My latest: on Jordan Peterson, in CT

Yesterday Christianity Today published my review of Jordan Peterson’s new book, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine. The title of the review is “Jordan Peterson Loves God’s Word. But What About God?” Early on I write the following:

The volume is, to put it mildly, an enormous undertaking—quite unlike Peterson’s self-help books. Running more than 200,000 words, it is a thematic and allegorical commentary on the law of Moses, especially Genesis and Exodus. It is gargantuan in every sense of the word: energizing and exhausting, brimming with ideas and asides, full of insightful connections and baffling conclusions, consistent in its viewpoint, maddening in its dodges, impressive in its ambition, and tedious, at times, in its sheer funereal solemnity.

Read the full thing here. For comparison, here is Rowan Williams in The Guardian with a rhetorically more negative but substantively similar assessment.

You can’t die for a question

I had some friends from quite different backgrounds do a bit of interrogation yesterday, following my post about biblicist versus catholic Christianity. Interrogation of me, that is. As is my wont, I sermonize and then qualify, or at least explain. Yesterday was the sermon. Today is the asterisk.

1. What I wrote has to do with a persistent conundrum I find myself utterly unable to solve. I cannot grasp either of two types of Christianity. The first lingers most in yesterday’s post. It is a form of the faith that never, ever grows; never, ever settles; never, ever stabilizes; never, ever knows. Its peculiar habit, rather, is always and perpetually to pull up stakes and go back to the beginning; to return to Go; to start from scratch; to question everything and, almost on purpose, to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Am I exaggerating? I’m not! Primitivist biblicism, rooted in nuda scriptura, affirms on principle that every tradition and all Christians, from the apostles to the present, not only may have gotten this or that wrong but did in fact get just about everything wrong. And this affirmation inexorably eats itself. For what the biblicist proposed yesterday is bound to be wrong tomorrow—that is, discovered by some other enterprising biblicist to belong to the catalogue of errors that is Christian history.

At the same time, this ouroborotic style of Christianity affirms a second principle: namely, the total sufficiency and perfect perspicuity of the canon. Come again? Didn’t we just say that everyone who’s ever read it got it wrong, until you/me? Indeed. Not only this, but the excavationist-reader of the clear-and-sufficient text somehow misses the fact that he is himself doing the very thing he chides the tradition for doing: namely, interpreting what requires no interpretation. The one thing we may be sure of is that his successor, following the example of his predecessor with perfect consistency, will fault him for his interpretation, while offering an alternative interpretation.

This whole dialectic makes me crazy. As evidenced by yesterday’s vim and vigor.

2. Let me put it this way. I understand that there are both people and traditions that embody this dialectic, that don’t see anything wrong with it. What I can’t understand is pastors and scholars wanting to produce such a viewpoint as a desirable consequence of ecclesial and academic formation. My goal as a teacher is to educate my students out of this way of thinking. Why would we want to educate them into it?

I will withhold comment on whether Protestantism as such is unavoidably ouroborotic. At the very least, we may say that the ouroborotic impulse is contained within it. Reformation breeds reformation; revolution begets revolution. Semper reformanda unmasks error after error, century after century, until you find yourself with the apostles, reforming them, too. And the prophets. And Jesus himself. And the texts that give you him. And the traditions underlying those texts. And the hypothetical traditions underlying those.

And all of a sudden, you find there’s nothing left.

Again, I’m not indicting Protestants per se. But there is an instinct here, a pressure, a logic that unfolds itself. And there are evangelical traditions that actively nurture it in their people. I’ve seen it my whole life. It’s not good, y’all! I, the ordinary believer, come to see myself, not as a recipient of Christian faith, but as its co-constructor, even its builder. It’s up to me:

Brad the Believer!
Can he build it?
Yes he can!
Can he fix it?
Yes he can!

And how do I do it? By reading the Bible, alone with myself, at best with a few others—albeit with final say reserved for me.

The faith here becomes a matter of arguing my way to a conclusion, rather than yielding, surrendering, and submitting to a teaching. Cartesian Christianity is DIY faith. It cannot sustain itself. It’s built for collapse. (The call is coming from inside the house.)

3. The second type of Christianity to which I alluded above, which was less visible in the post yesterday, is not so much a species of biblicism as its repudiation. In the past I’ve called it post-biblicism biblicism, though it doesn’t always entail further biblicism. A friend commented that what we need is an account of progressive biblicism, though that’s not what I have in mind either. What I have in mind is, I suppose, what I’ll call know-nothing Christianity. A Christianity of nothing but doubts. A faith reducible to questions.

I take it as given that I’m not talking about asking questions or having doubts, much less mysticism or apophatic spirituality. (Go read Denys Turner. All theology is apophatic, rightly understood.) No, I’m talking about a Christianity that has lost the confidence of the martyrs, the boldness of the apostles, the devotion of the saints.

Put it this way. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. But you can’t die for a question. Christianity is a religion of proclamation. It preaches a message. It announces tidings. It does not say, “Jesus might have been raised from the dead.” It says, “Jesus is risen.” You or I may well have intrusive mights in our struggles with faith. But the church is not a community of might and maybe. The church is a community of is, because she is a people of resurrection. What began in an empty tomb, she confesses, will be consummated before the whole world at the risen Lord’s return.

That’s something to die for. And therefore to live for. I can neither die nor live for a question mark. The church speaks with periods and exclamation points. She errs—her pastors miss the mark—when the faith is reduced to nothing but ellipses and questions.

4. It’s true that I exaggerated the catholic style of magisterial Protestantism. I also may have made it sound as though Christianity never changes; that whatever Christians have always said and done, they are bound always to say and do in the future, till kingdom come. (Though I think if you re-read what I wrote, I couched enough to give the Prots some wiggle room.)

In any case: granted. Preacher’s gonna preach. But here’s what I was getting at.

Christianity simply cannot be lived if, at any moment, any and every doctrine and belief, no matter how central or venerable, lies under constant threat of revision and removal. All the more so if the potential revision and removal are actions open to any baptized believer. Ouroborotic faith comes to seem a sort of vulgar Kantianism (or is it that Kant is vulgar Lutheranism?): heteronomy must give way to autonomy, lest the faith not be authentic, real, mine. The word from without becomes a word from within. The word of the gospel transmutes into a word I make, am responsible for making. I am a law unto myself; I am the gospel unto myself.

Who can live this way? Who can give themselves to a community for a lifetime based on a message (a book, a doctrine, an ethics) subject to continuous active reappraisal? and reappraisal precisely from below? The faith becomes a kind of democracy: a democracy of the living alone, to the exclusion of the dead. And just like any democracy, what’s voted on today will be up for debate tomorrow.

In a word: If Christianity is nothing but what we make of it—an ongoing, unfinished construction project in which nothing is fixed and everything, in principle, is subject to renovation and even demolition—then we are of all men most miserable.

To be sure, the skeptic and the atheist will see this statement as a précis of their unbelief. What beggars my belief is that, apparently, there are self-identified Christians who not only affirm it, but actively induce it in the young, in college students, in laypeople. I cannot fathom such a view.

5. A final thought. I am a student, in different ways, of two very different theologians: Robert Jenson and Kathryn Tanner. Much of what I’ve outlined here goes against what both of them teach regarding the church and tradition; or at least it seems to. Let me say something about that.

I am thinking of the opening two chapters of Jenson’s Systematics and of the whole normative case Tanner makes in Theories of Culture. In the latter, Tanner takes issue with both correlationists (to her “left”) and postliberals (to her “right”) regarding what “culture” is, how the church inhabits and engages it, and the honest picture that results for Christian tradition. There is a strong constructivist undercurrent in the book that would push back against what I’ve written here.

As for Jenson, he argues that the church is a community defined by a message. Tradition is the handing-on of the message, both in real time (from one person/community to another) and across time (from one generation to another). It is not a bug that causes the gospel to “change” in the process of being handed on. It’s a feature. We see this transmission-cum-translation project already in the New Testament. And it necessarily continues so long as the church is around, handing on the gospel anew.

Why? Because new questions arise, in the course of the church’s mission, questions that have not always been answered in advance. Sometimes it isn’t questions at all, but cultural translation itself. How should the gospel be incarnated here, in this place? Among gentiles, not Jews? Among rulers, not peasants? Among Ethiopians, not Greeks? Among polytheists, not monotheists? Among atheists, not polytheists? Among polygamists, not monogamists? Among liberals, not conservatives? Among capitalists, not socialists? Among democrats, not monarchists? In an age of CRISPR and cloning, not factories and the cotton gin? In a time when women are no longer homemakers only, but landowners, degree-holders, and professionals? When men are in offices and online and not only in fields and mines?

The gospel, Jenson says, doesn’t change in these settings. But how the church says the gospel, in and to such settings, does change. How could it not? We don’t speak the gospel in the same words as the apostles, or else we’d be speaking Aramaic and Greek; we’d be talking about idol meat and temple prostitutes and incense to Caesar and Artemis the Great. Now, we do talk about such things. But not as matters of living interest to our hearers. As, rather, samples of faithful gospel speech from the apostles, samples that call for our imitation, extension, and application. We say the selfsame gospel anew in diverse contexts, based on the apostolic example, in imitation of their model. As Barth says in the Church Dogmatics, theology is not a matter of repeating what the apostles and prophets said, but of saying what must be said here and now on the basis of what they said there and then.

In this way, “evangelical” tradition is simultaneously unchanging, fixed, stable and fluid, organic, growing. It’s why, as a friend once said after reading Theories of Culture, the church possesses a teaching office. Magisterial authority of some sort is necessary in a missionary community defined by a historical message expressed in written documents. Someone’s got to do the interpreting, not least when questions arise that the apostles neither answered nor even foresaw.

Hence my roping the magisterial Protestants into the “catholic” version of Christianity. Try as they might, they cannot deny that the doctrine of the Trinity formulated and codified by Nicaea and Constantinople is dogma for the church. It is irreversible, irrevocable, and therefore irreformable. Semper reformanda does not apply here. (And if not here, then not elsewhere, too.) Not because the Bible is crystal clear on the subject. Not because trinitarian doctrine is laid out in so many words on the sacred page. Not because no reasonable person could read the Bible differently.

No: It is because the church’s ancient teachers, faced with the question of Christ and the Spirit, read the Bible in this way, and staked the future of the faith on it; and because we, their children in the faith, receive their decision as the Spirit’s own. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us… It is thus neither your job nor mine to second guess it, to search the Bible to confirm that Saint Athanasius et al did, in fact, get the Trinity right. It’s our job to accept it; to confess it; to believe it. Any other suggestion misunderstands my, our, relationship to the church and to her tradition.

6. A final-final thought; a conclusion to my conclusion.

In my graduate studies I came to be deeply impressed by the underdetermined character of Scripture. The text can reasonably be read by equally reasonable people in equally reasonable ways. “Underdetermined” is Stephen Fowl’s word. It doesn’t mean indeterminate. But neither does it mean determinate. Christian Smith calls the result “PIP”: pervasive interpretive pluralism. Smith is right. His point is downstream from the hermeneutical, though, which is downstream in turn from the theological and ecclesiological point.

I’ve tried to unpack and to argue that point in my two books: The Doctrine of Scripture and The Church’s Book. Together they’re just short of 250,000 words. I wouldn’t force that much reading (of anyone, certainly not of me!) on anybody. Nor can I summarize here what I lay out there. I simply mean to draw attention to a fundamental premise that animates all of my thinking about the Bible and thus about the church, tradition, and dogma. That premise is a rejection of a strong account of biblical perspicuity. On its face, the Bible can be read many ways; rare is any of these ways obvious, even to the baptized. If I’m right, then either the Bible can never finally be understood with confidence (a position I reject, though I have learned much from scholars who believe this) or we ordinary Christians stand under that which has been authorized by Christ, through his Spirit, to teach the Bible’s word with confidence, indeed with divine assurance. Call the authority in question the church, tradition, ecumenical councils, bishops, magisterium—whatever—but it’s necessary for the Christian life. It’s necessary for Christianity to work. And not only necessary. But instituted by Christ himself, for our benefit. For our life among the nations. For our faith, seeking understanding as it always is. For our discipleship.

We are called to live and die for Christ. The church gives us Christ. She does not give us a question. She gives us a person. In her we find him. If we can’t trust her, we can’t have him—much less die for him. They’re a package deal. Accept both or neither. But you can’t have one without the other.

Two ways of reading

One way of reading something is to ask what’s wrong with it: what’s missing, what’s out of place. Another way of reading something is to ask what one might learn or benefit from it.

It’s a mistake to see the first as “critical” reading. This is the perennial academic error. Finding fault with a piece of text—whether an op-ed, an essay, a journal article, a monograph, a novel, or a poem—for being imperfect (i.e., human) or finite (i.e., limited) is absurd. We know in advance that every text we ever read will be both finite and imperfect. This is not news. Nor is “critical” reading the smirking discovery of whatever a given text’s limits or imperfections are. Who cares?

Roger Ebert liked to admonish Gene Siskel for being parsimonious in his joy. The principle applies to reading and indeed to all intellectual activity. Why should what is flawed take priority over what is good? Why not approach any text—any cultural artifact whatsoever—and ask, What do I stand to receive from this? What beauty or goodness or truth does it convey? How does it challenge, provoke, silence, instruct, or otherwise reach out to me? How might I stand under it, as an apprentice, rather than over it, as a master? What does it evoke in me, and how might I respond in kind?

Such a posture is not uncritical. It is a necessary component of any humane criticism. It is the first step in the direction of genuine (rather than superficial) criticism, for it is an admission of need: of the limits and imperfections of the reader, prior to mention of those of the text.

In a word, humility is the condition for joy, in reading as in all art. And without joy, the whole business is a sad and rotten affair.

A test for exegesis

A simple test for any proposed reading of Scripture, but especially for those put forth by biblical scholars:

Is God understood as (presupposed to be) a living agent…
(a) within the world described by the text, whatever its genre? or
(b) both within the world of the text and behind, in, and through the text itself?

In other words, is God a character in the text? an author of the text? or both?

What I find, in far too much Christian scholarship on the Bible, is option (a). God is taken seriously as a character, an agent, a force, a presence, an actor, a protagonist—within the narrative or poetry or whatever pericope or canonical book. Apparently, for many Christian biblical scholars, that is what it means to read “theologically.” The modifier “theological” denotes a “more than humanist” or “non–methodological atheist” hermeneutic; God is not presumed to be a superstition best elided in interpretation. This principle might extend to the present, so that the God at work in the world of the text is taken to be at work in the world of the reader.

But a crucial premise has been overlooked or denied. To read in the way thus delineated is to read the Bible “like any other book,” as if its form and content, its status, were no different in kind from any other work of literature. But why, then, should you or I or the scholar give it our attention, indeed a unique attention incomparable to any other book? The answer is simple: Because, as the church confesses, what the Bible mediates or bears to us is “the word of the Lord.” The Lord God of Israel stands behind the words of the text that attest him. They are inspired by him; he is, in the phrase of St. Thomas Aquinas, their “principal author.”

If that is true—and its truth is a matter of faith, not demonstration—then it must, and invariably will, affect how one reads the text. Nor is there anything unscholarly about this. Method is apt to subject matter. The subject matter of Christian exegesis of canonical Holy Scripture is the living word of the living God to his living people: the speech of Christ to his body and bride, in the present tense.

Christian scholars should read it as such. Bracketing the text’s inspiration or divine authorship is a dodge. A reading that limits God to intratextual agent while ignoring God’s role as extratextual author is not yet theological in the fullest sense.

Exegetes, take note.

Inegalitarian Acts

For various reasons I’ve been reading and re-reading Acts a lot this year. One reason is that I’m co-leading a Sunday School class through the book, slowly, chapter by chapter. This past Sunday I had Acts 15: the climactic moment in the story, the hinge of the great gentile missions of the Jewish churches in Jerusalem and Antioch.

In the process of reading and teaching Acts I’ve acquired many unfounded and decidedly unsexy opinions about it. My sense of its dating has been moving steadily earlier and earlier (like Harnack), and I enjoy mentally fiddling with authorship questions (St. Luke? St. Titus? Another?). Since I’m not a New Testament scholar, I’m freed from worrying about being found out with this or that frumpy position on these questions. Theologians are allowed to speculate, no?

In any case, teaching Acts 15 brought home to me one thing in particular in a new way: namely, just how inegalitarian it is. By this I don’t mean to refer to contemporary Christian debates about gender. I’m referring instead to structures of leadership and authority. I’ve seen this chapter used countless times as a paradigm for how a local church should practice corporate discernment, or come to a decision on some contested matter. But reading the chapter, you realize that that’s a fundamental misconstrual of the Jerusalem council.

For the council is not, nor is it about, a local matter. It’s quite explicitly about a distant matter, prompted by events and experiences hundreds of miles away. The Jerusalem church isn’t full of uncircumcised converts to The Way. Rather, Jerusalem is the origin and abiding center of The Way, housing its primatial leaders and authoritative spokesmen. The matter of gentiles and circumcision is taken from Asia Minor and Antioch through Phoenicia and Samaria to Jerusalem. And even those who bring it to Jerusalem have only a testimonial role to play; it is St. Peter, the chief apostle of the Twelve, and St. James, the head of the Jerusalem community, who declare (with the only speeches reported to us) the Spirit’s will in the dispute.

To be sure, we are told that the declaration involves the unanimous consent of the whole church (cf. v. 22); but even the most stubborn conservative will admit that the author is synthesizing and perhaps theologically airbrushing what continued, for some time, to be a question of considerable dispute among the churches—not least because they were spread far and wide, and technologies of communication meant that it took years of testimony, explanation, and persuasion to ensure that the faithful came to one mind on the matter. Note further, too, that it is not the people in general who gather for deliberation, but “the apostles and elders” (a phrase repeated no fewer than five times: vv. 2, 4, 6, 22, 23; following these mentions, the word apostolos does not appear in the remaining 13 chapters of the book, only presbyteroi—quite a fascinating lexical signal to the reader, when you think about it). Which means it is not only the formal, appointed leaders of the church who gather to discern and decide a contested question for “the” church; it is those leaders who reside in and speak from a location of recognized authority, in this case Jerusalem.

That sounds a whole lot like an ecumenical council, and not at all like a particular congregation practicing communal discernment. It’s neither local nor democratic. Some people’s voices bear authority, and others’ do not. Some are tasked with discovering the Spirit’s will, and others are not. Once the matter is decided, a document is issued, and the dispersed churches are tasked with receiving, obeying, and implementing the decision, not disputing or modifying it.

Again, isn’t this precisely what the episcopal synods of the fourth and fifth centuries, which set the template for subsequent councils, sound like? It’s not mere PR when the church fathers compare Nicaea and Constantinople and the rest to the blueprint of Acts 15. The Jerusalem gathering is the proto–ecumenical council, and thus the paradigm for all future attempts by the church’s supra-congregational hierarchy to respond to, and when necessary settle, volatile questions of major scriptural, theological, or moral import. Accordingly, the promulgations that proceed from such councils are rightly prefaced by, and received as justifiably asserting, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…”

All the more so if, as the church claimed from the beginning (and, so far as I am aware, continued to claim universally and unanimously from the third century through the fifteenth), her episcopoi are appointed, or ordained, as successors to the apostles. So that, in an ecumenical council beyond the apostolic age, episcopoi and presbyteroi gather on the model of Acts 15, hear testimony, deliberate, argue, pray, interpret Scripture, and render a judgment—with authority.

Perhaps there are reasons not to think such an action desirable, possible, or otherwise worth pursuing, whether in the past or in the present (after, for example, the Great Schism or the Reformation). At a minimum, it’s difficult to deny that the pattern is in strict imitation of the Jerusalem council, or that seeing in the Jerusalem council a pattern for local congregational discernment is a poor interpretation indeed.

I’m in CT on the conquest

I’m in Christianity Today with a review of Charlie Trimm’s new book, The Destruction of the Canaanites: God, Genocide, and Biblical Interpretation. Here’s how it opens:

There is a problem with the Old Testament. At a key juncture in salvation history, the God of Abraham commandeers one nation in order to destroy another. The aggressor nation attacks the second nation because God has judged the latter guilty. The aggressor is merciless, sparing neither women nor children, expelling the inhabitants from their land, and destroying sacred sites and symbols of religious practice—in effect, wiping them off the map. And, according to the Hebrew scriptures, all this happened by the terrible will of the sovereign Lord of Hosts.

It is a harrowing moment in the history of God’s people. But I am not referring to the conquest of Canaan by the tribes of Israel. I am referring to the assault on the northern kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians (a little over 700 years before the birth of Jesus) and the campaign against the southern kingdom, especially the city of Jerusalem and its temple, by the Babylonians about 130 years later.

Click here to keep reading. The book is excellent and I hope pastors and professors use it going forward. I also hope readers understand, once they finish the essay, that the opening line of the review is ironic.

The problem with evangelicalism

There’s not only one, granted. But this isn’t one of those posts. It’s not a beat-up-on-the-evangelicals manifesto in nine parts. It’s not about evangelicals and politics, or about that popular Christianity Today podcast, or about which marks truly define an evangelical, and whether they ought to be doctrinal or sociological or other.

This is a minor little comment about theology and hermeneutics. Here it is.

Evangelicalism isn’t merely a style (a way of being Christian) or a worldview (a set of beliefs). It’s a hermeneutic. It’s a path from here to there, a map for movement, a manual for drawing conclusions and making judgments about what Christian faith is, what Christian behavior entails, and how to inhabit the world. That manual occasionally takes written form but it usually operates in unwritten circulation, imbibed like mother’s milk from (successful) catechesis in active involvement in evangelical churches.

The substance of that manual may be summarized in a slogan: nuda scriptura. That is:

1. the Bible alone is for Christians the one encompassing and all-purpose practical guide to faith, ethics, politics, and culture;

2. the individual Christian is equipped and encouraged (perhaps required) to use the Bible in order to discover its normative teaching and guidance for him or herself regarding matters of doctrine and morals;

3. in principle no one and nothing—no person (a fellow Christian) or office (a pastor) or institution (a church) or text (past tradition)—is either better equipped or more authoritative with respect to reading the Bible for its normative teaching on doctrine and morals than the living baptized individual adult believer;

4. whatever the Bible does not speak about in clear, direct, and explicit terms is for Christians adiaphora.

Let me remind you again that few evangelical scholars would endorse this hermeneutic as a positive proposal. But it is unquestionably the default setting for numberless evangelical believers, churches, and institutions. And the main point I want to make here is that that is a feature, not a bug. Moreover—and this is the kicker—to cease to believe in and act according to this hermeneutic is in a real sense to cease being evangelical, at least as that term is embodied and enacted in concrete communities and the society at large.

This is why, for example, so many evangelicals who ostensibly remain evangelicals while earning graduate degrees and teaching in institutions of higher education no longer attend the kinds of churches in which they were raised but worship instead in Anglican or similarly liturgical traditions. Their on-the-page beliefs (inerrancy, sola scriptura, virginal conception, bodily resurrection, traditional marriage) remain the same, but the outward devotional and liturgical expression of those beliefs is different, indeed necessarily different, rooted as those external practices are in a crucial hermeneutical transformation.

So far I’m merely offering a description. This isn’t a critique. The title of this post, however, refers to a “problem.” Here’s the problem as I see it.

There are people who were raised evangelical and still claim, or at least do not repudiate, the title. But such people have migrated away from the evangelical hermeneutic in their studies, their experiences, their teaching and writing, and/or their ecclesial home. Nevertheless they still aim to speak to and for, if not on behalf of, evangelicals. They seek to persuade evangelicals to believe this or that, or reject this or that. Having unlearned or let go of the evangelical hermeneutic, though, they no longer speak from and to that hermeneutic; they don’t argue according to its premises; they write by different premises, rooted in a different hermeneutic.

Always—and I do mean always—the result is a failure to communicate (not to mention to persuade). The message is lost in translation. The speaker and listener, the author and reader, simply talk past each other. For they are not speaking the same language. They no longer share enough in common for their disagreements to be intelligible. Instead, their disagreements are an inevitable function of differing first principles, in this case, opposed hermeneutics of Christian faith and theology with respect to Holy Scripture.

Yet rather than this situation being seen as both obvious and unavoidable, the tenor of the constant miscommunication is, on both sides, rancor, distrust, and endless anathemas. I’m not so much concerned right now with the folks on the receiving end, those who still hold to the evangelical hermeneutic. I’m concerned with those who’ve lost or rejected that hermeneutic but who continue to speak to those who hold it.

It should be neither surprising nor frustrating if, should I say, “We as Christians ought to believe X doctrine because Y saint or Z tradition teaches it,” the response from a true-blue evangelical is, “Why should I care what Y or Z say? I don’t see X taught clearly, directly, and explicitly in the Bible.” For you are not seeking to persuade on the terms held by your listener or reader. The latter senses intuitively that what you are really asking him or her is to stop being the sort of evangelical they are, i.e., you are asking them to give up the evangelical hermeneutic. That may be a worthy endeavor—almost everything I’ve written as a scholar is in service to that endeavor—but that is a different task than making an argument by and for and among a certain community, on the terms set and shared by that community, that presupposes that those very terms, which in turn define that community, are wrong on principle. It’s a bait and switch, intended or not.

Furthermore, it’s important to see that you can’t have your cake (evangelical hermeneutic) and eat it too (sacred tradition). There are plenty of traditional doctrines that are plausibly compatible with the evangelical hermeneutic; there are fewer of them that follow, logically and necessarily, therefrom. Take divine simplicity, or the eternal generation of the Son, or the perpetual virginity of Mary, or even the creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople. None of these is incompatible with the plain teaching of Scripture. Can each and every one, in each and all of its details, be generated (1) directly from scriptural exegesis (2) to the exclusion of all other interpretive options (3) in accordance with the evangelical hermeneutic? I’m not so sure.

Which is why evangelicalism is such a rambunctious, fractious collective. It’s built for incessant, indefinite dissent. Someone or someones will always raise an objection, and precisely in accordance with the rules for assent and consent stipulated by the evangelical hermeneutic.

Biblicism is a woolly, ungovernable thing. It has a life of its own, because (among other reasons) it empowers individuals to interpret the text for themselves, with unpredictable results undecided in advance of reading, discussion, and debate.

In my view, for those who would remain in the evangelical family, you have to choose. You can be a biblicist, and stay; or you can stop being a biblicist, and leave. The sharpness of that choice need not be a matter of literal church membership. But theologically speaking, in terms of ideas and writing and how we make arguments and to whom and according to what premises, it seems to me that the choice is indeed just that sharp. It’s one or the other. There is no third way.

“The latest scholarship”

One often hears folks in biblical studies refer to “the latest scholarship” on such-and-such topic. Or they will refer to author X or book Y being “out of date.” Or when writing a scholar will refer to “the latest studies” or “the most recent research.”

I’ve poked fun at this tendency before. A few years back I penned “An honest preface to contemporary academic interpretation of the New Testament”:

The figures and authors of the New Testament, especially Jesus and Paul, taught and wrote primarily during the middle half of the first century A.D. Their teachings and texts were not, alas, understood in the 2nd century, nor were they understood in the 3rd century, nor were they understood in the 4th century, nor were they understood in the 5th century, nor were they understood in the 6th century, nor were they understood in the 7th century, nor were they understood in the 8th century, nor were they understood in the 9th century, nor were they understood in the 10th century, nor were they understood in the 11th century, nor were they understood in the 12th century, nor were they understood in the 13th century, nor were they understood in the 14th century, nor were they understood in the 15th century, nor were they understood in the 16th century, nor were they understood in the 17th century, nor were they understood in the 18th century, nor were they understood in the 19th century, nor were they understood in the 20th century. Such periods, unfortunately, were not up to date on the latest scholarship.

I am.

That is the spirit of historical-critical hubris in a nutshell. Less sarcastically, I’ve reflected on what I call “subjunctive scholarship,” or biblical scholarship in the subjunctive mode (or mood, if we want to be strict about it). Here’s the object of critique:

If you read enough biblical scholarship, you come to realize that one of the guild’s endemic features—for at least a century, probably two—is an overweening confidence in its claims. Such claims usually partake of a rhetoric of calm certainty; all too often what are contestable judgments based on slim evidence are instead asserted as facts, or at least as bearing a supreme likelihood of being true. These judgments in turn become the basis for still further judgments, or proposals, that are themselves even flimsier in terms of probability or breadth of justifying reasons. So far as I can tell, this style of scholarship is of a piece with the broader approach not only of history but also the social sciences.

I offer a couple counter-proposals for how to frame a work of historical biblical scholarship:

(1) In what follows I will write as if it were the case that X, though I am by no means certain or even confident that this hypothesis is true…

(2) In this essay/book I will follow lines of speculative reflection regarding a set of issues about which we lack anything close to sufficient evidence to support confident claims; accordingly, my ideas and proposals will follow a certain pattern: “If it is the case that X, then Y might reasonably follow,” allowing that I can make no dispositive arguments in favor of X, and that any number of alternatives to X are plausible; for that reason I will also trace some of those plausible alternatives and see what they might lead.”

Such argumentative frameworks are, granted, not exactly sizzling compared to the sort of rhetoric that attends much “cutting edge” scholarship. But the gains are worth it, gains in both epistemic humility and intellectual curiosity. Also in the honest pursuit of truth, given how little we do or can or will ever know about, in this case, the texts and wider contexts of culture and politics, persons and happenings in the first century.

Here’s one other observation I make in that post:

[To write in the subjunctive would] make clear—with no ifs, ands, or buts—that one or more premises of [a scholarly proposal] are arguable, indeed so arguable that it would be laughable to presume them to be self-evidently true to any reasonable person. Such a proviso would also signal the self-awareness on the part of the scholar that seemingly commonsensical consensus scholarly judgments inevitably come under fire in and by subsequent generations of scholars. What is taken for granted today is up for grabs tomorrow. No reason to act as though that isn’t the case.

Here’s the question I want to ask (one I may have asked elsewhere, though I can’t seem to find it in the following form), a question that might sound pedantic or sardonic but is meant in earnest. What good is being “up to date” on “the latest research” on X when the one thing about which we may claim disciplinary or epistemic certainty is that, whatever “the latest research” says about X today, it will be disputed by whatever “the latest research” says about X tomorrow? Put differently, if the force of academic arguments in the present tense depend upon a rough consensus about intrinsically contestable matters, and if the history of the discipline reliably informs us that every rough scholarly consensus is inevitably heavily revised or jettisoned by subsequent generations of scholars, or at least becomes subject to destabilization and thus no longer remains a consensus, then isn’t the whole towering edifice built on sand? Isn’t every argument built, with full awareness, on a foundation that everyone knows, as a matter of fact, will no longer exist within a matter of decades?—just to the extent that the foundation’s stability depended (at the time of the argument’s being made) upon its being more or less unquestioned, which is to say, a matter of present-day (though not future) consensus?

Note well that I am not calling into question either growth in historical knowledge or the ability to make claims to knowledge in this or adjacent realms of inquiry. Rather, I am calling into question the rhetoric, the confidence, and the rhetoric of confidence that attend such claims to knowledge. At a deeper level I am further calling into question the method of the inquiry, built argumentatively and even logically upon claims to present-day achievements of consensus that everyone knows but chooses to forget will be undone eventually—and often sooner rather than later.

Instead of qualifying historical and textual arguments into oblivion, however, acknowledging and accepting this critique should function to liberate biblical scholarship and historiography more generally. For it entails that works in biblical studies do not expire the year after publication. The value of the car, so to speak, doesn’t plummet once it’s driven off the lot. Sometimes colleagues in biblical studies speak as though, on one hand, they can’t propose ideas in public unless and until they’ve read everything published up to and including today (perhaps also forthcoming works!); and, on the other hand, that the sell-by dates for the very ideas they’d like to elaborate are, sad to say, the day after they propose them.

That sounds at once emotionally grueling, humanly impracticable, intellectually stifling, and epistemically indefensible.

The fundamental problem, it seems to me, is construing biblical scholarship on analogy to the hard sciences, rather than classing it among the hermeneutical arts. To be sure, there is sifting of evidence, and some of that evidence qualifies as “hard.” But the work of making sense of the canonical Jewish and Christian texts, including making historical sense of them, is finally interpretive in character. Not only is interpretation not “scientific” in the colloquial or disciplinary sense. To treat it as such is essentially to distort the task of understanding—in this case, understanding texts in their historical and cultural contexts—as well as the nature of disputation regarding proposals for such understanding. It takes on faith what is unproven, considers evidentially dispositive what is anything but, concedes to consensus what is and shall always be arguable. In short, it artificially constricts both the range and the force of what one may (and must) say as a member of the guild. And it does so for no good reason.

That’s not to say one may or should avoid reading “the latest” in one’s discipline. Staying “up to date” is in general a reasonable expectation for academics. But it is not and cannot be a condition for holding or proposing a plausible opinion on a contested topic, much less for rejecting, out of hand and sight unseen, “old” or “outdated” scholarship on said topic. Nine times out of ten, what makes “new” research new is not an archeological discovery or fresh material evidence. It is an innovative theory, speculative reconstruction, or alternative explanation of preexisting materials (usually just the texts themselves) that is “the latest” on the scene. Such proposals are well worth appraising. But they do not ipso facto rule out antecedent ideas. Even where they attempt to do so, they rarely succeed on the merits; when they do so succeed, often as not the rationale is fashion, an itch for novelty, or social pressure (that latter phrase being a serviceable gloss for “scholarly consensus”).

In any case, what I most want, as an outsider to the field of biblical studies but as one who reads it regularly for pleasure and profit alike, is for members of the discipline to be and to write and to teach free of this tiresome burden imposed upon them. That burden is called “being up to date,” which in turn carries with it a methodological mindset that treats the humanistic arts of interpreting ancient texts as a sort of hard science that accords omniscient experts, and them alone, the authority to make even the most modest suggestions about how to understand the Bible in its original historical contexts. Such a mindset also renders all biblical scholarship negligible or moribund within a decade after its publication. That’s just silly. Moreover, it ends up lowering the quality of such scholarship even on the day of its publication, since it is invariably pitched in such a way both that it must be “cutting edge” (ramp up that PR machine) and aware of its immediately diminishing relevance (grasp for those straws while you can), all the while focusing disproportionately on minute debates from recent years instead of the big questions at the heart of the subject matter. Not to mention the typical unspoken pretense that no one tried to exegete the text in question until the last two centuries.

That’s what I’d call being “up to date.” If you can tell me what the Greek and Latin and Syriac fathers and medievals and reformers all thought about this or that text, then you’ve got my attention. If, by contrast, mostly you know the Anglophone academic “consensus” regarding half a chapter in Philippians circa 1986–2011, though you’re aware that’s been overturned in the last decade, so obviously you need to bone up on the latest articles before you proffer an opinion … you’ve lost me.

To that sort of disciplinary formation, I have a simple message.

Be free!

A sheep among wolves

If, after reading [this book], you now turn to study the historical evidence for yourself, begin with the New Testament and not with the books about it. If you do not know Greek get it in a modern translation. Moffat’s is probably the best: Monsignor Knox is also good. I do not advise the Basic English version. And when you turn from the New Testament to modern scholars, remember that you go among them as a sheep among wolves. Naturalistic assumptions, beggings of the question such as that which I noted on the first page of this book, will meet you on every side—even from the pens of clergymen. This does not mean (as I was once tempted to suspect) that these clergymen are disguised apostates who deliberately exploit the position and the livelihood given them by the Christian Church to undermine Christianity. It comes partly from what we may call a ‘hangover’. We all have Naturalism in our bones and even conversion does not at once work the infection out of our system. Its assumptions rush back upon the mind the moment vigilance is relaxed. And in part the procedure of these scholars arises from the feeling which is greatly to their credit—which indeed is honourable to the point of being Quixotic. They are anxious to allow to the enemy every advantage he can with any show of fairness claim. They thus make it part of their method to eliminate the supernatural wherever it is even remotely possible to do so, to strain natural explanation even to the breaking point before they admit the least suggestion of miracle. Just in the same spirit some examiners tend to overmark any candidate whose opinions and character, as revealed by his work, are revolting to them. We are so afraid of being led into unfairness by our instant dislike of the man that we are liable to overshoot the mark and treat him too kindly. Many modern Christian scholars overshoot the mark for a similar reason.

In using the books of such people you must therefore be continually on guard. You must develop a nose like a bloodhound for those steps in the argument which depend not on historical and linguistic knowledge but on the concealed assumption that miracles are impossible, improbable, or improper. And this means that you must really re-educate yourself: must work hard and consistently to eradicate from your mind the whole type of thought in which we have all been brought up. It is the type of thought which, under various disguises, has been our adversary throughout this book.

—C. S. Lewis, Miracles (1947), 267–269

Blakely, Singal, and “stories”

I have a new piece in the latest issue of The New Atlantis called “Statistics as Storytelling.” The print journal is in subscribers’ hands; the issue will be online sometime this week, I imagine. (It’s jam-packed full of goodness, by the way: Nicholas Carr, Matthew Crawford, Phil Christman, Ari Schulman, Caitrin Keiper, Addison Del Mastro, and many others.) My piece is a long essay review of Jason Blakely’s book We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power. I’ll link to it in a separate post once it’s up.

You might think of the book as forming a kind of pincer movement with Jesse Singal’s book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills. Whereas Blakeley’s book is an academic work building on a particular philosophical tradition (Gadamer, Taylor, MacIntyre, et al), Singal’s is a trade book meant for a wide readership. Each chapter is a systematic take-down of the latest fad in “Primeworld,” or the TED Talk–ification of the social sciences, especially psychology.

I mention Singal’s book in the review, but I don’t engage it much more than a sentence or two. I have to say, I wasn’t prepared for just how good The Quick Fix is. Which is a way of saying that I thought the book would partake, at least a wee bit, of the very phenomenon it is criticizing. But it doesn’t. Its depth and breadth of research is impressive. The detail is painstaking. The dismantling is patient, fair, and deserved in every case. Moreover, Singal’s leftist credentials strengthen the book’s persuasive power, simultaneously preventing dismissals of his arguments (“oh, this is just a reactionary/anti-academic screed that doesn’t support progressive values”) and bolstering his counter-proposals (as in, e.g., when he suggests that attending to systems, policies, and institutions will improve the actual lives of people of color, as opposed to pained introspection by well-meaning white liberals).

But there’s one point of discrepancy between Singal and Blakely, and I’m not sure whether it is merely rhetorical or rises to the level of a substantive disagreement. As the title of my review suggests, Blakely interprets social science as a way of making sense of the world through narrative interpretation. But he doesn’t think this is the problem; the problem is that public and popularizing practitioners of social science do not believe this is what they are doing; indeed their cache comes in the dubious supposition that it is precisely not what they are doing, since their art (excuse me, science) is empirical, not humanistic. His argument, then, is not that we need to do away with the social sciences. It’s that they need to be integrated into a larger humanistic approach to the great and never-ending cultural task of interpreting reality through stories. Stories are how human beings make meaning out of the flux of life; they are unavoidable and in fact crucial to even the hardest of hard scientific ways of understanding the world. “Facts” mean nothing apart from context, and for human being that context is ineluctably narrative in shape. What that means is that we need to be aware of what we are doing and, furthermore, we need to develop nuanced and sophisticated ways of depicting reality in complex stories that, for all their subjective character, are nonetheless true.

Compare that account with the following, which comes from pages 277–279 in the Conclusion (titled “Escape from Primeworld”) to The Quick Fix:

As we've seen, there are myriad reasons half-baked behavioral science catches on, and those reasons often have to do with the cultural or institutional context of a given idea—the problem it is attempting to solve, the societal currents it is riding, and so on. As we conclude this book, it's worth taking stock of the more general, less context-specific reasons why bad social science spreads and what the consequences might be, particularly when it comes to Primeworld accounts.

The simplest reasons half-baked ideas tend to prevail is that all else being equal, the human brain has an easier time latching onto simple and monocausal accounts than to complicated and multicausal ones. Such accounts are more likely to be accepted as true and to spread. Our brains are built to be drawn to quick, elegant-seeming answers.

The legendary sociologist Charles Tilly nicely explains this in his account of human storytelling, Why? What Happens When People Give Reasons . . . and Why. He writes, “Stories provide simplified cause-effect accounts of puzzling, unexpected, dramatic, problematic, or exemplary events. Relying on widely available knowledge rather than technical expertise, they help make the world intelligible.” Tilly calls storytelling “one of [the] great social interventions” of the human species, precisely because of its ability to simplify and boil down. But this is the same reason stories can lead us astray. “In our complex world, causes and effects always join in complicated ways,” he writes. “Simultaneous causation, incremental effects, environmental effects, mistakes, unintended consequences, and feedback make physical, biological, and social processes the devil's own work-or the Lord’s—to explain in detail. Stories exclude these inconvenient complications.”

Think of all the stories that have fueled half-baked psychology: “Soldiers can resist PTSD if their resilience is boosted”; “Women can close the workplace gender gap if they feel an enhanced sense of power”; “Poor kids can catch up to their richer peers if they develop more grit.” In emphasizing one particular causal claim about deeply complicated systems and outcomes, these and the other blockbuster hits of contemporary psychology elide tremendous amounts of important detail.

It's likely that just as our brains prefer simple stories, within psychology, too, the professional incentives point toward the development of simpler rather than more complex theories. People who study human nature aren't immune to the siren call of simplicity. In a reply to one of her papers, the psychologist Nina Strohminger criticizes this tendency rather eloquently: “The fetishization of parsimony means that unwieldy theories are often dismissed on these grounds alone. . . No doubt there is something less satisfying about settling for inelegance, but the best theories won't always feel right. Elegance is not a suitable heuristic for veracity.” Scientists often have good reason to prefer parsimony—Occam's razor has its uses—but still: simple-seeming explanations of complex phenomena warrant skepticism.

Of course, simple and elegant and appealing theories are more likely to pay. If you're a psychologist in the twenty-first century, particularly a young one, you face a daunting landscape when it comes to making a name and therefore a career for yourself. Funding is being cut left and right, and the ongoing adjunctification of academia certainly hasn't spared psychology. There's one silver lining, though: the public is more interested in behavioral science than ever before. That's especially true if you can tell a simple, exciting, and above all new story about a subject of great societal concern.

I regret that Singal—and Tilly—use the trope of stories and storytelling for the in itself accurate point they want to make. What they have in view is simplistic or reductive theories of complex phenomena that, because the human mind craves parsimony and the masses love a straightforward tale, gain popularity both in the academy and in intellectual journalism by comparison to the unsexy, the muddled, the multi-factored, the epistemically incomplete explanation. But that has nothing to do with the human propensity for narrative. Tilly’s account is itself a story, perhaps overly reductive: Humans tell stories to cut through the clutter, and this disposition to storytelling explains why fad psychology has such a grip on our collective imagination as a society. But my observing this isn’t a criticism. Every legible sentence and assertion in an argument is unavoidably a kind of compressed story and necessarily, always and everywhere, simplified relative to an exhaustive explanation of the subject in question. Which is just another way of saying it’s human beings doing the thinking and talking. That isn’t an obstacle in the way of our knowledge. It’s how we know anything at all.

In my view, then, Singal’s closing nod to the dangers of “storytelling” is not in material disagreement with Blakeley’s proposal. If the two books form a pincer movement, I would describe their relationship in this way: Blakely’s provides the necessary philosophical framework for a workable theory and practice of science—which is what Singal wants, a reliable habitus of public-facing social sciences like psychology—while Singal’s book shows, in glorious gory detail (through well-told vignettes, by the way!), what Blakely lacks the space to unfold in full: the manifold dysfunctions of scientism in its current dominant ideological form.

Take up and read them both. They make for quite the one-two punch.

Axioms of Christian exegesis

I … rejoice, as any interpreter of scripture should, to find such a clear case of prima facie contradiction [in the text]; such instances are efficacious in prompting theological thought because of the axiom that the canon of scripture is not incoherent. …

But what about the pleonasm [in the biblical passage under consideration]? It’s axiomatic for Christians that the text of scripture has no accidental features, which entails that the pleonasm isn’t one.

—Paul J. Griffiths, Regret: A Theology (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), 4, 20

On finding race and racism in the New Testament

I am skeptical of attempts to center contemporary Christian conversations about race on New Testament texts purported to feature or critique racism. From what I can tell, this move is a common one. Pericopes adduced include Jesus's encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman, his meeting with the Samaritan woman at the well, and the parable of the good Samaritan. Most often, however, I see writers, pastors, and preachers use the example of gentiles in the early Jewish church, deploying some combination of Acts 15, Ephesians 2, Galatians, and Romans in order to illustrate the ostensible overcoming of racism in the early Jesus movement as an abiding example for churches struggling with the same problem today.

Why am I skeptical of this move? Let me try to spell out my reasons succinctly.

1.  Race is a modern construct. What we mean by "race" does not exist in the New Testament, either as a concept or as a narratively depicted phenomenon.

2. Racism, therefore, also does not exist in the New Testament. I'm a defender of theological anachronism in Christian exegesis of Scripture, but speaking of "racism in the New Testament" is the worst kind of anachronism. It's a projection without a backdrop, a house built on sand, a conclusion in search of an argument.

3. Prejudice toward, suspicion of, and stereotyping of persons from other communities—where "other" denotes differences in region, language, cult, class, or scriptural interpretation—did exist in the eastern Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire in the first century. Inasmuch as contemporary readers want to draw analogies between forms of modern prejudice and forms of ancient prejudice, as the latter is found in the New Testament, so be it.

4. It is a fearful and perilous thing, however, to attribute such prejudice to those Jews who populated the early church or who opposed it. Why? First of all, because today it is almost uniformly gentiles who make this claim, and gentile Christians have an almost ineradicable propensity to assign to Jews—past and present—sinful behavior they seek to expunge in themselves. (See also #7 and #10 below.)

5. Moreover, Jewish attitudes about gentiles in the first century were neither uniform nor simple nor reducible to prejudice. The principal thing to realize is that, according to the witness of both the prophets and the apostles (that is, the Old and New Testaments), the distinction between Jews and gentiles is a creation of God. There are Jews and gentiles because God called Abraham and all his descendants with him to be set apart as God's holy people. All those not so called, according to the flesh, are gentiles. This distinction is maintained, not abolished, in the preaching of the gospel by the Jewish apostles in the first half century of the church's existence.

6. First-century Jewish beliefs about and relations with gentiles, then, were informed by scriptural testimony. God's word—that is, the Law, the prophets, and the writings—has a lot to say, after all, about the nations (the goyim or ethne). Go read some of it. See if you walk away with a clear, obvious, and uncomplicated view about those human communities that lie outside the election of Abraham together with his seed. Focus in particular on the book of Leviticus. Then go read chapter 10 of the book of Acts. Is St. Peter blameworthy for his hesitancy about Cornelius and his household? Is he foolish or shortsighted, much less prejudiced? Or is he following the way the words run in the Torah until such time as an angel of the Lord Jesus provides a vision paired with a divine command to act according to an alternative and heretofore unimagined interpretation of Torah? (An interpretation, note, only possible now in the light of the resurrection of the Messiah from the dead.) I'd say it's fair to think Peter, along with his brother apostles, was not in the wrong if God deemed a vision necessary to change his mind—a vision, mind you, that is didactic, not an indictment.

(7. As a historical matter, it is also worth drawing attention to the work of scholars precisely on persons such as Cornelius, gentile God-fearers and friends and patrons of the synagogue in the diaspora. The caricature of Jews living outside the land in the first century, distributed across countless cities in the Roman Empire and elsewhere, as bitter, sectarian, resentful, fearful, and hostile ethnic fundamentalists is just that: a caricature. Indeed, one should always beware of anti-Jewish sentiment lingering just beneath and sometimes displayed right on the surface of historical scholarship as well as popularized historical treatments of the Bible.)

8. As for Acts 15—the culmination, as St. Luke tells it, of Peter's vision, of Saul's conversion, of Pentecost, of the ascension, of the birth of Jesus, in fact of the calling of Abraham and the creation of Adam—the story is hardly one of racism or even of ethnic prejudice. The question for the nascent apostolic church was not whether gentiles could join. It would certainly qualify as something akin to ethnic prejudice if the exclusively Jewish ekklesia said, "We don't want your kind here." But that's not what they said. All saw and glorified God for the wonders he'd worked among the gentiles, drawing them to faith in Jesus Messiah. The question—the only question—was on what terms they would enter, that is, by what means and in accordance with what rule of life they would become members of Christ's body. Would they, like the Jews, follow the Law of Moses? Would they honor the Sabbath, keep kosher, be circumcised? Or would they not?—that is, by remaining gentiles, not subject to Torah's statutes and ordinances. Either way, they would be saved; either way, they would believe in Jesus; either way, they would receive baptism and thereby Jesus's own Spirit. The issue, in short, was not an ethnic, much less a racial, one. The issue was the will of God for those believers in Jesus who were not descendants of Abraham. And after not a little disputation and controversy, the apostolic church discerned that it was the Spirit's good pleasure for the church to comprise Jews and gentiles both, united in the Messiah as Jew and gentile, neither becoming the other nor both becoming a third thing.

9. It turns out, therefore, that the climactic tale of gentiles being welcomed into Jewish messianic assemblies around the Mediterranean Sea in the years 30–80 AD has nothing whatsoever to do with race, racism, or ethnic prejudice. Acts 15 is simply not about that. Insinuating that it does either distorts its proper significance or metaphorizes a text without grounding, or even the need, to do so.

10. None of the foregoing is meant to suggest that either the New or the Old Testament is thus reduced to silence on pressing challenges facing the American church today, not least the seemingly unexorcisable demon of anti-black racism. Nor, as I said above, is it impossible, or imprudent, to draw analogies between scriptural instances of out-group derogation and present-day experience, or between the complications arising from Jew-gentile integration in Pauline assemblies and similar complications in American churches. Nor, finally, does the wider witness of Holy Scripture have nothing to say about the bedrock principles that ought to inform Christian speech about these matters: that God is sovereign, gracious Creator of all; that every human being is created in the image of God; that each and every human being who has ever lived is one, in St. Paul's words, "for whom Christ died." I only want to emphasize what we can and what we cannot responsibly read the canon to say. More than anything, though, I want to encourage gentile Christians to be vigilant in their perpetual war against Marcionitism in all its forms. There is a worrisome tendency in recent Christian talk about white racism in America to frame it, biblically and theologically, as anticipated and foreshadowed by Jews. Even when unintended—and I have no doubt it usually is—that is a morally noxious, canonically warped, theologically obtuse, and historically false claim. The early Jewish church did not resist gentile inclusion due to its racism against gentiles. It had none, for there was none to have. There is, lamentably, plenty of racism in the world today. Look there if you want to address it. You won't find any in the pages of the Bible.

On writing and bad readers

There will always be bad and disingenuous readers. That's the first thing to know as a writer. They'll always be with us, and they'll always be there, ready to read what you've written—labored over for hours, days, weeks—in bad faith, or to misinterpret it due to laziness or antipathy or narcissism or some other intellectual vice.

For a while now a threefold example of this has stuck with me. It comes from one particular author's writings—a widely read academic whom we'll call Joe Johnson—and has served as a perpetual reminder of this unavoidable fact. The first stems from an essay he wrote; the other two from different reviews of different books by Johnson.

The essay was, immediately upon publication, willfully misread to mean what Johnson clearly did not mean, could not have meant, and clarified in reply that he did not mean. The misreadings seized on a few terms and a couple of minor framing devices he used in the essay in order to turn his argument inside out. It did not matter what he said to clarify; the misreaders were set in their ways.

One review was, hands down, the single most disingenuous, unserious, vicious, and uncharitable engagement with a text I have ever seen in print. Something about Johnson or the book in question clearly irked the reviewer to such an extent that rage, of an immature and pitiable sort, had to be vented in his direction. It was a sad sight to see.

The other review was calm in tone but, by its conclusion, decided that Johnson had failed in some significant way for the simple reason that (we surmise) he did not write the book the reviewer wished he had; or (to say the same thing differently) he did not end up in the "correct" ideological place by book's end. Oddly, though, even the items on the reviewer's wish list would not amount to sources of disagreement between Johnson and the reviewer; they simply never came up in the course of the book. Apparently the reviewer merely wanted Johnson to talk about them, and Johnson impolitely refused in advance.

I recall this threefold example of a single writer's plentiful experience with misreading for at least three reasons. First, if it can happen with a scholar of Johnson's stature—with a writer as generous, catholic, and lucid as he—then it will happen to anyone, including little old me. So expect it, and don't be surprised by it. Second, I confess that when I encountered each of these cases, I felt a small despair grow inside me. Why bother? That is, why bother with writing if this is the result? But then, writers I admire, such as Johnson, keep on keepin' on, in spite of these experiences, and that is exactly one of the reasons why I admire them. And since not all readers are the bad sort, writing need not be doomed to terminate in deliberate misinterpretation and misrepresentation; it might actually reach those open to its message; it might even instruct, edify, enrich, or bring pleasure to such persons. It's worth it, therefore, to try to be among those who make the attempt.

Third, though, I also remember the example of Johnson in order to remind myself: don't be one of them. At all costs, don't be a bad reader.

Why there's no such thing as non-anachronistic interpretation, and it's a good thing too: reflections occasioned by Wesley Hill's Paul and the Trinity

For some time now I have been convinced that the issue at the root of all conversation and controversy regarding historical criticism and theological interpretation of the Bible is anachronism. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to write an article on the topic in the next year or two; I've touched on the theme in a paragraph or two in a couple of articles already, but it deserves a treatment unto itself. Until then, let me use Wesley Hill's wonderful book Paul and the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters as an occasion to discuss what's at play here.

Programmatically: The fundamental hermeneutical first principle of self-consciously historical-critical study of the Bible is that such study must avoid anachronism. Two hermeneutical values underlie or spin off this principle: on the one hand, what makes any reading good is whether it is properly historical; therefore, on the other hand, all reading of the Bible ought to avoid anachronism—or to say the same thing negatively, anachronistic readings of biblical texts are by definition bad.

Enter scholars like Hill: supple interpreters, subtle thinkers, careful writers, sophisticated theologians. What Hill aims to show in his book is that the conceptual resources of trinitarian theology may be used in the reading of biblical texts like Paul's letters as a hermeneutical lens that enables, rather than obstructs, understanding. More to the point, such understanding does not stray from the canons of historical criticism, which is to say, it does not fall prey to anachronism. Thus, his project "plays by the rules" while bringing to bear doctrinal resources otherwise considered anathema by historical critics (both Christian and otherwise).

Consider his language:

"I need to clarify in what ways the grammar of trinitarian theology will and will not be invoked, and to specify the methodological safeguards that will protect my exegesis from devolving into an exercise in imaginative theologizing." (31)

"The methodological danger that lurks here is one that may be described as a certain kind of 'projection'... To avoid this pitfall, I will adopt a twofold approach: First, the readings of Paul I will offer ... will be self-consciously historical readings, guided by the canons of 'critical' modes of exegesis. At no point will a trinitarian conclusion be allowed to 'trump' what Paul's texts may be plausibly shown to have communicated within his own context. Second, trinitarian theologies will be employed as hermeneutical resources and, thus, mined for conceptualities which may better enable a genuinely historical exegesis to articulate what other equally 'historical' approaches may have (unwittingly or not) obscured." (45)

"[Paul's theology's] patterns and dynamics may be newly illumined and realized within new contexts and by means of later conceptualities, which are to some degree 'foreign' to the texts themselves." (46)

"...the use of trinitarian theology in the task of reading Paul in an authentically historical mode..." (46)

"my goal is not to 'find' trinitarian theology 'in' Paul so much as to use the conceptual resources of trinitarian doctrine as hermeneutical aids for reading Paul afresh. [This book addresses the] question of whether those trinitarian resources may actualize certain trajectories from Paul's letters that he would have expressed in a different idiom." (104-105)

"[Recent] studies are rightly concerned to respect the linear unfolding of historical development, rather than anachronistically imposing later theologies back onto Paul's letters. But my thesis ... has been mostly taken up with demonstrating the converse: that trinitarian doctrine may be used retrospectively to shed light on and enable a deeper penetration of the Pauline texts in their own historical milieu, and that it is not necessarily anachronistic to allow later Christian categories to be the lens through which one reads Paul. ... I have tried ... to show that the conceptual categories of 'persons in relation' developed so richly in the fourth century and in the following theological era, may enable those who live with them to live more deeply and fruitfully with the first century apostle himself." (171)

"Is it possible ... that a kind of broad, pluriform trinitarian perspective, far from being an anachronistic imposition on the texts of Paul, may instead prove genuinely insightful in a fresh look at Paul?" (169)

Let me be clear: Hill masterfully demonstrates his thesis. Anyone who knows my theological interests knows that Hill is preaching to the choir. The concepts, categories, and modes of reading developed in the 4th and 5th centuries by the church fathers constitute a hermeneutic nonpareil for faithful interpretation of the Christian Bible, the epistles of Paul included. And Hill shows us why: positively, because that hermeneutic was constructed precisely in response to the kinds of challenge for talk about God, Christ, and Spirit found in Paul's letters and elsewhere; negatively, because contemporary historical critics have not learned the exegetical-theological lessons of trinitarian doctrine, and thus largely replay the terminological debates from the side of opposition to Nicaea (e.g., distinction obviates unity, derivation implies subordination, etc.).

But when I say that Hill demonstrates his thesis, I do not mean that he succeeds in offering a reading that avoids anachronism. He does not. But the fault is not with him. The fault is with the criterion itself. His only fault—and it is a minor one, but an instructive one nonetheless—is to play by the rules set for him by biblical criticism. Because the truth is that avoiding anachronism is impossible. The act of reading is itself irreducibly, unavoidably, essentially anachronistic. In particular, reading any text from the past, indeed a religious text from the ancient past, just is to engage in anachronism.

So the issue is not that Hill's trinitarian hermeneutic for Paul is anachronistic. It's that the non-trinitarian hermeneutics of every one of his peers—Dunn, Hurtado, McGrath, Bauckham, whomever—are equally anachronistic.

Hill gestures toward this fact in his critique of the use of "monotheism" as a category applied to Paul, as well as the language of a vertical axis on which to plot the relative divinity of God and Jesus. But the critique goes all the way down. And this cannot be said forcefully enough, given the depths of historical criticism's rejection of anachronism, both for its own exegesis and that of anyone else, and given the extent of its influence not only over the academy but over the church. In a word:

Historical-critical exegesis is fundamentally, inescapably anachronistic.

What do I mean by this, and on what grounds do I say it?

First, and most basically, because historical criticism is itself a contingent, lately constructed mode of reading not universally found among all communities of reading. Put differently: the attempt to read without anachronism is a parochial idea—created at a certain time and place, and therefore present in some cultures and not others. So that the suggestion that non-anachronistic reading is what it means to read well is self-refuting, if reading was ever a successful practice outside of Western culture in the last few centuries.

Second, because all reading is anachronistic, as I said above. Let's limit that claim to the readings of texts not written in one's own immediate time and place and/or addressed to oneself (i.e., not emails received moments after sending). To read a text outside of its original context and audience means to read that text in a new, different context, by or with a new, different audience—in this case, you, the reader. That means that the language, customs, assumptions, beliefs, practices, background knowledge, relationships, intentions, and so on, that pertained to the original setting of the text are no longer present, or present in the same way, and that you bring to the text entirely different customs, knowledge, experience, etc. To read a text in such a setting invariably changes how the text is read. And however much one tries to mitigate such contextual factors, resistance is futile; indeed, resistance is itself a sign of doing something different—engaging in a different practice, through different means, with a different end—than the original audience in its original context.

Now, third, the objection might arise: Does that mean we simply cannot arrive at historical understanding? Not at all. My point is the opposite: True historical understanding is always anachronistic. Because historical self-understanding, historical consciousness, is itself a historical achievement, a contingent event. The way that we late moderns "think" history is not native to history's actors; "putting ourselves in their shoes," trying to think their thoughts after them, in just the way they thought them, ruthlessly identifying and trying to eliminate any stray intrusions of modern thoughts and even modern applications—that is, strictly speaking, something our forebears did not do. We can do it, we can play the game, but it's a game we're playing (just like chess or basketball, which are real games with real rules we can really play in the present, but which have not always existed, even if analogous games existed in other cultures, past or present); it's not a sort of time machine of the mind. Even that metaphor fails, since the trouble with time machines, as with observation of nature, is that they don't leave the past untouched. The same goes for historical investigation. You bring the future with you.

Fourth, the insight of Gadamer is key here: Historical understanding is a possibility, but lack of anachronism is neither possible nor desirable. That would entail leaping over the history in between the text in question and the present. But that history has, quite literally, made the reading of that text now, in this setting, possible; furthermore, texts bring with them the histories of their reception that have attended them ever since their inception. Those histories not only inform our interpretations in the present, however historically rigorous: they set the conditions for them. To make the claim, "Paul's conception of God and Christ is binitarian," is to locate oneself on a timeline; it is not a claim that was made, because it could not have been made, prior to a certain moment in our history. And, as a claim, it would be no more intelligible to Paul than to Anselm. That is what makes it anachronistic.

Fifth, the most important reason why historical-critical reading is essentially anachronistic is the way that it uses—quite explicitly and without apology—resources outside the text, resources foreign to the text's original audience, as a means of interpreting the text. Examples are obvious: monographs and articles, concepts created long after the text's composition, archeological findings, data regarding life and neighboring cultures prior to and contemporaneous with the text's original setting. Historical-critical exegesis often proposes readings of ancient religious texts (say, Genesis 1) that would have been impossible in the original context, because no one at the time had, or could have had, the kind of comprehensive knowledge about their own time and place that we have since amassed. (It is worth noting that this exegetical procedure is not different in kind than reading Genesis 1 in light of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, or scientific theories about the origins of the universe.) In a manner of speaking, the best historical-critical interpretations are self-consciously maximalist in just this way: they are so exhaustive in searching out every possible detail, contour, allusion, and influence that such an interpretation in the text's original setting would have been unthinkable—indeed, no such interpretation would have been possible until now, this very moment in time. Undertaken in that sort of self-conscious way, anachronism would be welcomed and readily admitted as the very occasion and goal of historical reading.

Much more could be said; Lord willing, I'll say it in print here in a few years. For now, recall Hill's rhetorical question in the book's conclusion: "Is it possible ... that a kind of broad, pluriform trinitarian perspective, far from being an anachronistic imposition on the texts of Paul, may instead prove genuinely insightful in a fresh look at Paul?" (169). Let me take a lesson from Hill and apply it to his own work: these are not competing claims; it is not an either/or situation. Bringing trinitarian doctrine to bear on the letters of Paul is both anachronistic and richly insightful. Whether or not it is more insightful than non-trinitarian readings, whether or not it does greater justice to the texts considered as a whole and in all their literary-theological diversity, is a separate question, one not governed exclusively by historical concerns. I happen to side with Hill's answer. But even if we were wrong in our judgment, it would not be because our reading was anachronistic. An ostensibly superior reading would be, too.

Jon Levenson on the costs and limitations of historical criticism

“Historical criticism has indeed brought about a new situation in biblical studies. The principal novelty lies in the recovery of the Hebrew Bible as opposed to the Tanakh and the Old Testament affirmed by rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, respectively. Jews and Christians can, in fact, meet as equals in the study of this new/old book, but only because the Hebrew Bible is largely foreign to both traditions and precedes them This meeting of Jews and Christians on neutral ground can have great value, for it helps to correct misconceptions each group has of the other and to prevent the grievous consequences of such misconceptions, such as anti-Semitic persecutions. It is also the case that some of the insights into the text that historical criticism generates will be appropriated by the Jews or the church themselves, and they can thereby convert history into tradition and add vitality to an exegetical practice that easily becomes stale and repetitive. But it is also the case that the historical-critical method compels its practitioners to bracket their traditional identities, and this renders its ability to enrich Judaism and Christianity problematic. There is, to be sure, plenty of room in each tradition for such bracketing. There are ample and long-standing precedents for Jews to pursue a plain sense at odds with rabbinic midrashim and even halakhah and for Christians to interpret the Old Testament in a non-Christocentric fashion. But unless historical criticism can learn to interact with other senses of scripture—senses peculiar to the individual traditions and not shared between them—it will either fade or prove to be not a meeting ground of Jews and Christians, but the burial ground of Judaism and Christianity, as each tradition vanishes into the past in which neither had as yet emerged. Western Christians are so used to being in the majority that the danger of vanishing is usually not real to them; after all, the post-Christian era will still be post-Christian, not post-something else. But Jewry, none too numerous before the Holocaust, has now become 'a brand plucked from the fire' (Zech 3:2). And most Jews with an active commitment to their tradition will be suspicious of any allegedly common ground that requires them to suppress or shed their Jewishness.

“Bracketing tradition has its value, but also its limitations. Though fundamentalists will not see the value, nor historicists the limitations, intellectual integrity and spiritual vitality in this new situation demand the careful affirmation of both."

—Jon D. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism (1993), p. 105. That line about Christians in the West not feeling the danger of vanishing, by contrast to Jews after the Shoah, is worth ruminating on. God be praised for Levenson, who is peerless and unflinching in his insights into and critique of historical criticism.

A Question for Richard Hays: Metalepsis in The Leftovers

In the finale of season 1 of the HBO show The Leftovers, Kevin Garvey reads a passage from the Bible over the body of Patti Levin, which he just buried with Rev. Matt Jamison. The whole season has culminated in this moment, which was partially the result of his own decisions, decisions sometimes made after blacking out and sleepwalking. These frightening episodes were in turn the result of dealing with the unbearable grief of losing each member of his family one by one to their own grief in the wake of The Departure (a rapture-like event a few years before)—all while serving as Chief of Police for a town that is being torn apart at the seams.

So Jamison hands Garvey a marked passage, and Garvey reads:



The passage is Job 23:8-17 (NIV). The scene is probably the most affecting—and least typical (i.e., not Psalm 23 or Genesis 1 or a Gospel)—reading of Scripture I've ever witnessed on screen.

And it got me thinking about Richard Hays. Specifically, it got me thinking about his books Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (1989) and Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (2016). In those books Hays uses a literary device called "metalepsis" to uncover or identify allusions to passages of the Old Testament beyond what is explicitly cited in the New Testament. The idea is that, say, if a small portion of a Psalm is excerpted in a Gospel or Epistle, the author is thereby calling forth the whole Psalm itself, and that attentive readers of Scripture should pay attention to these intertextual echoes, which will expand the possible range of a text's meaning beyond what it may seem to be saying on the surface. So that, for example, when Jesus quotes Psalm 22 on the cross, those who know that that Psalm ends in deliverance, vindication, and praise will interpret the cry of dereliction differently than those who understand it as the despairing separation of the Son from the Father.

At last year's meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, there was a session devoted to Hays's latest book. When it came time for questions, I raised my hand. I asked whether his argument rested on authorial intention, that is, whether, if we could know for certain that the Evangelists did not intend any or most of the metaleptic allusions Hays draws attention to in his book, that would nullify his case; or whether we, as Christian readers of Holy Scripture, are authorized to read the New Testament in light of the Old in ways its authors never intended. Hays assumed I hadn't read the book and that I was asking on behalf of authorial intention (i.e., he and Sarah Coakley both treated me a bit like a hostile witness, when I was anything but), but he answered the question directly, and in my view rightly: Yes, the metaleptic readings stand, apart from historical claims about authorial intention. Whatever Mark may have meant by the quotation of Psalm 22, we aren't limited by that intention, knowing what we know, which includes the entirety of the Psalm.

So back to The Leftovers. May we—should we—apply the hermeneutic principle of metalepsis to this scene's use of Scripture (and scenes like it)? What would happen if we did?

When I first watched the episode, I mistakenly thought that the famous passage from Job 19—"I know that my redeemer lives..."—followed the words cited on screen, which is what triggered the idea about metalepsis. In other words, if Job 23 were followed by words of bold hope in God, should that inform how we interpret the scene and its use of the quotation? Even granted my error, there is the wider context of the book of Job, and in particular the conclusion, in which God speaks from the storm, and Job is reduced to silence before God's absolutely unanswerable omnipotence—or, better put, his sheer divinity, his incomparable and singular God-ness. Might we interpret this scene, Garvey's story in season 1, and the whole series in light of this wider context?

It seems to me that we can, and should. But then, I'm only halfway through season 2. Job comes up again in episode 5 of that season, when Jamison is asked what his favorite book of the Bible is, and gives some trivia about Job's wife. Which suggests to me that perhaps Damon Lindelof and his fellow writers may be wise to the wider context and meaning of Job, in which case we viewers may not have to interpret against authorial intention at all.

That's a bit less fun, though it increases my respect for the show and the artists behind it. In any case, I'll let you know what I think once I finish.

David Bentley Hart on contemporary versus premodern allegorization

"Historians or hermeneuticians frequently assert that what most alienates modern readers from the methods of premodern exegetes is the latter’s passion for allegory. But this is false. If anything, we today are much more culturally predisposed than our forebears to an unremitting allegorization of the tales we tell or books we read, no matter how elaborate or tedious the results. True, we may prefer to discover psychological or social or ­political or sexual narratives 'encoded' in the texts before us, rather than spiritual or metaphysical mysteries; we might find it impossible to believe that a particular reading could be 'inspired' in a more than metaphorical sense; but the principle of the metabolism of the fictions we read into the 'meanings' we can produce is perfectly familiar to us. The same critic who might prissily recoil at the extravagances of a patristic figural reading of the Book of Numbers might feel not the slightest dismay at the transformation of Prospero into an ironic indictment of ­colonialism, or of Horatio Hornblower into an inflexibly erect emblem of the 'phallic signifier.' What makes the spiritual allegories of ancient pagan, Jewish, and Christian exegetes so alarming to modern sensibilities is not that they were allegories but that they were so disconcertingly spiritual."

—David Bentley Hart, "Ad Litteram" (now collected in A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays, 274-277). This is absolutely correct, and the entire (brief) essay should be required reading for biblical scholars, whether disposed to historical criticism or any other scholarly hermeneutic.

Figural christology in children's Bibles

The two Bibles my wife and I read to our children are The Jesus Storybook Bible, written by Sally Lloyd-Jones and illustrated by Jago, and the Jesus Calling Bible Storybook, by Sarah Young. Their favorite story by far is "the Moses story" (a title I required instead of their original "the Pharaoh story"), which they quickly came to know like the back of their hand.

One night, when I persuaded them to let me read them something other than the Moses story, we read the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. To my delight, when we got to the part where the three were thrown into the fiery furnace, and "a fourth figure" was there with them, and none of them were burned by the fire, the text and illustration both delivered on the christological implications of the episode and drew the figural connection implicit within it.

First, my children recognized the fourth figure as Jesus, for the simple reason that he is depicted exactly as he is later in the same Bible. And second, when I began to say, "And because Jesus was with them, the fire didn't burn them up..." I was able to continue, without skipping a beat, "...just like the burning bush. What happened to the leaves on that bush?" To which my children answered, "They didn't burn up!"

And so we had ourselves a little family figural reflection on God's presence when it comes near: both its fearsome power and its power to save. A reflection rooted in and oriented to christology, stretching across salvation history and the scriptures of Israel and the church. At a 4-year old level.

Give me these Storybook Bibles over historical criticism every day of the week.

Thomas Aquinas on the Trinity in Genesis 1

"[One reason] why the knowledge of the divine persons [that is, that God is triune] was necessary for us . . . [is that i]t was necessary for the right idea of creation. The fact of saying that God made all things by His Word excludes the error of those who say that God produced things by necessity. When we say that in Him there is a procession of love, we show that God produced creatures not because He needed them, nor because of any other extrinsic reason, but on account of the love of His own goodness. So Moses, when he had said, In the beginning God created heaven and earth, he subjoined, God said, Let there be light, to manifest the divine Word; and then said, God saw the light that it was good, to show the proof of the divine love [that is, the Holy Spirit]. The same is also found in the other works of creation."

—Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Q32 a1 ad3

Augustine on multiple interpretations of Scripture

"There are doubtless other ways of understanding our Lord's words, Why ask me about the good? No one is good but the one God (Matt 19:17). Provided however they do not favor belief that the Son's substance, by which he is the Word through whom all things were made (John 1:3), is of a lesser goodness than the Father's, and are not otherwise at odds with sound doctrine, we may cheerfully use not merely one interpretation but as many as can be found. For the more ways we open up of avoiding the traps of heretics, the more effectively can they be convinced of their errors."

—Augustine, De Trinitate I.31