Prophecy and Hermeneutics (Studies in Theological Interpretation): Toward a New Introduction to the Prophets

By Christopher R. Seitz

A fresh wave of studies on the prophets has appeared in recent years. Old Testament scholar Christopher R. Seitz has written Prophecy and Hermeneutics as a way of revisiting, from the ground floor up, what gave rise to studies of the prophets in our modern period. In addition, Seitz clearly shows that a new conceptuality of prophecy, hermeneutics, history, and time is needed--one that is appropriate to current views on Isaiah and the Twelve. Scholars, students, professors, and theological libraries will find this an essential foundational resource.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781441201676

Christopher R. Seitz

Christopher R. Seitz is Professor of Old Testament and Theological Studies at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland. He is the author or editor of eight books including Figured Out: Typology, Providence and Christian Scripture and Nicene Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism.

Book preview

PROPHECY AND

HERMENEUTICS

STUDIES in THEOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION

Series Editors

Craig G. Bartholomew

Redeemer University College

Joel B. Green

Asbury Theological Seminary

Christopher R. Seitz

Wycliffe College, University of Toronto

Editorial Advisory Board

Gary Anderson

University of Notre Dame

Markus Bockmuehl

University of St. Andrews

Richard Hays Duke

University Divinity School

Christine Pohl

Asbury Theological Seminary

Eleonore Stump

Saint Louis University

Anthony Thiselton

University of Nottingham

University of Chester

Marianne Meye Thompson

Fuller Theological Seminary

Kevin Vanhoozer

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

John Webster

University of Aberdeen

Jim Kinney

Baker Academic

PROPHECY AND

HERMENEUTICS

Toward a New Introduction

to the Prophets

CHRISTOPHER R . SEITZ

© 2007 by Christopher R. Seitz

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakeracademic.com

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Seitz, Christopher R.

    Prophecy and hermeneutics : toward a new introduction to the prophets / Christopher R. Seitz.

        p. cm. — (Studies in theological interpretation)

    Includes bibliographical references

    ISBN 10: 0-8010-3258-X (pbk.)

    ISBN 978-0-8010-3258-5 (pbk.)

    1. Prophecy—Christianity—Biblical teaching. 2. Prophets—Biblical teaching. 3. Bible. O.T. Isaiah—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 4. Bible. O.T. Minor Prophets—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.

BS1505.52.S45 2007

224 .06—dc22

2007009757

Scripture translations are by the author.

CONTENTS

Preface: Explanation and Orientation

Introduction: Prophecy Reconfigured

1 What Is an Introduction to the Prophets?

Part 1 The Overreach of History—Figuring the Prophets Out

2 The Prophets as a Discrete Phenomenon

3 The Eclipse of Biblical Prophecy

4 Prophetic Associations in the Canonical Form

5 The Prophets Reconfigured

Part 2 Time in Association—Reading the Twelve

6 Prophecy and Tradition-History: The Achievement of Gerhard von Rad

7 Prophecy and History: The Book of the Twelve as History

8 Prophecy and Hermeneutics: Canonical Reading and Hermeneutical Reflections

Conclusion

PREFACE

Explanation and Orientation

This is a book about the prophets and the way the introduction to the prophets emerged in the first place and then evolved. It focuses on the challenge of handling the temporal character of prophecy appropriate to its canonical presentation. As such, the very definition of what we mean by history is at stake. At the heart of history lies a figure, Jesus Christ. His manifestation is anticipated in Israel in crucial ways. Understanding his place in time—our time right now—requires a full appreciation of the way he is prefigured in God’s life with and witness within Israel. And here the prophetic legacy is central to grasping this witness.

In the chapters to follow I will repeatedly use the term figural, for which some explanation should be given here. I have begun with a focus on a single figure, at the center of time. Given the rise of critical method, and in the light of new ways of assessing history and interpretation, more must be said. The prophetic witness is crucial in this regard. It presents a special challenge because it is invested in an account of time as in God’s hand and as accomplished by his word. We will fail to understand Jesus Christ as the word of God unless we understand his accomplishment in Israel.

The term figural entails a literary dimension, that is, the way that prophetic materials have been intentionally related to one another by known and unknown authors, editors, and tradents—terms that within the context of the Old and New Testaments have their own distinctive character, as over against modern analogues. Original utterances, in literary form, have occasioned cross-references and a wider field of association, to which they now belong and within which meaning is generated. The prophetic word accomplishes, and that literary accomplishment can be studied carefully and understood, if only provisionally and only with great patience. This literary dimension might also be called configural, or an act of configuration.

Because this activity takes place across time, it has a historical, diachronic, and temporal dimension. The theological conviction undergirding literary configuration is that God is acting consistently and comprehensibly across time. Prophets see his hand at work and hear him speak. Through this medium, and because the speech is that of the author of time, God continues to speak and inspire hearing. Associations are configured not just because we can see them by closely studying their literary manifestation. They are there because God intends to make them speak of his ways through time. The times are in his hand, and the prophetic word manifests this temporal, historical movement. History is the term we frequently use to describe, by appeal to an external grid of association, how the biblical materials can be rearranged, so as to reconstruct their movement from earliest to latest developmental moments. But understood by attention to the figural character of prophetic speech, the term history will here refer to the achievement of the biblical witness in its final literary form, as the temporal dimension of God’s work is set forth.

Figural has been chosen as the term of reference for other reasons, involving the history of recent biblical scholarship. It had become popular to contrast something called the plain or historical sense with further senses called fuller, typological, or even allegorical (when that was not being dismissed as nonsense). On this understanding, a fuller sense was a spiritual sense, somehow linked to an intention not directly that of an author (understood as historically reconstructed). An allegorical sense was contrasted with a typological sense on the grounds that the latter was an extension of a historical intention, while the former was divorced from this. It belonged, rather, to a field of association distinct from historical linkage and even opposed to it. Perhaps it was a reader imposition (to use the jargon of our day), or simply the product of external reflection, tied up with various spiritual concerns (moral life, final purpose, contemplative growth). On these grounds, typology was thought far more corrigible for integration with the now-popular historical-critical method and so was finding fresh commendation. Allegory remained the tough opponent of, or incorrigible interpretative practice of, modern historical reading. When one considers that for Thomas Aquinas the literal sense is the spiritual sense and that the historical sense apart from this is an attenuated or artificially enclosed sense, it is clear how far the terms have been stretched and altered in the modern period.

More recently, from a wide variety of directions, the sharp distinction between typology and allegory has been shown to be overdrawn, overly optimistic in respect of integration with historical-critical methods, and false in its handling of distinctions in the history of the Bible’s reception in church, synagogue, and culture, especially in the early period. To avoid this confusion and to preserve as unprejudiced that dimension of modern historical reading capable of useful incorporation, I have favored the term figural.

Figural interpretation seeks to comprehend the character of God’s work with Israel, with Jesus Christ, and with the church, on the grounds that such a work is patient of understanding, has been providentially intended and overseen, and exists at a dimension only anticipated by modern inquiry into authorial intention. This inquiry so focused on an original author and subsequent tradition-historical elaboration as to bypass the legacy of configured witness now provided in the final form of the canon. The interpretative horizon of canonical reading is not merely formal characteristics of association or lists of books or matters of closure and stabilization, far removed from history and historical reference. Canonical reading is a species of historical reading, and as such it raises questions about what is meant by history.

The first part of the present work seeks to understand those historical forces in the last two centuries of interpretation that have given rise to the introduction to the prophets in the form in which we recognize it. My concern is to plot the way that specific theological questions of high moral urgency—tied up with prophecy and fulfillment, the relationship between the Testaments, what is meant by prophecy as a word to the future—began to recede in importance precisely to the degree to which the term history became considerably thinned out. The project of understanding the prophet’s word in time became a major preoccupation, but what of the prophet’s word as generating and describing time in a larger sense and as presented by the canonical witness in its given form (Isaiah or the Twelve)? It is my conviction that this dimension is also historical, even as we now struggle to understand it, due to the ascendancy of another use of the term (focused on what Hans Frei calls ostensive reference).

A study in theological interpretation is just that, or so this present work believes. It is a study into the way that theological interpretation—in this case, theological interpretation of the prophets—has been undertaken, modified, challenged, reconceived, and now reconsidered from a canonical perspective, so as to intimate a new form of introduction to the prophets.

Those more anxious to see the newer approach at work than to understand its logic and, as I will argue, its urgency may find themselves more at home in part 2. These chapters are more exegetical in nature. They have had a prior life in a series of public lectures, leading to subsequent publication, as over the course of the past years I have tried to understand what an introduction to the prophets is or may be.

This leaves me only the happy task of thanking those who have helped me think through the present work, challenged me to greater clarity, or indicated that they were unconvinced and that I should give it up and return to the far more uncomplicated rigors of historical-critical labor (something that no longer gets at the heart of the issue, though it asks the right sort of introductory questions).

I was able to think through the larger issues of the Twelve, having already worked through a comparable set of hermeneutical and historical challenges in the book of Isaiah (which lacks clearly marked internal boundaries). I thank the members of the faculty and students at Cambridge University and Tyndale House for stimulation and feedback during a research leave and a lecture series there. I benefited as well from conversations on interpretation in the context of the Scripture and Hermeneutics Consultation, organized by Craig Bartholomew, over the past five years. I taught one undergraduate module on the Twelve that was especially beneficial in helping frame my new conception, and lecturing to introductory students in the University of St. Andrews also raised for me very basic questions of comprehensibility and clarity. I am grateful for my students’ curiosity and their probing.

A semester of research at the Center of Theological Inquiry provided the opportunity to write up the bulk of part 1, and the seminars there were excellent occasions for pressing for greater clarity and for analyzing the historical context of prophetic interpretation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jan Muis and Rusty Reno were particularly good interlocutors and interrogators, and I have the pleasure of thanking them here for their interest and encouragement. I always benefit from the conversations I have with Ephraim Radner, whose mind and life are especially tuned to a dimension of reading Scripture that I associate with the figural; he gave very good comment and encouragement, and I acknowledge my gratitude to him.

Three students in particular have been instrumental in this work. Daniel Driver did a good deal of proofreading and made important suggestions; I owe to him the citation from Bengt Hägglund that closes the volume. Don Collett and I have spent long hours discussing the hermeneutical implications of associations in the prophetic canon, and I mention his name and acknowledge his contributions with special thanks. Mark Gignilliat pointed me to the quotation from Barth that follows, and I have enjoyed conversations with Mark about figural interpretation and history.

Portions of the present manuscript were delivered as lectures on figural interpretation hosted by Stan Walters at Tyndale University College in Toronto. I am grateful for his hospitality and encouragement and for the warmth and intellectual vitality of his faculty colleagues. Mark Elliott is responsible for helping organize the Scripture and Theology Seminar at the University of St. Andrews, and I acknowledge his friendship and special historical gifts here. Nathan MacDonald has also been a good conversation partner on matters related to hermeneutics.

As always, I owe a tremendous debt to Brevard Childs, magisterial presence in matters of Old Testament interpretation and the history of ideas. His curiosity and insight have sharpened with the years, and I am continually buoyed by companionship with him and his wife, Ann. Jim Kinney is a remarkably patient and wise publisher and scholar, and I thank him and his staff for their excellent work. The present work is dedicated to the students who have participated in the Scripture and Theology Seminar at the University of St. Andrews.

I came across this quotation as my work was drawing to a close, and it seemed pertinent to the challenge at hand. Barth was once asked, "[Does your theology give] enough weight to history, to God’s work in history and the various manifestations of his redemptive purpose in the historical process? In this connection what do you think of the Heilsgeschichte emphasis in modern theology?" He responded in this way:

I think in every one of these lectures which I have given in this place [Princeton University] I mentioned the context of God’s word as God’s work. To speak of God’s word as God’s work is to speak of the history, the story, the content of the Biblical message and witness. What more? I don’t think we are invited by the Biblical witness to speak of the general process of world history, but we must think and speak about that very special, very particular history of reconciliation and of revelation. That history was of course in the context of general world history, but the sacredness of that history is in the fact of God’s word becoming flesh. As history of salvation and revelation, it is in one word Heilsgeschichte. The Lord in the flesh, the history of Jesus Christ, together with the foreshadowing promise to Israel and followed by its justification in the Church over against the world—this whole as such can be called Heilsgeschichte. Are we to think of a kind of special history within this history, of a historical process, so to say? Some theologians have thought so. The Dutch theologian Cocceius who was the founder of a big, important school of theology, and also Bengel, thought in terms of events following one another on a line and so this became for them a kind of philosophy of sacred history. I personally cannot follow this way because the history in question is a history which not only happened but happens and will happen in all times as the same history. It should not be divided into different steps and phases; it is one history. We are always at one with the prophets of the Old Testament; we are always invited to be witnesses of Christ’s presence in this life; and in history we are always called to live in and with them as secondary witnesses.1

1 . Karl Barth, A Theological Dialogue, Theology Today 19 (1962): 174–75.

INTRODUCTION

Prophecy Reconfigured

I very much doubt whether the main task of an Old Testament theology is the understanding of Israel’s literary legacy as a unity. . . . The most urgent task to-day, as it seems to me, is that of avoiding all conceptions of unity which are not fully authenticated by the material itself.

—Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, 2.427

For a good number of years I have been involved in work on the prophets, primarily the book of Isaiah.1 Prior to that a monograph on Jeremiah and Ezekiel and prophetic activity in the exilic period was published.2 A considerable investment in Isaiah research was drawn to a close with the appearance of a commentary on the latter chapters in 2001.3 In the same year Figured Out was published.4 In that book I undertook a preliminary investigation of the methodological issues involving figural reading and a distinctive understanding of time and providence, based upon the canonical coherence of Christian Scripture.

Upon completing this work, I gave considerable thought to writing an introduction to the prophets. Two matters required further reflection, however, and they were related to each other. In a manner somewhat similar to research going on in Isaiah, a fresh wave of studies was appearing that examined the coherence of the book of the Twelve as a single collection.5 Indeed, several studies sought to show that the final editing of Isaiah and the Twelve was mutually influencing and that the two books ought fruitfully to be compared as distinctive witnesses within the larger prophetic corpus.6 This was, from my perspective, in many ways a refreshing development, not least because the constitutive character of the Twelve (as constituted by twelve individual witnesses) is not a matter for scholarly reconstruction and speculation, but at one important level it lies there straightforwardly before us. This made an investigation into the coherence of the final form of the witness—if such there was—much simpler to contemplate and to pursue.

It was clear to me, however, that this dimension of newer research into prophetic books—first Isaiah and then especially the Twelve—would have far-reaching implications for how one set about writing an introduction. At issue was the mundane fact of the provision of an order of presentation. I deal with this issue in some detail in the chapters to follow, but the questions raised by these new developments can be set forth briefly here. Where would one start and where would one end? If Isaiah and the Twelve were to be taken seriously—not just in their parts, but also as whole works—would this not directly impinge upon the sequential dimension it is the business of an introduction to provide? At issue was not the diachronic reality revealed by historical-critical work on the prophets, that is, that Isaiah has been profitably understood as having a rich developmental history, in simplified form, comprising three Isaiahs. This characteristic of Isaiah remains crucial to its interpretation. When it comes to the Twelve, it has always been the case that the constitutive character of this witness has raised important questions about order and sequence—though in a less high-flying form than historical analysis of the last two hundred years has understood it to be. The Twelve had begun to be treated in a way that would call for the congenial verdict of an assured result of historical-critical investigation. Start with Amos; end with Jonah. Slot in the three Isaiahs. Deal with the complexity of Jeremiah in some way, and arrange the rest of the Minor Prophets, or parts of them, on a grid of sequential presentation. In short: produce a history of prophecy in Israel, complemented with various species of commentary and analysis, in this or that proportion and for this or that audience or purpose.

The obvious question then asserted itself in the light of this newer research. How would one account for the consolidated witness of Isaiah or the Twelve, the dimension now acknowledged to be a profound form of prophetic witnessing in its own right and not just an accident of needing to put the pen, or prophetic mantle, down somewhere in time? One can see that the question has an especially acute form in the case of the twelve Minor Prophets, whose present order—if worthy of an introduction treatment—has been completely recast by the reigning historical-critical model of interpretation.7 This is not an issue that can be easily finessed. Rather, it gets right to the heart of what one means to introduce the prophets of Israel.

This, then, brings me to a third consideration and the reason for the present undertaking. It seems clear that this new research, which seeks to appreciate the final form of prophetic books—and the Twelve is its own very special case, as we shall see—is crucial to our understanding of prophecy qua prophecy and is absolutely fundamental to how prophecy actually makes its mark and does its work. As such, it calls for a fresh assessment of the logic of independent treatments of the prophets—what in time can be called an introduction—as a topic in its own right.8

In the treatment to follow, the history of introductions to the prophets is briefly described. It is crucial to see the way interpretation of the prophets was affiliated within the comprehensive project of biblical theology, for at one period of time in particular comprehensiveness was both the promise and the pledge of an account that purported to be about such an undertaking. It will emerge in time that the character of this comprehensiveness, its desirability, and its possibility all become open questions. Until, that is, at a certain point and in certain circles, the very idea has lost its cogency and its logic altogether, and an introduction to the prophets is simply free to get on with whatever it believes it is doing. Here again, I attempt to explain just why this became the trail that an introduction went down, at least in a good many instances.

In the present work, the reader will encounter one dimension in particular that requires some explanation. It will become clear that the single most important interlocutor in the analysis that follows is Gerhard von Rad. I have at other places invested a good deal of effort in coming to terms with von Rad’s enormous influence and contribution.9 The reason for this is quite simple. For von Rad, the comprehensive dimension of biblical theology is still fully intact, if not also fully and creatively transformed under his capable tutelage. Von Rad desires a total picture, and he is not content to carve things up and place them in separate bins whose affiliating logic is then absent or only for the reader to supply. Von Rad is not a piecemeal thinker. He is not a kind of quartermaster whose job is to redistribute supplies or hand out chores for specialized projects in discrete fields of labor.

It is precisely for this reason that one can note with irony a development that von Rad likely did not anticipate. His impressive Old Testament Theology came with a division into two volumes; at the start of volume 2 he gives account of both the logic and the limitations of making a break where he does (I discuss both the break and the interior organization and rationale of the two volumes in some detail below). In volume 2 we have an account of the prophetic literature, and the entire volume is devoted to a sustained and trenchant evaluation of this canonical reality, hence the subtitle: The Theology of Israel’s Prophetic Traditions. Yet this description could be misleading, for the point of volume 2 is to place prophecy, and also prophecy in relationship to factors under discussion in volume 1, within the broader ecology of Old Testament and New Testament reflection—what might properly be called biblical theology. So it is critical to observe that a major section (over one hundred pages long) brings the volume to a close and that this section (part 3) deals with what von Rad calls The Old Testament and the New. Prophecy, in other words, is the means by which, theologically speaking, the Old Testament moves from the delivery of its message as a whole into the reception and culmination—as von Rad understands this—represented by the New Testament witness. Prophecy exists in its own right, but also, in a very fundamental way, to build a bridge across two Testaments. I will examine in detail the character of that bridge in chapters to follow.

As is frequently the case with such things, the very success of this influential work led publishers to conclude that a separate volume on the prophets would prove quite serviceable. The effect of this, however subtle, was nonetheless telling. Part 3 of Old Testament Theology finds no place in The Message of the Prophets (Die Botschaft der Propheten); instead of this, von Rad undertakes some minor editorial adjustments, and the new volume draws to a close with very minimal reflections on the Old Testament and the New Testament, in the place of part 3. The effect of this is to encourage a view that it is possible to have a separate volume on the prophets that treats them as a reality unto themselves, instead of as an ingredient part of a much larger project—which for von Rad is not in the genre of introduction but of theology. The point should not be overstated. One can read The Message of the Prophets and understand that von Rad wants to relate this phenomenon to something much larger. But the proportionality of the original project is disturbed all the same, and one must hunt for the now only sparse and piecemeal suggestions that the prophets belong in a tradition-history whose basic movement is always forward, that is, the dimension that receives great prominence in volume 2 of the original Old Testament Theology.

I state it this way for a further reason. In the magisterial project where the prophets found wider affiliation, one can see very clearly in von Rad’s concluding materials (part 3) a far more radical understanding of tradition-history than the anodyne version animating part 2. In the main section of volume 2 (i.e., von Rad’s part 2), now constituting the heart of a detached The Message of the Prophets, tradition-history is the means by which von Rad demonstrates, against reigning models, that the prophets have precursors, that is, the core traditions underlying the finished Hexateuch. The chief point for von Rad is to show that the prophets have some kind of connection with what, in mature form, will be called law—thus, as a later expression has it, the law and the prophets.

This sketchy bridge backward will be vastly overshadowed by the one that moves forward, thrusting violently forward into the New Testament, in von Rad’s phrase of choice. The production of a separate account of the prophets not only gives the wrong impression of the independence of these figures in von Rad’s conceptuality, anticipating