Faith in a Hidden God: Luther, Kierkegaard, and the Binding of Isaac

By Elizabeth Palmer

The story of the binding of Isaac presents problems and opportunities for people who seek to live faithfully in relationship with a God who surpasses our understanding. This book examines how Luther and Kierkegaard read Genesis 22 in lively ways that both challenge and edify the life of faith. Luther uses the concept of resurrection to sanitize the story of its horror, portraying God as a loving (albeit testing) father and Abraham as a model of trust. Kierkegaard emphasizes the unintelligibility of both God and Abraham, showing that faith--whatever it is--is not easily spoken of. Yet, both interpretations are anagogical: they move their readers in the faith of which they speak. Luther‘s exegesis helps readers flee from the horror of a hidden God toward the comfort of trusting in the mercy of God, promised and revealed through Christ. Kierkegaard‘s interpretation drives readers toward the abyss and leaves them hovering there, on the cusp of faith active in love. At once a history of exegesis and a theological exploration of the meaning of faith in the face of suffering, this book demonstrates how the way we read the Bible is crucial to the life of faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781506432748

Book preview

Preface

This book investigates Martin Luther’s and Søren Kierkegaard’s readings of Genesis 22 within the history of exegesis to illuminate how each theologian informs and exemplifies the meaning of faith before a God who is both revealed and hidden. After outlining some contemporary readings of the story in the context of recent debates about biblical interpretation, this project closely examines Luther’s Lectures on Genesis and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling as works of exegesis. Each of these readings of Genesis 22 not only elaborates the meaning of faith in relation to human reason and ethics, but also elicits in the reader a response—pressing the reader into the movement of faith by way of both form and content.

But the movement of faith is not the same for Luther and Kierkegaard. For Luther, faith involves continually fleeing from the hidden God and turning toward trust in God’s mercy. Accordingly, his exegesis of Genesis 22 vacillates between evocative reminders of God’s hiddenness and interpretive moves that strip the story of its horror, leaving Abraham (and the reader of the Lectures on Genesis) to envision a God who is trustworthy despite appearances. For Kierkegaard, faith involves springing into the paradox of a hidden God. His exegesis of Genesis 22 leaves Abraham (and the reader of Fear and Trembling) suspended in this leap, with a God who refuses to fit into human reason or ethics and yet who still, strangely, evokes love. The Lectures on Genesis and Fear and Trembling are instructive for theology today because each is a form of exegesis simultaneously pedagogical (engaging biblical text with theological questions concerning faith) and anagogical (moving its reader to participate in the faith that it examines)—or, in the language of more recent literary theorists, performative.

In the secondary literature on Luther’s Lectures on Genesis there is rarely discussion of the text’s influence on its readers. Several performative dimensions of Fear and Trembling have been identified by scholars, although there is no consensus on the relationship between this performativity and readers’ faith experiences. In fact, both texts exemplify anagogical exegesis. But neither text is a perfect example. In both Luther’s and Kierkegaard’s readings of Genesis 22, the complexities inherent in the difficult biblical text give rise to interpretive moves that not only elicit but also at times sabotage the anagogical movement toward which the exegesis aims. In other words, both Luther and Kierkegaard demonstrate the limitations of exegesis as well as its possibilities for the life of faith.

Both Luther and Kierkegaard present readings of Genesis 22 that are unique in the history of exegesis. Most patristic and medieval exegetes, as well as many contemporary Christian biblical theologians, focus on Abraham as a model of obedience, foreshadowing the proper Christian response to God in light of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, a sacrifice prefigured in the story by both Isaac and the ram. In contrast, Luther and Kierkegaard scrutinize Abraham through the lens of faith: a faith that resists explanation as it grasps the paradox of a God who appears to contradict both human reason and God’s own promises. For both Luther and Kierkegaard, faith involves paradox, contradiction, and discomfort—as Luther puts it, trusting in God’s promises even when the promises appear to contradict one another, or as Kierkegaard puts it, grasping the impossible on the strength of the absurd. For both exegetes, Genesis 22 exemplifies the difficulty of faith in relation to human reason in the face of a God whose motives are terrifyingly hidden.

In the traditional language of exegesis, it is accurate to say that both Luther and Kierkegaard insist on reading Genesis 22 in a way that is consistent with the literal-historical meaning of the text, rejecting the traditional allegorical (i.e., Christological) readings of the text that have existed across the history of exegesis—from church fathers such as Origen and Chrysostom to the recent  exegesis of biblical theologians such as R. W. L. Moberly and Gerhard von Rad. But in their attempts also to read Genesis 22 tropologically—assessing Abraham’s  faith  within  a  moral  framework  in  order  to  draw conclusions about how Christians should live before God and other people—both Luther and Kierkegaard embellish the story, telling it in dramatic narrative form with considerable poetic license. And it is in this embellishment that Luther’s and Kierkegaard’s readings of Genesis 22 differ significantly from one another, revealing ultimately what each exegete believes is the movement of faith—for Luther, a fleeing from the terror of the God hidden outside of revelation toward trust in the revealed God; and for Kierkegaard, a leap from the comfort of objective, ethical, philosophical thought into the paradox of relating in subjectivity to a God who appears to be characterized by the absurd.

Luther makes exegetical choices that would appear to sanitize the story of its most horrific implications about both God and Abraham, emphasizing the concept of testing (on God’s part), belief in the resurrection of the dead (on Abraham’s part), and consent to be sacrificed (on Isaac’s part). Luther’s narrative portrays a God whose purpose is to test Abraham in order to bring about faith and reveal this faith to later generations. Framing God’s command to Abraham as a test that was never to be completed diminishes the horror of the command, and emphasizing Abraham’s belief in the resurrection of the dead diminishes the horror of Abraham’s willingness to carry out the command. Further, Luther makes Isaac into a moral agent by inserting a conversation between Abraham and his adult son on the mountaintop in which Isaac agrees to be sacrificed, having himself been previously instructed in the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. The doctrine of the resurrection of the dead as rooted in creatio ex nihilo legitimates the plot of Genesis 22 in Luther’s reading, placing both God’s actions and Abraham’s actions within an ethically comprehensible framework. Even if hidden, this God is hidden within revelation.

However, Luther’s Abraham still suffers the anguish of having to kill his son. Here, Luther’s continuous deep immersion into the emotions of Abraham draws into the story the possibility of a God whose nature and motives fall outside of revelation: a God who would toy with humans sadistically through terrifying games of life and death. Abraham’s putative belief in resurrection fails to obliterate the reader’s glimpse of such a hidden God; it can only continually draw the reader’s attention from this God toward the comfort of the trustworthy God known to people of faith through revelation.

Kierkegaard, on the other hand, pushes the story of Genesis 22 against the philosophical climate of his day and toward a God who remains hidden. But he does so in a way that is far from straightforward. Through the voice of Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard portrays the story of the binding of Isaac as a demonstration of the inexplicable paradox that constitutes the life of faith. After dismissing several easy readings of the story that resemble those of Luther (God testing Abraham, God making sport of Abraham, Abraham holding firm to the promise of resurrection), Johannes situates Genesis 22 against Kant’s ethic of universal maxims and Hegel’s absorption of the individual into universal absolute spirit, dramatically claiming that the single individual can stand in relation to the absolute and in doing so is higher than the universal. Narrating the story through both the anguish of Abraham and the horror of a God with unexplainable motives, Johannes de Silentio is left, in the end, describing a faith that stands apart from human reason and ethics.

But Johannes’s view of faith is called into question both by his identity as a nonbeliever and by the broader picture of faith that is drawn in Kierkegaard’s later works. The fact that Kierkegaard wrote pseudonymously strengthens the anagogical dimension of his writings: the reader is forced to discern truth for him or herself. Yet, by presenting Johannes’s troubling views as a possible meaning of faith, Kierkegaard nevertheless shapes the way his readers will encounter God, and the structure and content of Fear and Trembling forces its readers into just such an encounter.

Both Luther and Kierkegaard express faith as movement—a gift from God that, although it cannot be attained or possessed by human activity, is accompanied by a certain perspectival shift, both cognitive and affective, on the part of the believer in relation to a God who is hidden as well as revealed. For Luther, faith involves a fleeing from the God hidden outside of revelation to the revealed God (even if revealed in hiddenness); for Kierkegaard, faith involves a double movement culminating in the leap (the qualitative transition of pathos) toward the hidden God, away from the idle and idolatrous chatter of comfortable Christianity. Luther ends with comfort in the Word against the specter of a hidden God. Kierkegaard ends with immersion into the dizzying paradox of the Absolute, which demands the even more paradoxical response of faithful living.

Luther’s and Kierkegaard’s interpretations of Genesis 22 do more than simply teach readers about faith: they also produce in readers the movement that is associated with faith. In each case, the movement of faith elicited by the reader’s encounter with the interpretation enacts the tropology explicated within that interpretation. In this way, Abraham’s struggle to live in faith becomes the reader’s own struggle. Thus, the reader of Luther’s exegesis is drawn toward a safe and trustworthy God, the God to whom Luther would have Abraham and all Christians flee as the movement of faith. For the reader of the Lectures on Genesis, the God who is hidden behind Genesis 22 is also revealed as a trustworthy God whose promise of resurrection is firm, even while such a God exists only against the background of the possibility of a God whose hiddenness is far beyond revelation.

In contrast, the reader of Kierkegaard’s exegesis confronts directly just such a hidden God: one who transcends human ethics and philosophy; the God whom Abraham faced and Christians must face in the honest, terrible subjectivity that constitutes the movement of faith. For the reader of Fear and Trembling, the hidden God of Genesis 22 is revealed in a terrifying silence that does not guarantee the assurance of mercy. And yet, the crucial second movement of faith, constituted precisely by the absence of a guarantee, nevertheless overcomes the hopelessness of resignation and thus opens the reader to an encounter with the Spirit who elicits faithful works of love. But Fear and Trembling itself does not bring about this second movement—it leaves the reader on the precipice.

Ultimately what is of most significance for this project is not the question of whether Luther or Kierkegaard reads Genesis 22 more accurately than their exegetical predecessors and successors. Nor is it the question of who is more accurate about the nature of the movement that constitutes faith, for as the concluding chapter will claim, faith is a complex movement incorporating in different contexts various stances and shifts with respect to the hidden God. The crucial point, rather, is to investigate the ways in which these two biblical interpretations portray and effect such movements. The fact that both Luther and Kierkegaard interpret the Bible in a way that elicits an anagogical movement in their readers—and that they do so more clearly than their exegetical predecessors and successors, yet neither effortlessly nor flawlessly—is instructive for people of faith today, exemplifying the power of words to construct reality and the stakes and limitations of exegesis for people and communities of faith.

1

Pedagogy and Anagogy in Twentieth-Century Readings of Genesis 22

Genesis 22 and Contemporary

Hermeneutical Questions

In his renowned literary comparison of Genesis 22 with Homer’s account of Odysseus’s homecoming, Erich Auerbach reminds readers that the most provocative interactions between a reader and a religious text may play out in the silences in the story, the spaces that elude narrative logic and move the reader from certainty toward the frightening aporia that underlies the relationship between humans and their God.

In the story of Isaac, it is not only God’s intervention at the beginning and the end, but even the factual and psychological elements which come between, that are mysterious, merely touched upon, fraught with background; and therefore they require subtle investigation and interpretation, they demand them. Since so much in the story is dark and incomplete, and since the reader knows that God is a hidden God, his effort to interpret it constantly finds something new to feed upon.[1]

The Binding of Isaac has commanded a leading role in the history of biblical interpretation, both because of its narrative silences and because of the horror of the divine command that drives the story forward.[2] This text is at once sparse and dramatic, with gaps in the terse narrative that beg to be filled and emotionally fraught ethical implications that impel exegetes and philosophers to repeated analysis.[3] It is also unique among biblical narratives: nowhere else does God directly command a father to sacrifice his son; nowhere else is the father poised to obey, only to be stopped by an angelic intervention that spares both son and father.

The primary aim of this book is to investigate closely two Christian interpretations that have arisen in the history of exegesis of this troubling text: Luther’s Lectures on Genesis and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. To contextualize the forthcoming readings of Luther and Kierkegaard within questions that Christians ask today, this chapter introduces some modern[4] interpretations of Genesis 22 in the context of contemporary discussions about how to read the Bible.

The history of interpretation of Genesis 22 begins in the Bible itself and continues into the present time, particularly among Jewish and Christian scholars,[5] who interrogate the shared text with common questions, the answers to which carry substantial theological and ethical weight: How old was Isaac when the binding occurred? Were Isaac and Sarah told of the plan? Why did Abraham not argue with God (as he had done regarding the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah)? Why did Abraham tell the servants that both he and the boy would return from the mountain? What did Abraham and Isaac talk about during the three-day journey? Why was it an angel, and not God, who stopped the sacrifice? What is the significance of the ram? Did God know the outcome of the test ahead of time? Why did the angel speak twice? Was the blessing contingent on Abraham’s obedience? Did Isaac return afterward with Abraham to Beersheba? Did Sarah ever find out about the near-sacrifice? Most gripping of all are the questions that concern the divine and human motives in this perplexing drama: Why would God demand such a thing of Abraham, and why would Abraham be willing to do such a thing?

These final questions concerning the motives of God and of Abraham are at the heart of the difficulty of coming to grips with Genesis 22 as a text read and interpreted by communities of faith. The Binding of Isaac has been regarded as an ethically and religiously problematic narrative from nearly the beginning of its history of interpretation: critiques of Abraham’s decision to sacrifice his son were documented as early as Philo.[6] More recent forms of critique began to take shape when those engaging in post-Enlightenment disputes about the relationship between faith and reason found fuel for their philosophical fires in the moral questionability of Genesis 22. Such a move was made first by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, who mined the character and motivations of Abraham for ethical principles that could be either universalized or denounced. Today the story is commonly read through lenses of critique by sociologists, feminist scholars, poets, psychologists, biblical scholars, historians, and theologians. Many of these thinkers have criticized the normative role of Genesis 22 within communities of faith, claiming that such a horrific religious narrative is utterly wrong in its portrayal of God and leads to dangerous suppositions about what it means to live a religious life.[7] But others, attempting to find historical reasons for the shape of the narrative while refraining from making judgments about the text’s utility, have sought to explain the Binding of Isaac in concrete historical terms: as an exemplification of the Israelites’ struggle to overcome pre-Israelite rituals of child sacrifice; as an etiology of the centralization of worship in Jerusalem; as a literary and cultic foreshadowing of the Passover; or as an historicization of a theological theme that runs through the history of Jewish and Christian tradition, the humiliation and subsequent exaltation of the beloved son who has been chosen by God for both suffering and grace.[8] What all of these modes of reading have in common is that they read the text and its theological implications as reflections of human attempts to create and enact religious meaning, socially and individually. They do not locate within the text theological norms to be internalized by readers for religious purposes.

In contrast, most pre-Enlightenment exegesis of Genesis 22—both Jewish and Christian—presumed that the story conveys an historical event but also expresses religious meaning that is normative across time and space. Patristic and medieval Christian exegetes interpreted Genesis 22 as a theological foundation of the Christian life, focusing on Abraham either as model of obedience (following the New Testament interpretation in James) or as model of faith (following the New Testament interpretation in Hebrews). In either case, the earliest Christian interpretations remained focused on the motives and subjectivity of Abraham rather than God or Isaac. Rabbinic and medieval Jewish readings of the Binding of Isaac culminated in a theology of Isaac as a willing martyr whose merits would extend redemptively to Jews throughout the rest of history, ultimately eclipsing the importance of Abraham’s role in the story.[9] This movement coincided with a decreasing significance of Abraham in Christian interpretations, in favor of a focus on Isaac as a type of Christ.[10] What holds all of these early readings of Genesis 22 together (and sets them apart from most modern critical interpretations) is the assumption that the text conveys truth about the divine/human relationship—a truth that inheres not only in the author’s intention or the text’s original context but also in relationship with the reader, who is presumed to be a person of faith.

Such variety in readings of a single biblical story points to the fact that the long history of exegesis of Genesis 22 is constituted by a complex interaction between different modes of interpretation. David Tracy has outlined three hermeneutics that are utilized by readers in their encounters with texts: hermeneutics of critique, hermeneutics of suspicion, and hermeneutics of retrieval.[11] Tracy’s categories describe comprehensively the most common modes of reading classic texts that have occurred in recent scholarship. In this chapter, the most significant modern readings of Genesis 22 will be placed into three categories that are informed by those of Tracy but differ in name and nuance: historical-critical readings, normative-critical readings, and normative-theological readings. This terminology reflects more precisely recent discussions about how scholars and people of faith read the Bible. Historical-critical readings aim to situate the story within its context of origin and postulate the resonances of meaning and intent out of which the narrative was historicized. Such interpretations read the text critically through historical questions and correspond to the category that Tracy has called hermeneutics of critique.[12]Normative-critical readings intend both to identify those resonances of meaning and intent and to evaluate them through norms that have arisen in the present social and intellectual context. Such readings investigate the text critically through normative questions and often fall  into  the  category  that  Tracy  has  called  hermeneutics  of suspicion  (but  also  incorporating  elements  of  critique).  Normative- theological readings locate within the story and its context of origin religious meanings and intents that are regarded as both edifying and authoritative for people of faith who encounter the story and its history of interpretation.[13] Normative-theological interpretations read the  text  theologically  through  normative  questions,  and  they  tend to  correspond  to  Tracy’s  hermeneutic  of  retrieval.  Although normative-theological readings dominated the exegesis of Genesis 22 that preceded the Enlightenment, there were also  critical  strands  present  within  the  normative  readings  during that era. Similarly, although critical readings are more common today in Genesis 22  scholarship,   biblical   theologians   continue   to   offer normative-theological readings of the text that also utilize critical methods. In fact, all three modes of interpretation have been present throughout the history of exegesis, often intertwined together within a single reading of the story.[14]

Recently, several theologians have argued for the superiority of normative-theological readings of the Bible over historical-critical or normative-critical readings, claiming that critical interpretations fail to edify people of faith and instead intensify the divide between academy and church. David Steinmetz, for example, argues in his essay, The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis, that pre-critical exegesis, with its openness to a multiplicity of meanings and its refusal to bind the meaning of the text to the author’s original intent, is truer than critical exegesis.[15] Steinmetz uses the term pre-critical to connote not only the time period prior to the rise of modern historical-critical methods but also more specifically in reference to the traditional fourfold method of reading Scripture, in which a single word or phrase could simultaneously carry literal and spiritual (allegorical, tropological, and anagogical) meanings.[16] Critical exegesis (which includes both historical-critical and normative-critical readings) risks falling into either the Scylla of extreme subjectivism (in which the meaning of a text is located in whatever values the reader brings to it—an overemphasis on spirit) or the Charybdis of historical positivism (in which the meaning of a text is located exclusively in the author’s intent—an overemphasis on letter).[17] The stakes of biblical interpretation are high for Steinmetz: Until the historical-critical method becomes critical of its own theoretical foundations and develops a hermeneutical theory adequate to the nature of the text which it is interpreting, it will remain restricted—as it deserves to be—to the guild and the academy, where the question of truth can endlessly be deferred.[18] For Steinmetz, truth is both the goal of exegesis and the cause of the divide between academy (with its emphasis on critical exegesis) and church (with its respect for and emulation of pre-critical exegesis).[19]

Steinmetz’s appeal to the term truth refers not only to the content of the normative-theological claims made by interpreters, but also to the hermeneutic by which these normative-theological claims are brought by interpreters to the text. Accordingly, Steinmetz labels the historical-critical method as false and pre-critical exegesis as true.[20] This broad appeal to truth implies that method impacts content: if the proper method of reading a text is employed, the claims made by the exegete are likely to be true; if a text is read falsely, the claims made by the exegete are not likely to correspond to the text’s true meaning. It follows, then, that the meaning of a text is connected inherently to the way the text is read by future generations.

It is with respect to such texts as Genesis 22 (where, as Auerbach reminds readers, so much in the story is dark and incomplete)[21] that Steinmetz’s argument for multiple levels of interpretation is useful to readers. Readers of Genesis 22—both in the academy and in the church—approach the text looking for concrete meaning and are confronted instead with narrative gaps. André LaCocque has pointed out that the hermeneutical process of filling in the gaps is inscribed in the Hebrew language itself, where the vowels are unwritten and must be vocalized by the reader.[22] And yet, LaCocque argues, recent hermeneutical theories have acknowledged that the gaps in a text contain not only a meaning situated in the context of the text’s composition, but also the text’s Wirkungsgeschichte, the dynamic history of interpretation of a text by the communities that receive it:

The meaning of a text is in each instance an event that is born at the intersection between, on the one hand, those constraints that the text bears  within  itself  and  that  have  to  do  in  large  part  with  its  Sitz im Leben and, on the other hand, the different expectations of a series of communities of reading and interpretation that the presumed authors of the text under consideration could not have anticipated.[23]

As texts are inscribed into multiple traditions, LaCocque argues, the traditions become inscribed into the texts. In this way texts are taken up into living communities. Writing in 1980, Steinmetz grounded his case for the superiority of normative-theological biblical exegesis in an argument for simultaneous multiple interpretations that in many ways foreshadowed the work of later thinkers such as LaCocque. Steinmetz’s concern was not to set forth multiple interpretations for multiplicity’s sake, but rather to allow for normative-theological readings of an ancient text to be considered true even apart from the original intent of the author. Steinmetz’s argument is also rooted in the conviction that, as LaCocque would later articulate it, the meaning of a text resides in the intersection between original context and the series of communities of reading that make up the history of interpretation of the text. To put it more simply, Steinmetz believes that the history of exegesis matters in biblical interpretation, and truth-claims matter in the evaluation of both current interpretations and the history of exegesis.[24]

Biblical theologian R. W. L. Moberly sets forth an equally strong defense of normative-theological readings of the Bible, claiming that they are superior to historical-critical or normative-critical readings in the context of faith communities. Like Steinmetz, Moberly uses the metaphor of letter and spirit, along with the parallel Jewish exegetical division between peshat and derash, to suggest that proper understanding of Scripture strikes a balance between the two ways of reading. Historical-critical readings neglect the spirit when they focus exclusively on the text’s original world or the author’s original intent. Normative-critical readings, and some normative-theological readings, neglect the letter when they impose upon the text conceptual frameworks from a later time period.[25] Letter and spirit, Moberly argues,

must not be allowed to come apart from each other: the minutiae of exegesis (‘letter’, peshat) and the wide sweep of theological presuppositions, insights, and goals (‘spirit’, derash) must remain in genuine mutual interaction without either coming into conflict or drifting apart at crucial moments."[26]

To keep exegesis properly balanced between letter and spirit, then, the Christian interpreter must participate in what Moberly calls the rule of faith: a set of beliefs and practices that acknowledge a relationship with a Trinitarian and Incarnational God.[27]

In Moberly’s view, interpreting Hebrew Scripture through Christian convictions and practices is the most appropriate mode of reading for those who seek to balance letter and spirit. For Steinmetz, ancient and medieval interpretations of Scripture are superior to modern interpretations because they allow the reader to locate truth in multiple layers of interpretation at the same time, expanding the meaning of the text beyond the intent of the original author or community in which the text arose. Such multiplicity, Steinmetz argues, was more appropriate to the ancient church than any one single meaning would have been. While Steinmetz argues generally for the validity of truth-claims in biblical interpretation and the superiority of exegesis that incorporates such truth-claims, Moberly makes a more specific argument: that certain truth-claims (those found in normative-theological readings) are more valid than others (those found in normative-critical readings).

These and similar convictions have more recently found expression in the Scripture Project, a continuing conversation among scholars, including both Moberly and Steinmetz, who seek to reclaim normative-theological readings of the Bible within academia and the church. The Scripture Project has culminated in the articulation of Nine Theses on the Interpretation of Scripture, which appear in the introduction to a collection of essays and sermons, The Art of Reading Scripture.[28] The nine theses locate truth about God within Scripture and proclaim God as the author and giver of the truth contained in the stories; proclaim that Scripture is rightly understood through the church’s rule of faith and participation in the church; affirm multiple meanings that extend beyond the author’s intent; suggest that the Old and New Testaments are best read in light of one another and as a coherent narrative; advise that Christians read Scripture in conjunction with both the saints of the church and diverse others outside of the church (particularly Jewish people of faith);[29] and commend the Holy Spirit’s continual work in ongoing fresh interpretations of Scripture. Within the context of these theses, Steinmetz and Moberly each present freshly nuanced arguments in favor of normative-theological readings of the Bible.

Steinmetz advocates reading the Hebrew Bible through a Christian second narrative, in which the end of the story (i.e., the Christian story of salvation through Jesus) is known and acknowledged by the reader.[30] Although such a method seems anachronistic from the perspective of historical criticism, Steinmetz argues, it is both realistic (since historians looking back at original texts do in fact know the subsequent history) and preferable (since it allows the reader to view the original text at its intersection with the history of interpretation). The Christian second narrative as a hermeneutical strategy is analogous to the second narrative in detective novels, where the gaps in the story are suddenly filled in by a long, revelatory explanation in the final chapter. As Steinmetz puts it, How the story ends makes a difference for the beginning and middle of the story as well as for its conclusion.[31] One might read the Hebrew Bible through a second narrative that is either critical or theological, and in either case the gaps in the text are filled in by the reader’s normative perspective. However, this normative perspective will only find truth in the gaps, according to the Nine Theses, if it aligns with the church’s narrative.

Steinmetz’s contribution to the Scripture Project maintains the divide between the historical-critical method and pre-critical exegesis (which he now calls traditional exegesis). But he has backed away from his earlier rhetoric which posited as the result of this hermeneutical distinction a sharp divide between church and academy: his focus now is on the use of normative truth-claims to fill in the gaps in ancient texts. In contrast, Moberly’s contribution to the Scripture Project penetratingly articulates a sharp distinction, although it is a distinction of a different sort: not between church and academy, but between biblical studies and theology within the academy.[32] After lamenting the disciplinary divide between biblical and theological study and arguing that it represents an unnecessary antithesis, Moberly argues that biblical interpretation must be reconceived within academia:

The goal is not to say that all biblical study must become theological, for the Bible can legitimately be studied in differing ways according to context and purpose. The concern, rather, is of a different kind: to seek a way of overcoming the antithesis between reason and faith—which is also a dissociation of knowledge from love, of the head from the heart—such that a renewed and more integrated understanding of the academic task becomes possible.[33]

These metaphors—knowledge and love, head and heart—are located within Moberly’s argument about the academic divide between biblical scholarship and theology: what is not clear is whether he would also apply them to the distinction he has previously made between letter and spirit. However, the primary argument in the essay (rooted in Augustine’s exposition of John 7:17 in Homily 29) is that in order to understand Scripture one must believe.[34] This hermeneutical strategy is compatible with his earlier claims that proper interpretation of the Bible is inextricable from the convictions and practices of a life of faith. In fact, Moberly argues, biblical scholarship should be dually responsible, both to the tasks of historical-critical work and to the tasks of systematic and dogmatic theology, thus bridging the divide between reason and faith.[35] Although such a dualistic formulation may appear to imply that theology as a discipline is ruled by faith rather than reason, in fact Moberly insists that such a divide need not exist at all (and will not exist for the theological reader who is both attentive to historical detail and formed by a life of faith).

Moberly shares with Steinmetz the conviction that the way a reader interprets the Bible matters deeply and what is at stake is nothing less than truth, a truth that is revealed to faithful readers by God in the text and its history of interpretation. Both Steinmetz and Moberly are deeply shaped by the history of exegesis and unapologetically beholden to the traditions and doctrine of the church; both advocate a privileging of normative-theological reading (although not necessarily to the exclusion of historical-critical reading), where truth-claims rooted in Christian faith and practice take the prominent place among multiple levels of interpretation. Such a way of reading the Bible is common within Christian faith communities and may be edifying for people of faith. However, it risks criticism on two grounds: the charge of eisegesis by those who believe that the meaning attributed to a text should be clearly delineated from the beliefs or values of that text’s readers; and the charge of incorrect interpretation by those who affirm normative reading in general but disagree with the particular normative claims of the reader. To put it another way, the value that Moberly and Steinmetz place on properly balancing letter and spirit may be misplaced (if in fact the meaning of the original text is purely letter, without spirit) or may play out wrongly in practice (if the content of the spirit is misinterpreted). The first critique is commonly leveled by scholars within academic spheres; the latter is likely to arise between those who read the Bible in relationship to a faith community (whether that relationship is constituted by participation in the faith community or critique of it).

Moberly acknowledges the second risk when he writes that the question of what counts as a good reading of the biblical text cannot be divorced from questions about the context and interpretative community within which the reader stands.[36] For this reason, Moberly (in agreement with the Scripture Project) suggests a measure for the truthfulness of one’s normative-theological claims: the extent to which one is embedded within the tradition, theology, and practice of the church. Moberly does not, however, sufficiently explore the implications of the fact that there exist many different traditions, theologies, and practices that claim to be the church or the effects of these implications upon his hermeneutic theory.

Against the charge of eisegesis, Moberly and Steinmetz would argue (along with the church fathers) that a text’s meaning is never simply the letter: there are deeper meanings in the text that draw upon the larger Christian story, even if implicit and not originally intended by the author. Both scholars would be careful to qualify any Christian truth-claims about Hebrew Scripture by acknowledging that they are not embedded within the historicity of the text or the intent of the author. To locate meaning in both the original text and the later history of the text’s interaction with readers is compatible with both the early church fathers’ modes of interpretation and recent tendencies in literary theory to call for multiplicity in meaning and signification. However, whether such an argument for multiple meanings eliminates the charge of eisegesis depends on the relationship the interpreter sets up between the meaning inherent in the text and the meaning given to the text by later readers. To read one’s own normative claims into a text (as Moberly does with his typology and Steinmetz does with his second narrative), no matter how rooted those claims are in other ancient texts or in a continuous history of interpretation that makes similar claims, is always a form of eisegesis. But to read one’s own normative claims alongside a text analogically or comparatively, or to evaluate a text through one’s own normative claims, does not necessarily fall into the category of eisegesis. Whether eisegesis is ever appropriate within communities of faith is another question. It is, as Steinmetz and Moberly point out, the way many Christians have read Hebrew Scripture since the beginning. Such readings may very well be edifying to people of faith.

However, this project demonstrates that if utility to people of faith is the criterion for evaluating exegesis, the assessment of such utility is not as simple as the distinctions that Steinmetz and Moberly have drawn. All the distinctions drawn by Steinmetz and Moberly—between biblical scholarship and theology, or between historical-critical and traditional interpretations, or between academy and church—are important for Christian readers in search of a hermeneutic that locates normative-theological truth-claims within Scripture. But these distinctions remain (to use the now-familiar metaphor) within the level of letter, unless the exegesis also has an effect on the reader by shifting his or her understanding of God. The measure of useful exegesis for people of faith is not contingent on the content of theological truth-claims that may be inherent in the text or imposed upon it by later readers, or even upon the presence of such claims, but rather upon the effect of the interaction between the exegesis and its reader.

The way such an interaction between exegesis and reader might occur can be seen in the following hypothetical example. A pastor who is asked by a troubled parishioner about the meaning of the Binding of Isaac might answer in several ways. The pastor might respond that Genesis 22 is a story that reflects an ancient people’s struggles with customs of child sacrifice and the redactor’s concern to justify the centralization of worship at the temple in Jerusalem. This answer corresponds roughly to the literal sense of Scripture in the church fathers’ exegesis and to the mode of reading that this project calls historical-critical.[37] Steinmetz and Moberly might suggest that this pastor is neglecting spirit for the sake of letter, interpreting the text factually but not in such a way that reveals any meaningful truth. Alternatively, the pastor might answer that Genesis 22 is a story that teaches Christians either how to live (with Abraham as exemplar of faith or obedience) or how not to live (with Abraham as a model of insanity, selfishness, abuse of power, or radical misunderstanding of God’s intent). Each of these answers corresponds roughly to the tropological sense of Scripture in the church fathers’ exegesis: the former answer is normative-theological, and the latter answer normative-critical.[38] Or the pastor might answer that Genesis 22 is a story that foreshadows the sacrifice of Christ and thus teaches Christians about salvation history. This answer corresponds roughly to the allegorical sense of Scripture in the church fathers’ exegesis and to the mode of reading that this project calls normative-theological.[39] Steinmetz and Moberly might suggest that any of these normative modes of interpretation can unearth the truth in the text, as long as they align their normative claims with those of the church’s rule of faith and set them forth alongside attentiveness to the text’s original context. At the same time, many biblical scholars and theologians would suggest that a pastor who reads Christ into the meaning of an Abrahamic narrative is guilty of eisegesis.

As different as they are from one another, each of these interpretations offered by the pastor is pedagogical: it teaches the parishioner something about the meaning of the text and its reception within a Christian context. This book will demonstrate, however, that there could be another dimension to the pastor’s interpretation. Within any of the aforementioned interpretations, the pastor might tell the parishioner something about God that is unexpected—whether unexpectedly disturbing or unexpectedly comforting—so that the parishioner’s vision of God changes. This answer is pedagogical insofar as it teaches the parishioner something about the pastor’s interpretation of the text’s meaning. But it also changes the parishioner’s vision of God, and thus moves the parishioner perceptually closer to (or further from) that God. Such movement, therefore, not only exemplifies but also enacts the anagogical sense of Scripture that was elaborated by the church fathers: an ascent of the soul toward God along the ladder of Scripture.[40]

In the history of exegesis, the term anagogy has traditionally been used to refer to the content of a particular interpretation (e.g., a reading in which Jerusalem symbolizes the heavenly city to which every Christian soul will eventually return).[41] However, Henri de Lubac has shown that in the church fathers the sense of Scripture that came to be known as anagogy consistently carried a twofold meaning.[42] The term signified both the particular content of teachings about the future age and the mystical ascent into that future that comes to the reader of Scripture:

[T]he first of the two anagogies teaches that part of Christian dogmatics called ‘eschatology’—which is further subdivided into two parts, according as the ultimate end of each person or that of the universe as a whole is concerned. . . . As to the second anagogy, it introduces us here and now into the mystic life; at the terminus of its movement, it fulfills that ‘theology’ which is made etymologically the equivalent of ‘theoria’ and which is the contemplation of God. In modern terms, the one is speculative; the other, contemplative.[43]

De Lubac traces the second meaning of anagogy through the history of medieval exegesis, identifying it in such theologians as Origen, Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, and Gregory the Great. It is this form of anagogy to which the term anagogical exegesis in this project refers: an interaction between interpreter and Scripture, or even between reader