed in a particular ecclesial tradition (Wesleyan-Methodist).

����������� The relevance of this self-disclosure will become apparent in the development of this essay, most transparently with regard to the particular approach I take as a biblical scholar to the discussion: from the side of biblical studies, rather than toward it. Although I will insist that the labyrinth that presently occupies the space between the Bible and theology cannot be resolved by particular methodological commitments or techniques, I will argue, first, that a particular vision of how biblical texts �mean� has had the effect of diminishing the status of biblical studies as a specifically theological discipline and of segregating biblical studies from theological reflection on the practices of those faith communities concerned with the Bible as Scripture. That is, I will urge that the malaise that has settled on the relationship of Bible and theology has deep, historical roots in a failed experiment in clarifying the respective roles of biblical theology and dogmatic theology. Attempts to construe the role of biblical studies above all in the descriptive mode, and especially as historical and/or literary analysis, in the service of a distinct, prescriptive agenda for the church�s faith and life, I will argue, constitute a failed experiment. By way of assessing our current state of affairs and in order to point the way forward, I will then move backward, to the remarks of Friedrich Schleiermacher regarding the essential role of Scripture in the theological enterprise. My interest in Schleiermacher is in part utilitarian; he proves a salutary conversation partner in this discussion, both for his laudable insight and for his explicit attention to methodological issues that invite further reflection and criticism. I hope that my comments will demonstrate that my interaction with Schleiermacher has not transformed him into a straw dog, impertinent for exploring and reshaping the contemporary theological landscape. Instead, attending to Schleiermacher will promote interaction on three central issues of ongoing concern. My aim is to show that the biblical texts must themselves be recast with regard to their status and role as Christian Scripture if the Bible�s fecundity for ecclesial faith and practice is again to be appreciated.

Linear Hermeneutics: A Failed Experiment

As Brevard Childs tells the story, �biblical theology,� as a discrete discipline, is a post-Reformation development. The Reformation�s appeal to the Bible as sole authority in matters of faith signaled a change in emphasis away from a dogmatic ecclesiastical framework toward the delineation of the theology of the Bible sans the earlier presumption that the message of the Bible and the content of church dogma were coterminous.^[5] Medieval Christianity had presumed no necessary historical gap between the Bible and contemporary faith,^[6] and this may not at first blush seem much different from the hermeneutics of the Reformation, in which the Bible functioned as �a compendium of divine doctrine.�^[7] To be sure, in either case, the relationship between the Bible and theology is regarded as immediate; however, the Reformation noted with seriousness the theological development which had occurred in the church subsequent to the generation of the Old and New Testament books, asserting over against that theological heritage the priority of Scripture. As I have suggested elsewhere,^[8] the impetus for the segregation of biblical studies and theology can be traced more pointedly to the problematizing of �history� associated with Modernity. Carl Schorske has commented with reference to the cultural shifts arising out of the Enlightenment, �In most fields of intellectual and artistic culture, twentieth-century Europe and America learned to think without history. The very word �modernism� has come to distinguish our lives and times from what had gone before, from history as a whole, as such. Modern architecture, modern music, modern science�all these have defined themselves not so much out of the past, indeed scarcely against the past, but detached from it in a new, autonomous cultural space.�^[9] Hence, although he has his antecedents, we may find a helpful point of beginning in Johann Philipp Gabler, writing at the end of the 18th century, who proffered a methodological distinction between dogmatic theology and biblical theology which, in many of its basic points, would win widespread support.^[10]

����������� Gabler sketched a three-stage process by which one might move from historical analysis of the biblical texts to a biblical theology: (1) careful linguistic and historical analysis; (2) engagement in a synthetic task, the purpose of which was to identify those ideas common among the biblical writers; and (3) arrival at the transcendent (timeless and universal) principles of the Bible. If one were to engage in dogmatic theology, one would begin here, with these transcendent ideas, so as to adapt them to particular contexts. In this way, the Bible (and, for Gabler, this meant especially the New Testament) was positioned as the basis or fountainhead of all theology. Although the second step might be dropped by some interpreters (as it seems to have done in some of Gabler�s own subsequent writing), and although additional steps might be proposed, this essential process carried the day for many interpreters over the next two centuries and continues to have its champions today. Not only this ordered procedure but especially the presumed priority of the meaning of the biblical text taken on its own terms�this is what I refer to as �linear hermeneutics.�

����������� Although the approach outlined in Krister Stendahl�s celebrated essay in the Interpreter�s Dictionary of the Bible cannot simply be identified with Gabler�s work,^[11] it is via Stendahl�s distinction between �what it meant� and �what it means� that the relationship between biblical studies and theology is now popularly conceived. And such distinctions are ubiquitous in contemporary discussion. Heikki R�is�nen insists that Gabler was right in his programmatic distinction between the historical and theological tasks of the exegete, for example, just as Peter Balla affirms in his reassessment of the field that the task of New Testament theology is distinct from systematic theology; for Balla, the New Testament is viewed as �source� for theology and is not itself �faith seeking understanding.�^[12] I. Howard Marshall writes that �the basic principle is that the significance of the text is derived from its original meaning; the meaning determines the significance,� and his more recent proposal regarding the relationship of biblical studies to systematic theology, while more textured than his earlier comments might portend, clearly posits biblical theology as the foundation of systematic theology.^[13] Contributions to the genre �a theology of the New Testament� in the past three decades further signify the ascendency of this way of construing the theological mission of biblical scholars, for almost invariably they point to the important, inaugural step of engagement in the �descriptive task��which Stendahl presented thus: �[O]ur only concern is to find out what these words meant when uttered or written by the prophet, the priest, the evangelist, or the apostle�and regardless of their meaning in later stages of religious history, our own included.�^[14] To cite one further, contemporary example, in his introduction to a �biblical theology of the New Testament,� Peter Stuhlmacher outlines his own three-stage hermeneutic: (1) historical analysis of the biblical texts, (2) historical reconstruction of the relationship among these elements, and (3) interpretation of this reconstruction for its relevance to the present.^[15]

����������� Surrounded by so great a crowd of witnesses, we might be tempted to embrace a linear hermeneutic in one or another of its forms and attempt to get on with the task. If only things were so simple! Indeed, if it were so simple, would we be able today to speak of the chasm separating biblical and theological studies or need to concern ourselves with the problem of the use of Scripture in systematic theology?^[16] As I have already suggested and will now document, to embrace a version of this linear hermeneutic would be to participate in, indeed, to perpetuate, a failed experiment. I will first sketch three fault lines that threaten at its very core the time-honored distinction between �what it meant� and �what it means.� I will then outline four additional points at which this hermeneutic threatens to fracture in relation to a more specifically theological reading of the Bible as Christian Scripture.

����������� (1) The Nature of Texts. Three interrelated issues surface here. First, as such theorists as Wolfgang Iser and Umberto Eco emphasized a quarter-century ago, texts are not self-interpreting, semantically sealed, meaning-making machines.^[17] Texts are not reservoirs of meaning waiting to be dipped into or siphoned off. For Eco, texts like those in Scripture are characterized by the invitation for readers �to make the work� together with the author, with the consequence that texts possess a vitality that cannot be reduced to data or principles or precepts. Rather, they are rendered meaningful in personal and communal performance. Iser observes that narrative texts�incapable of delineating every detail, even in plot�are inevitably characterized by gaps that must be filled by readers; even if the text guides this �filling� process, different readers will actualize the text�s clues in different ways. For both Eco and Iser, then, texts are capable of a range (though not an infinite number) of possible, valid meanings, depending on who is doing the reading, from what perspectives they read, what reading protocols they prefer, and how they otherwise participate in the production of significance. Given this perspective on texts, interpretation cannot be construed as the �discovery of meaning,� but rather as text-guided �performance.�

����������� Second, a linear hermeneutics presumes the need to locate �meaning� as a property of the text or of historical events examined through the text-as-window, a perspective according to which meaning is objectified, and the text is regarded as a thing to be interrogated and manipulated so that it might divulge its deposits.^[18] Gabler�s method concerned itself with �ideas,� and biblical theology in the descriptive mode has subsequently sought theological unity largely in the realm of propositions or universal principles. The consequence is a never-ending bid for unity in doctrinal formulations grounded in a view of texts as containers of inert meaning. Such a view overlooks the power of texts to impinge on their readers. Texts cannot be regarded as mere objects, but are subjects in discourse.^[19]

����������� Closely related, a third concern focuses on how modern biblical scholarship has tended to assume that meaning belongs, without remainder, to the point of a text�s formation. Whether one thinks in terms of a perspective on discourse like that of Robert Wuthnow or the status of some texts as �classics,� the effect of these newer perspectives is to label this characterization of texts as unnecessarily restrictive. Wuthnow notes how cultural products, like texts, sometimes relate in an enigmatic fashion to their social environments: �They draw resources, insights, and inspiration from the environment: they reflect it, speak to it, and make themselves relevant to it. And yet they also remain autonomous enough from their social environment to acquire a broader, even universal and timeless appeal.�^[20] He thus affirms what David Tracy� develops in relation to �classics��namely, that (some) texts have the capacity to speak to but also beyond the situations within which they were formed.^[21]

����������� (2) The Nature of Readers. Adopting the scientific method, or at least a caricature of the scientific method, linear hermeneutics has required the impossible of its practitioners�namely, that they shed their perspectives and interests in order to describe the original, historical meaning of the biblical text read within its own historical and literary boundaries. The openness to a perspective outside of our own, commitments to fairness and honesty in interpretation, and the capacity for self-overcoming�these admirable characteristics of objectivity which make possible thoughtful community have unfortunately been mistaken for a hermeneutical presumption of neutrality.^[22] It has� become commonplace in many circles to grant the impossibility of �scientific objectivity� or neutrality in biblical interpretation, but admissions of this sort have yet to lead to the wholesale reimagining of the task of biblical studies that the crumbling of its centuries-old foundation might portend.

����������� Apart from the anthropological reality that each of us reads from a certain place that can to some degree be transcended but never fully escaped and that what we hear in biblical texts is more or less determined by the wavelengths to which our ears are tuned, it is worth asking whether neutrality is even desirable. Writing of �understanding� in her novel, The Telling, Ursula K. LeGuin observes, �One of the historians of Darranda said: To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune. A yielding, an obedience, a willingness to accept these notes as the right notes, this pattern as the right pattern, is the essential gesture of performance, translation, and understanding. The gesture need not be permanent, a lasting posture of the mind or heart; yet it is not false. It is more than the suspension of disbelief needed to watch a play, yet less than a conversion. It is a position, a posture in the dance.�^[23] Can a text that articulates the importance of care for the alien, the orphan, and widow be effectively engaged by persons who adopt a neutral or disengaged position with regard to society�s marginal?

����������� (3) The Problem of Unity and Diversity. In designing a linear approach arriving at universal precepts from the biblical materials, Gabler held to the ideal that theological unity could be found underlying the manifold witness of Scripture, and this unity became the Holy Grail for his methodological heirs. Although Gabler was working fully within the spirit of Enlightenment idealism that Reason would bring order to the canon as it would also to do the cosmos, it is now widely recognized that the descriptive task of biblical theology has struggled on the uneven terrain of diversity within the canon. How does one present a descriptive, biblical theology when the biblical witnesses themselves do not take up the same concerns and, when they do, are capable of competing solutions? Some interpreters have reduced the biblical choir into a scriptural solo, insisting that all of the voices speak as one, in spite of the fact that no one voice in Scripture, taken on its own, could ever be heard to speak in just that way. Another answer has been to allow one voice to speak for all. Thus, when listening for the theology of James or Jude one may discern more the voice of the Pauline ventriloquist than that of James or Jude. Still others have focused on the search for the coordinating center of Scripture (�covenant,� for example, or �reconciliation�), the effect of which has been effectively to mute alternatives within the canon. Yet others have advanced various metaphors for addressing the issue of diversity�the conference table, for example, or a rope wound of many strands. And, on account of its diversity, many have rejected outright the possibility of deploying the Bible as a normative source in theology and ethics.

����������� Pursuing a related theme, within the guild of biblical scholars, the perhaps inevitable effect of the turn to historical analysis can be seen, first, in the division of biblical studies into testamental specializations, then, later, into specializations within the Testaments. What biblical scholar today can speak of the Bible as a whole? Indeed, New Testament scholars are more likely to characterize themselves as �Lukan scholars� or �Paulinists.� That some specialize in �Q studies� or �study of the historical Jesus� points even further to the conquest of historical analysis over what were to have been regarded as the theological ends of biblical study. In short, commitment to a linear methodology that prioritizes historical meaning has pushed the Humpty Dumpty of biblical theology off the wall, with no means in sight for putting the pieces back together again.

����������� Having outlined three fissures that seem intrinsic to the model of linear hermeneutics on any reading, let me turn briefly to four objections that surface when the descriptive task of biblical theology is accorded privilege in a more specifically theological reading of the biblical texts as Christian Scripture.

����������� (4) Christian Belief in One Church. In an important essay on �The Religious Power of Scripture,� Robert Jenson insists that �...the initiating error of standard modern exegesis [i.e., historical-critical exegesis] is that it presumes a sectarian ecclesiology��one that fails to acknowledge that �...the text we call the Bible was put together in the first place by the same community that now needs to interpret it.�^[24] To put this somewhat differently, the Christian affirmation of one church, existent across time and space, leads to the recognition that the biblical materials were not written to some community of faith other than our own; hence, the essence of the �gap� we experience that separates the biblical world from our own is not so much historical as it is theological. The issue focuses on our comportment vis-�-vis Scripture, our willingness to be �taken in,� as Ellen Davis put its, to enter into a new imaginative world whose presuppositions we may not share initially and to allow Scripture to read �against us� so that we are changed.^[25] It has to do with a theological vision, the effect of which is our willingness to regard these biblical texts as our Scripture and to inhabit its story as our own. From this perspective, historical criticism�s presumption of a chasm separating the world of the Bible from our own lives cannot serve well as point of departure.

����������� (5) Christian Belief in One Canon. We have already observed the ease with which prioritizing historical analysis resulted in the splintering of the Bible�first, into two Testaments; then, into different voices (J, P, E, D, or Q, L, and M in Pentateuchal and Gospel studies; John or Paul or Jesus in New Testament theology); and, then, into different witnesses to perhaps the same voice (Is it possible to speak of a �Pauline theology,� or only of a theology of Romans or Philippians?). The issue of the status of the first two-thirds of the Christian Bible is further raised by adopting the nomenclature of �Hebrew Bible� in opposition to �Old Testament�; sometimes motivated by a concern to raise the importance of those books as something more than �preface� to the Christian Scriptures, the practical effect is nonetheless to rend the Old Testament from its canonical role in a Christian reading of the Scriptures. What can be said of a church that has in so many arenas proven itself to be Marcion�s child and an academy that so easily takes for granted the segregation of biblical studies into testamental specializations? If the tool driving the wedge between Old and New Testaments was the hegemony of historical criticism, the result is a profoundly theological problem now present as a necessary aspect of resolving the estrangement of Scripture and theology.

����������� (6) Christian Belief in Inspiration. In his efforts at legitimating his brief as a professor of New Testament theology in a university context, Larry Hurtado affirms the essentially historical and critical nature of New Testament study while at the same time noting that �...we cannot really study the New Testament writings without engaging the religious affirmations and issues that constitute their contents.�^[26] This is an important point that bears repeating in view of how often in the last three centuries history and theology have been polarized in biblical studies. At the same time, from the perspective of theological hermeneutics, more must be said since it is self-evident that study of the religious significance of these texts can itself be undertaken as a historical enterprise, unrelated to the potential voice of those texts in contemporary theological witness. One of the ways the church has insisted on this something �more� is in its classical affirmation of the doctrine of biblical inspiration. In the wake of the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the early twentieth century, such talk has become politicized within the church and we have no common language for conversing about inspiration. I have found John Goldingay�s approach helpful in this context. For him, at least part of what we mean when we speak of �the inspiration of Scripture,� assuming that we take our cues from the representation of �inspiration� in the Old Testament prophets, is that these words have significance for people beyond their original effectiveness: �these words are meaningful, indeed make special demands, in a later context than the one in which they were originally uttered.�^[27] The interpretation of the Scriptures of Israel by Jesus and Paul, and the inclusion of those Scriptures in the Christian Bible is profound testimony to our claim that the meaning of Scripture cannot be relegated or reduced to its historical moment.

����������� (7) Drawing a Line from Scripture to Theology. One generally typical way of relating the Bible to constructive theology from within the contours of a linear hermeneutic is to move from exegesis to biblical theology to systematic theology to ethics. Two difficulties present themselves immediately�one historical, the other hermeneutical. First, in terms of simple historical development, it is erroneous to imagine that Scripture has priority over theology. �Rules of faith,� narrative summaries of the kerygma, were shaped before and alongside the formation of the Christian canon and, in fact, performed a determinative role in the formation of the Christian canon. Second, there is the problem of continuity: Can these biblical documents, by themselves, support the theological weight placed on them? Add to this the fact that biblical texts, taken on their own terms and without recourse to a history or community of interpretation, are capable of supporting multiple interpretations, and it becomes clear that, even if we want to affirm that scriptural engagement is inescapable for the Christian community, sola Scriptura can never guarantee that one is Christian. Irenaeus (ca. 130 � ca. 202), for example, noted how Gnostics made use of biblical exegesis in their arguments, but insisted that they did not read the Scriptures aright on account of their disregard of the �order and connection� of Scripture; failing to understand the Bible�s true content, they put the pieces of the biblical puzzle together in a way that turned a royal personage into a hound or fox (Adversus Haereses 1.8.1). The �order and connection� to which Irenaeus referred was the rule of faith, a summary of the Christian kerygma that measured faithful interpretation of Scripture. Writing of this stage in the church�s history, William Abraham observes, �...the development of a scriptural canon was utterly inadequate to meet the challenge posed by the Gnostics. The Gnostics had no difficulty accepting any canon of Scripture which might be proposed; being astute in their own way and eclectic in their intellectual sensibilities, they simply found ways to use Scripture to express their own theological convictions. This should come as no surprise to anyone. A list of diverse books merely by the sheer volume involved is susceptible to a great variety of readings.�^[28]

����������� Was not the exercise of this kind of subjectivity precisely what historical criticism was introduced to counter? To question the hegemony of historical analysis may seem foolhardy in light of the history of interpretation, since heightened concern with historical meaning was to serve as an antidote to other uses of the Bible that were (and may continue to be) problematic. To deploy an anachronism in language if not in practice, historical criticism was meant to address the use of the Bible as an ecclesial power play. Concern with validity in interpretation continues to undergird many if not all contemporary defenses of a linear hemeneutic.^[29] Weaned on the poststructural nourishment (however diluted) of such theorists as Michel Foucault, some interpreters have in fact rejected any semblance of interpretive constraint or stability, which for previous generations of readers was grounded in authorial intent, the history to which the text gives witness (or which generated the text), and/or the structure of the text itself. There is reason for this. For such masters of suspicion as Marx, Freud, or Foucault, our �knowing� is shaped by influences that we scarcely recognize�our unconsciousness, for example, or our relationship to the means of production. Indeed, for Foucault, all discourse is to some degree imperialistic; discourse is a mode of power by which inequality is enacted, promulgated, and sanctioned. �Truth� itself is a social construct, and whoever has power determines its content.^[30] The pursuit of authorial intent, then, is for one set of interpreters a guarantor of readerly neutrality but for another a thinly disguised means of self-legitimation.

����������� Are these our only choices�the alleged objectivity of a modernist historicism versus unbridled hermeneutical subjectivity (to which Kevin Vanhoozer humorously refers as �hyperactive hermeneutics�)?^[31] Having urged that a linear hermeneutic that prioritizes historical analysis cannot but help to erode further the gully already dividing the study of the Bible and constructive theology, but committed to a theological hermeneutic within the Christian tradition, I need now to point the way forward to an alternative account.

 

In Dialogue with Friedrich Schleiermacher

With regard to Scheiermacher, my interest is not particularly on his development of a philosophical hermeneutic concerned with the subjectivity of understanding,^[32] but rather with his explicit statement regarding the relation of theology and the Bible which appears at the head of his discussion of �The Formation of the Dogmatic System�:

All propositions which claim a place in an epitome of Evangelical (Protestant) doctrine must approve themselves both by appeal to Evangelical confessional documents, or in default of these, to the New Testament Scriptures, and by exhibition of their homogeneity with other propositions already recognized.^[33]

Schleiermacher thus underscores helpfully, and programmatically, such crucial concerns as the priority of classical formulations of the faith of the Christian church; the import of addressing Scripture theologically, and from an avowedly theological stance (and, by implication, the decisive role of the theological formation of readers of Scripture); and the place of coherence in theology (though, for Schleiermacher, �coherence� would not refer to historical consistency from one age to the next). Taking seriously his legacy as the �father of Protestant theology� and now reading this methodological axiom more than 160 years after its first publication, we can see how Schleiermacher brings into focus important issues that continue to trouble us. In this section of my essay, then, I will use Schleiermacher�s statement of method as a beginning point for discussion of three issues.

����������� (1) The Status and Role of the Old Testament. Schleiermacher�s use of �New Testament� to modify �Scriptures� makes explicit what has been and continues often to be the practice associated with theology in its diminishing or completely negating the status and role of the Old Testament as Christian Scripture. In this, Schleiermacher was heir to the agenda already associated with Gabler, whose method had accorded privilege to the New Testament. Schleiermacher thus also bears witness to what is almost certainly the inevitable outcome of the impulses of history-oriented analysis; requiring that the meaning of texts resides at their historical address, historical criticism has no intrinsic need and little room for the theological claim constituted by the location of these two collections together as one �book.� This is true in spite of the observation that the Hebrew Scriptures lay in need of being rescued, so that they might be heard in terms of their own witness, from the strictures of typological schemes that blatantly turned figures and data in the Old Testament into precursors of Christ and the church. More pointedly, though, Schleiermacher saw his disjunction of Old and New Testaments as the disjunction of Judaism and Christianity. Admitting the historical connection between Christianity and Judaism �through the fact that Jesus was born among the Jewish people� (�12.1), he nonetheless lumped Judaism together with Heathenism �inasmuch as the transition from either of these to Christianity is a transition to another religion� (�12.2). He continues, �...Christianity cannot in any wise be regarded as a remodelling or a renewal and continuation of Judaism� (�12.2). Although this assertion flies in the face of the findings of more recent New Testament scholarship, it remains true that Old Testament scholarship in the historical-critical mode has continued to segregate the Old Testament from its canonical mores in the Christian Bible, increasingly treating it as a self-contained collection of documents known as �Hebrew Bible.� The teleological movement of the Christian Bible from creation to new creation, together with its christological pivot-point, is thus displaced.

����������� In his study of the enduring theological witness of the Old Testament, Christopher Seitz points us in a helpful direction. For Seiz, addressing the theological problem of two Testaments is a necessary facet of resolving the estrangement of Scripture and theology. What holds the canon together is not some sort of Scripture principle or theological abstraction, but the God who covenanted with Israel and raised Jesus from the dead. Christians who for whatever reason, whether explicitly or functionally, downplay or deny the ongoing theological witness of the Old Testament thus cut themselves off from more than interesting or important �background material.� At stake, rather, is the fulness of God�s self-disclosure�that is, the possibility that we might erroneously imagine that we have access to a ��person-event Jesus of Nazareth� apart from the claims of the triune God.�^[34] The integrity and role of Scripture is thus grounded in the two questions, Who is speaking? and Who is being addressed? Scripture is not a people�s attempt to understand God, but God�s own self-disclosure: �The two-testament witness renders not a great code, but God as he truly is, without remainder, save that blocked out by a darkened will and mind.�^[35]

����������� Accordingly, the search for a �coordinating center� of the Bible is unmasked as an attempt to tame the witness of Scripture in ways congenial to Enlightenment idealism, and the same may be said of other biblical-theological quests of doctrinal unity. What holds the Testaments�and the diverse materials comprising the Testaments�together is not theological abstraction, but the story of God, a telling of which requires the witness to beginnings, the mid-point of the Christ-event, and the end of the eschatological vision, no one of which can be reduced to one book or one Testament read on its own terms. A �Christian� reading of the Old Testament is not one that asserts the superiority of the New Testament over the old, or that the Old Testament requires the New as hermeneutical key, but rather one that recognizes that the Old Testament points beyond itself toward the fulfillment of God�s purpose at the same time that it narrates the expression of that purpose in creation and among those whom God has made his people. To interpret the pages of the biblical texts in this way is itself already a theological task, one that requires both less and more than proper exegetical tools. To grapple with Scripture in this way presumes an openness to a living relationship with God, on the basis of which we come to Scripture with respect, in gratitude, ready to embrace and to be embraced into God�s own ways and work.

����������� (2) Does Doctrine Eclipse the Witness of Scripture? For children of the Reformation, the relation of the biblical text to the theological tradition presents an unresolved and inescapable conundrum. The same may be said for children of the Enlightenment. The slogan sola Scriptura raises the question, How does Scripture function vis-�-vis doctrine, the teaching office of the church, experience, and so on? Recognition of the historical particularity of all knowing raises the question whether theological statements from another time have bearing on our own.

����������� My earlier comments on the problems attendant to historical-critical modes of inquiry might be taken as a wholesale rejection of the aims and contributions of much formal study of Scripture over the last three centuries. This is not the case�though, ironically, I would quickly add that the most promising work among historical-critical scholars has been at the hands of those who refused to take this approach to its logical conclusions, who have, then, failed to cast off their own Christian commitments in the service of scientific neutrality and instead have read in a way positively disposed toward the religious significance of the biblical texts.^[36] The need to wrestle the text of Scripture from dogmatic clutches was a real one, but this need was itself historically determined. And this history has largely left us, so much so that biblical and theological studies seem any more not to speak the same language. Hence, whereas biblical studies might still be regarded as functioning to resist the theological or ecclesial domestication of the biblical witness, this is hardly the issue today that those progenitors of historical criticism faced centuries ago. Indeed, theology today often seems quite capable of carrying on its work sans any need to draw on or check in with biblical studies.

����������� For this reason, we need to hear, and hear well, Schleiermacher�s emphasis on �confessional documents.� Although his concern is with a particularly Protestant interpretation of Scripture, at a more basic level his is a call to take seriously that a reading of the Bible worthy of the name �Christian� is a �ruled reading.� That is, the question of validity in interpretation for theological readings of Scripture cannot be separated from the question of a particular reading�s coherence with classical faith. In his discussion of the appeal to confessional documents, Schleiermacher draws attention explicitly to the role of those documents, to which I will refer as �doctrine,� in the formation and maintenance of identity. A similar viewpoint is developed by our contemporary, Alister McGrath. Noting the need to move beyond the insights of Scripture in order to face challenges addressed to subsequent Christian communities, he observes the concern to extend the biblical vocabulary and conceptual framework in ways consonant with Scripture�s central insights. The consequence�those doctrinal formulations that would interpret (and not merely restate) the New Testament traditions concerning Jesus�was doctrine, which functions to define communities of discourse.^[37]

����������� Let me propose, however, that more needs to be said and that, for a contemporary theological hermeneutics, it is important to characterize the relationship between Scripture and doctrine as mutually informing and influencing. Brief discussion of three areas where the voice of Scripture has been inappropriately muted and begs for recovery in doctrinal criticism will illustrate my point.

����������� First, to take the Apostles� Creed as an exemplar, it is puzzling that, in its witness to our confession of Jesus� role as Savior and Lord, the Creed summarizes one of our central beliefs in a rather one-sided� representation of the Return of Christ: �from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.�^[38] Not least in modern western culture, where guilt plays so large a role in our collective personality, images of �Christ the Judge� may not be entirely welcome, even among those who have turned to Jesus in faith. Even among Christians, �judgment� may evoke feelings less of hope than of fear. It is therefore always worth remembering that �judgment� does not simply refer to �condemnation,� but has to do more broadly with assessment and division, so that some may with good reason anticipate judgment as the time when they and their cause will be vindicated. It is also worth remembering who will pronounce final judgment. The End will be marked by judgment, to be sure, but this is the judgment exacted by the one who �came to seek and to save the lost� (Luke 19:10). Even with these interpretive provisos, however, it is remarkable that the Creed can speak of the coming judgment without bearing witness to the consummation of God�s purpose in creation and covenant, and, indeed, to the biblical hope of the restoration of the cosmos. It is at this point that the Creed�s witness is truncated and in need of augmentation.

����������� Second, again to reflect on the Apostles� Creed, it is enigmatic that the significance of Jesus� life can be passed over so easily in the space between the two affirmations, �born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate.� That the New Testament devotes four of its books to narrations of Jesus� ministry registers a level of importance that seems overlooked by the Creed. Moreover, those repeated appeals to �the faithfulness of Jesus�^[39] in the New Testament letters presume some significance to the shape of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Again, however, this is not suggested by the Creed�a lacuna that has repercussions both for christology (and especially for our understanding of Jesus� sonship) and for discipleship (i.e., for those who �follow the example of Jesus�).

����������� Third, neither the Apostles� Creed nor any of the Rules of Faith/Truth that dot the writings of the early centuries of the church ever mention Israel. It might be urged that the creeds or rules should not be expected to mention everything and that some things were likely to have been simply taken for granted, including the import of Israel in the divine economy. This argument is not very compelling, however, since the Creed does mention from the Old Testament the one thing that might most easily be taken for granted�namely, the work of God in creation. Instead, we must take notice of the need in the first three centuries of the Common Era for Christians to work out their self-identity, especially with respect to Judaism, and that they did so both over against Judaism and, increasingly, by adopting a supersessionist narrative of God�s purpose. Without delving into this problem in detail here,^[40] it is worth noting that, for Luke and Paul, to name two prominent New Testament witnesses, the narrative of God�s purpose cannot circumnavigate Israel and remain the biblical narrative, whereas the �confessional documents� of the Christian church seem willing to write Israel out of the story altogether. For early �confessional documents,� the voice of the Old Testament has simply been silenced in its witness to Yahweh�s redemptive work with Israel. Here, again, we have evidence that doctrine cannot simply trump the work of biblical interpretation but must be placed in a dialectical relationship with Scripture that is mutually informing.

����������� (3) Our (Modernist) Tendency to Reduce and Objectify. Schleiermacher�s reference to �an epitome [Inbegriff: �synopsis� or �condensation�] of...doctrine� captures one of the primary factors contributing to uneasy relations between Bible and theology. This concern with analytical synthesis at the level of relative abstraction and systematization, I take it, lies behind John Goldingay�s stark assertion, �If systematic theology did not exist, it might seem unwise to invent it....�^[41] Insofar as systematic and biblical theologians alike participate in and perpetuate the modernist tendency to reduce and objectify, and to dismiss mystery and resolve tensions left standing by Scripture (and by life!) in the service of principles and schemas, it will be difficult to unite the two so long divided, exegesis and constructive theology. Even a cursory examination of the content of the Bible will illustrate why this is so. Although one finds lists of precepts (�You shall...�) and the formulation of truth claims (�God is...�), the overwhelming portion of the Bible is cast as narrative. What is more, even those texts that do not exhibit an explicitly narrative mode of discourse�say, the latter prophets or letters�themselves have a storied character about them. To this we may add that, especially with those documents in the New Testament most susceptible to systematic arrangement, the Pauline and Catholic letter collections, there is no escaping their essentially occasional character. These observations have immediate ramifications for the theological use of Scripture.

����������� First,� widespread efforts either to distill theological claims from narrative or to deny that theology can be derived from narrative notwithstanding, we must recognize that narrative can be and in Scripture certainly is a mode of theological discourse. If we deny this to be the case, it may be because we have learned too much from Schleiermacher concerning the way �theology� is or must be done. (For this reason, one of the most important contributing factors to the contemporary rapprochement between biblical and theological work has to do with rethinking the task and aims of systematic theology.)

����������� Alternatively, or additionally, it may be because we have a truncated notion of narrative, one whose primary categories are �true� or �fictional� rather than oriented toward the communicative role of narrative texts. This has to do largely with problematic notions of �history� in terms of� �what actually happened��a modernist perspective that, again, divorces history and theology and minimizes the role of historical narrative in the Bible. As the field of philosophy of history has developed, we have seen, instead, that �history� and the �past� exist in a kind of bartering relationship�the past providing environmental situations, personages, and events; history providing significance through selectivity and narration. Hence, history is both less and more than the past; history is di‘g‘sis (narration), not mim‘sis (imitation). If there is to be a historical account at all, decisions must be made, lest the past be distilled into an infinity of singularities and indifference wherein everything is of equal hermeneutic value. Events must be chosen, but must also be coordinated within an interpretive web, in a narrative of causal relations. Here is the axis around which the entire enterprise turns: Events are chosen and linked in light of the commitments of the historians (and their communities) concerning their sense of beginnings and endings. That is, selectivity and narrativity in biblical historiography are theological statements, forged in relation to a vision of how Yahweh�s will is coming to fruition.

����������� Second, rather than restricting Scripture�s role in theology to that of �foundation�or �source,� it is important to recognize that the Bible is not raw material waiting for theology to happen. It is already theology. �Faith seeking understanding� is already going on in its pages. Answers to the question, How might Scripture function in systematic theology?, often revolve around issues of content. What does James teach about God, for example? What is the relationship between faith and works? If these books are themselves �faith seeking understanding,� however, then we must trace a different line of questions, for then these books are not to be identified with �the gospel,� but as witnesses to the gospel. What is more, to illustrate with the New Testament materials, they witness to the gospel within specific sociohistorical contexts (e.g., Philippians, Philemon) or more generally within the ancient Mediterranean world (e.g., Luke-Acts, James). None are transcultural per se, even if they have the capacity to speak beyond their contexts of origin, for they articulate within, and against, the cultural mores of the ancient Roman world and (some of) that world�s subcultures. Their assumptions can invite paradigmatic status, to be sure. For example, they bear witness to such non-negotiable presuppositions as the continuity of past, present, and future with respect to the Scriptures of Israel and the character of the people of God on account of the one, eternal purpose of God; or the new-age inaugurating advent of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth; and so on. Without overlooking the importance of such matters, we may explore how these books model the instantiation of the good news in particular locales and with respect to historical particularities. Here, in the New Testament already, one finds �theology� both in its critical task of reflection on the practices and affirmations of the people of God to determine their credibility and faithfulness, and in its constructive task of reiteration, restatement, and interpretation of the good news vis-�-vis ever-developing horizons and challenges. How is James situated in and reflective of a particular sociohistorical environment? What is its response�on the basis of the great story of God�s activity in the world, including the world of James�to that environment? When read against that mural, what does James affirm, deny, reject, undermine, embrace? What strategies for articulating the good news and construing practical faithfulness are portended in those pages? How does it invite its readers into the reflective and constructive task of discourse on the nature of faithful discipleship? On what authorities does the text of James draw? What vision of the �new world� does it portend? In short, if we are concerned with the �theology of James,� we cannot be satisfied with �description,� but we must explore how this letter draws its readers into transformative discourse.

 

Final Words: Shaping Our Theological Horizons

My earlier critique of historical modes of biblical scholarship should not be taken as a call for some form of study devoid of scholarly rigor or critical engagement. With reference to my earlier comments, though, it will come as no surprise that, by �critical� and �rigorous,� I refer more broadly to the need for discernment with reference to the varieties of possible readings of biblical texts rather than to the commitment to neutral scholarship characteristic of biblical studies influenced by the scientific method. Nor am I referring to a particular mode of study�even if �critical study of the Bible� has for two hundred years been virtually equated with the paradigm of historical criticism. I am concerned, with the question of validity in interpretation and how this might be measured. A critically engaged reading of Scripture would account for the text in its final form; for the text as a whole; for the cultural embeddedness of all language (rather than assuming that all people everywhere and in all times construed their life-worlds as we do); for the canonical address of the text, particularly with reference to the location of particular biblical witnesses within the grand mural of the actualization of God�s purpose; and for the witness of Scripture as seen in its effects within and among the community of God�s people, not least in the distillation of Scripture�s message in the great creeds of the church which confess and proclaim and worship the Triune God. With Francis Watson, then, I am allowing that, in theological hermeneutics, �much that seems important to conventional historical-critical scholarship would become a matter of indifference.�^[42]

����������� Those modes of biblical study sponsored by such a hermeneutic would be �partial,� in the sense of their ecclesial and theological location. From this vantage point, the best interpreters of the Bible are those actively engaged in communities of biblical interpretation and the single most important practice to cultivate is involvement in reading the Bible with others who take its message seriously and who meet regularly to discern its meaning for faith and life. If such a group is multigenerational and multicultural, and includes access to the depth of the interpretation of Scripture in the church�s history, this is even better. Moreover, a reading of the Bible as Christian Scripture can never be satisfied with anything less than interpretive practices oriented toward shaping and nurturing the faith and life of God�s people. Faithful appropriation of Scripture requires attention to theology, with the result that we can hardly speak of biblical illiteracy in the church without at the same time decrying our concomitant theological amnesia. Tethered to a commitment to read the biblical texts within the horizons of their theological subject matter is a commitment to reading those texts within communities of faith wherein the theological formation of its members is a central practice.

����������� A theological hermeneutics of Christian Scripture would take seriously the referential relation between the words of Scripture and the ongoing presence of the crucified Christ, who is Lord of the church. Such a hermeneutic would find its orientation not in an objective reading of biblical texts, but in the creative and redemptive aims of God that come to their most visible expression in Jesus of Nazareth, the Word become flesh. This is not to belittle or otherwise to minimize the importance of Scripture, as though God�s purpose were mediated in some way apart from Scripture. It is, however, to underscore, first, that the truth we seek cannot be dissolved into theological abstractions or objective truth claims; and, second, that a Christian theological hermeneutic is necessarily tied to its effects in transforming persons and communities in ways consonant with God�s project of liberation.

����������� Speaking with some hyperbole, then, a theological hermeneutic concerned with the faithful interpretation of the Bible as Christian Scripture must be tilted less toward the Bible�s content and more toward the authoritative role of Scripture in theological conversion. By �theological conversion,� I refer to a conversion of the imagination�that is, the reformation of the essential categories by which we interpret life,^[43] together with those dispositions and practices that emerge through and from such conversion. If Scripture functions as the instrument of revelation, through which God makes himself known in the life of his people, then (1) it embodies the paradigm by which Christians make sense of the world in relation to God and (2) it is incumbent on Christians to engage in theological reflection on Scripture whereby their imaginations are yielded to the theological vision of Scripture. Comporting oneself vis-�-vis Scripture will not overcome the problem of diversity of perspectives within the Bible, but will rather focus our imaginative faculties on the pattern of the story (or �plot�) that runs from creation to new creation, with the Christ-event as its interpretive middle; or on the �voice� of Scripture heard as a choir of voices engaged in melody and counter-melody.

����������� In the end, a theological hermeneutics concerned with the interpretation of the Bible as Christian Scripture is first as an invitation from God.

We are drawn into the world of the text precisely as we are drawn into a relationship with its central character [that is, with God]. As this happens, we find ourselves confronted by many of the same realities and experiences as are narrated in the text. Suddenly, sin, guilt, grace, reconciliation, the power of God�s Spirit, the risen Christ and so on are not mere elements in a narrative world, but constituent part of our own world, players and factors to be taken into consideration in our daily living and our attempts to make sense of our situation.^[44]

We are beckoned to come and live this story, to inhabit the narrative of God�s ongoing and gracious purpose for his people, to resist attempts at revising the words of Scripture so as to make them match our reality and instead to make sense of our reality, our lives, within its pages, within its story. To embrace the Bible as Scripture, then, is to accept it not as one narrative among others, but to accord it a privilege above all others, and to allow ourselves to be shaped by it ultimately.

 

 

Endnotes