Metaphors, Carrots, Sticks, and the Divine Authorship of Scripture: A Few Thoughts on Richard Hays' The Moral Vision of the New Testament

I've enjoyed engaging recently with Richard Hays' book The Moral Vision of the New Testament, not least because he is convinced that, for the Christian, moral reasoning is an exegetical matter. As the best theology centers on unpacking and integrating the teachings of the canonical writ, so developing a Christian ethic centers on attending to and practicing biblical directives for the church. Another strength of the volume is Hays' affirmation of both the determinacy of the meaning of biblical texts and possibility of genuine knowledge of that meaning and also the culturally-conditioned nature of our exegesis and attempts at principlizing our way from the sacred page to the contemporary setting. This leads his work away from the mire of hermeneutical and ethical relativism, but not without a firm grasp of the primacy of the particularity of the text and the significant limitations of abstracting from the Sitz im Leben of the original readers in order to relate Scripture to the church's current milieu. In turn, he lays stress on the need, under the tutelage of the mind-independent meaning of the text, to exercise the imagination in order to discern ways in which the world of Scripture connects up metaphorically with the world in which we now dwell and must make decisions. This, he says, fosters proper contextualization in the task of Christian moral reasoning as we seek to deploy and enact the normative teaching of Scripture, once displayed in previous historical-cultural situations, in the church's present situation. In short, contextualization depends less on pristine principles and more on discovering analogies that enable us to relate the canonical to the contemporary.

One of the helpful points he makes in examining the Pauline ethical material is that "Paul generally prefers suasion to sanctions." That is, the apostle will endeavor first to hold out the incomparable riches of new life in Christ before using the dangers of rejecting Christ as motivation for repentance. He opts for "the carrot over the stick as a strategy of moral exhortation" (p. 40). Of course, as Hays adds, Paul isn't afraid to spell out the real prospect of divine judgment in hopes of prodding Christians to pursue a life of obedience. However, the point is still worth noting for our own interactions with other believers: amplify the joy of a faithful life before resorting to the threat of divine condemnation when aiming to persuade someone to continue along the path of Christian maturity.

In addition to these positive remarks, there are a few questions I would raise. Chiefly, I wonder how a certain subterranean perspective on God's relationship to Scripture affects some of Hays' exegetical and methodological judgments. For example, when he considers the difficult passage on women and teaching in 1 Timothy 2, Hays concludes that the author (not Paul, in Hays' mind) ventures a "lame exoneration of Adam" (p. 67). However, if we believe that in each biblical text we find both the divine and the human voices harmoniously addressing the church, and, if we believe that central to the exegetical task is determining the (unified) "normative stance" (Wolterstorff's phrase) of those two authorial agents, then it seems that both complementarians and egalitarians must do better than to concede a poorly devised bit of argumentation in the Bible. If God through the human author and without violating said author's personality and agency inscripturates the normative stance found in each section of the biblical literature, including a section that posits arguments, I would hesitate to dismiss even a seemingly odd thread of reasoning as "lame." The other options seem to be 1) downplaying God's involvement with certain texts or aspects of texts (which texts? which aspects?) and/or 2) broadly rejecting the claim that God is speaking to the church in the text. (Notice that this concern could be shared by those who do believe Paul wrote all of the Pauline epistles and by those who do not. The question is one of God's relationship to the Bible.)

Any thoughts?

Ruled Reflection: Learning Restraint from a Little Book

Seldom do I read 2 John, but I was struck by this word of instruction included in the apostle's plea for the church to resist Gnostic teaching:

"Everyone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God.  Whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son" (2 Jn. 9).  

We're meant to abide in Christ's teaching for his disciples and so the task of theology is not to forge new intellectual ground but to explicate and elaborate the gospel.  If we stray from ruled reflection, metaphysical-conceptual reflection in service to the sacra doctrina of the Bible, and cast out into the high seas of speculation, we generate significant risks for ourselves and for those who listen to us speak of God.  Hence Calvin, for example, warns multiple times against the danger of vain curiosity.  Let us know and love the gospel and its prophetic and apostolic unpacking in Scripture such that it rules all our thoughts of God!

Augustinian Inerrancy...

Endeavoring to uncover the meaning of Genesis 1, Augustine writes:

"I will have nothing to do with all those who think Moses could have said anything untrue."  (Confessions, 12.23.32)

I'm not convinced that the Christian tradition is without the doctrine of the truthfulness of all Holy Scripture until Old Princeton comes on the scene.  Thoughts?

Must-Read Book about The Book

For thoughtful Christians, especially those called upon to preach, teach, and theologize with some facility, Timothy Ward's Words of Life: Scripture as the Living and Active Word of God (IVP) is a must-read book. I try not to tout just any book in this way, but Ward's latest on Scripture is a gem. It endeavors to outline God's relationship to the Bible in a biblical, lucid manner and it opens up exciting windows into the nature of Scripture and the ministry of the word of God.

The book unfolds in four major sections. First, Ward embarks on an exegetical quest to uncover what Scripture says about its own relationship to God. Second, he treats the relationship of Scripture to God in systematic-theological mode, mapping out how each person of the Trinity involves himself with the Holy Writ. Third, Ward carefully sketches the traditional attributes of Scripture: necessity, sufficiency, clarity, and authority. Fourth, and finally, he connects the doctrine to the life of the church, not least to the pulpit.

Here are two highlights:

1) Ward proposes that God invests himself in his word, which is therefore a mode of his presence (what he calls God's "semantic presence"). Does this proposal forge a theological path through the Barthian-Carl Henrian fissure by retaining an emphasis on both revelation as God's own presence toward human beings and the Bible as a locus of revelation? See esp. pp. 66-67, 73.

2) Ward judiciously re-presents the doctrine of inerrancy, locating it under the scriptural attribute of authority. He cannot but call it a "natural implication" of verbal inspiration, but he places it within the context of more central themes, not least because it can pertain to just the Bible's propositions, which constitute just one facet of divine covenantal communication in and through Scripture. In addition, he agrees with John Woodbridge and others who deny that the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture was first cooked up at Old Princeton. On the contrary, says Ward, it has been present materially throughout church history, though the terminology was popularized in the 19th century.

There is a taste. Comments welcome!

John Webster on Holy Scripture

In his 'The Dogmatic Location of the Canon' (published in his Word and Church) and Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch, John Webster unfolds some weighty thoughts on the doctrine of Scripture. Here are only a few of them:

1) The doctrines of God, revelation, and even salvation should inform our understanding of Holy Scripture. In other words, we need to affirm an overtly dogmatic (not merely historical or sociological) location for the Bible.

2) Even situating bibliology within ecclesiology won't get the job done for several reasons. (1) What God, not the church, is doing with the text is the central issue. (2) In ecclesiologically-driven descriptions of Scripture the church is often viewed from too sociological, too immanent an angle.

3) By speaking in Scripture God acts upon the church, making the process of canonization one of submission and recognition, not one of innovation.

4) 'Interpretation' might be a term too loaded down with psychological and philosophical freight to do justice to the activity of Christian reading of Scripture. Webster uses the term 'reading' to insist that, rather than generating meaning by interpreting the Bible, Christians are confronted by the meaning of the text and experience a conversion to its teaching.

Useful and provocative stuff!