Divine Scripture in Human Understanding: A Systematic Theology of the Christian Bible

By Joseph K. Gordon

In six closely-reasoned chapters, Joseph Gordon presents a detailed account of a Christian doctrine of Scripture in the fullest context of systematic theology.

Divine Scripture in Human Understanding addresses the confusing plurality of contemporary approaches to Christian Scripture—both within and outside the academy—by articulating a traditionally grounded, constructive systematic theology of Christian Scripture. Utilizing primarily the methodological resources of Bernard Lonergan and traditional Christian doctrines of Scripture recovered by Henri de Lubac, it draws upon achievements in historical-critical study of Scripture, studies of the material history of Christian Scripture, reflection on philosophical hermeneutics and philosophical and theological anthropology, and other resources to articulate a unified but open horizon for understanding Christian Scripture today.

Following an overview of the contemporary situation of Christian Scripture, Joseph Gordon identifies intellectual precedents for the work in the writings of Irenaeus, Origen, and Augustine, who all locate Scripture in the economic work of the God to whom it bears witness by interpreting it through the Rule of Faith. Subsequent chapters draw on Scripture itself; classical sources such as Irenaeus, Origen, Augustine, and Aquinas; the fruit of recent studies on the history of Scripture; and the work of recent scholars and theologians to provide a contemporary Christian articulation of the divine and human locations of Christian Scripture and the material history and intelligibility and purpose of Scripture in those locations. The resulting constructive position can serve as a heuristic for affirming the achievements of traditional, historical-critical, and contextual readings of Scripture and provides a basis for addressing issues relatively underemphasized by those respective approaches.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780268105204

Joseph K. Gordon

Joseph K. Gordon is professor of theology at Johnson University.

Book preview

ADVANCE PRAISE

for

Divine Scripture in Human Understanding

"Divine Scripture in Human Understanding has the potential to greatly aid the ways in which Scripture is used and understood in theological debate, especially in those communities that are more biblically oriented. Its sophisticated discussion of the actual history of Scripture within an overall context of divine providence undoes any attempt at fundamentalism. The book is accessible to nonspecialists, but will be of greater value to those who are seeking professionally to understand their own performance in relation to questions such as ‘What do we mean by biblical theology?’ and ‘Is biblical theology just exegesis?’"

—Neil Ormerod, Australian Catholic University

‘Christians need to learn how to read, hear, and meditate on Scripture in a Christian manner.’ This substantial and important book spells this out, in the form of a systematic theology of the Bible, in dialogue with the church fathers and with Bernard Lonergan and Henri de Lubac. It sets Scripture in a trinitarian context and makes a strong case for its inspiration and authority.

—John Barton, Oriel and Laing Professor Emeritus of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture, University of Oxford

Joseph K. Gordon’s approach to the perennial question for Christians of how to read Scripture—how, that is, to understand its contents, its modes of discourse, its spiritual authority, and its historical contingencies in the light of theological tradition and practice—is subtle, deft, and penetrating. The result, moreover, is a volume at once remarkably comprehensive and delightfully concise. Students of theology will profit from it immensely, but so will accomplished masters of the craft.

—David Bentley Hart, University of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study

This remarkable book offers a thoroughly trinitarian approach to a systematic theology of Holy Scripture, rooting it in the rule of faith, in constructive appropriation of premodern understandings of Scripture to address postmodern paradoxes, and in absolute honesty about modern historical consciousness and awareness of the contingencies of textual transmission, of biblical diversity, and of linguistic indeterminacy. It affirms that, as the useful instrument of divine pedagogy, Scripture proves capable of perennially transforming human lives. Thus what we have here is a wonderful corrective to bibliolatry which substantiates the indispensable and vital connection between the Word of God incarnate and the Word of God inscribed.

—Frances Young, Edward Cadbury Professor Emerita of Theology, University of Birmingham

Joseph Gordon offers a sophisticated, creative, and compelling account of the human-divine character of Scripture, and of Scripture’s instrumental role in the divine economy of human transformation for participation in the life of the Triune God. Gordon’s treatments of the rule of faith as hermeneutical necessity, the soul (reinterpreted for our context) as the subject of transformation, and the theological significance of the Bible’s concrete, diverse instantiations inform his overall project in fresh ways. This is an important volume that deserves the careful attention of both biblical scholars and theologians.

—Michael J. Gorman, Raymond E. Brown Professor of Biblical Studies and Theology, St. Mary’s Seminary & University

"God may not have a context, but Scripture—God’s inscripturated word—certainly does, and the major contribution of Gordon’s study lies in its careful unpacking of the role that various historical contexts have on its authors’ and readers’ categories of understanding. As an added bonus, Divine Scripture in Human Understanding contains one of the clearest descriptions of Bernard Lonergan’s unique approach to theology’s task of faith seeking textual and traditioned understanding for today that I have yet come across."

—Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Research Professor of Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Divine Scripture in Human Understanding

READING THE SCRIPTURES

Gary A. Anderson, Matthew Levering, and Robert Louis Wilken

series editors

Divine Scripture in

Human Understanding

A SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY OF THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE

JOSEPH K. GORDON

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS

NOTRE DAME, INDIANA

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

www.undpress.nd.edu

Published © 2019 by the University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gordon, Joseph K., 1985–author.

Title: Divine scripture in human understanding : a systematic theology of the Christian Bible / Joseph K. Gordon.

Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. | Series: Reading the Scriptures | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019003978 (print) | LCCN 2019004374 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268105198 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268105204 (epub) | ISBN 9780268105174 (hardback) | ISBN 0268105170 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible—Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Classification: LCC BS511.3 (ebook) | LCC BS511.3 .G667 2019 (print) | DDC 230/.041—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019003978

° This book is printed on acid-free paper.

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

CHAPTER ONE. Scripture at the Level of Our Times: Situation, Exigencies, and Thesis

CHAPTER TWO. Historical Precedents: The Rule of Faith in Irenaeus, Origen, and Augustine

CHAPTER THREE. The Location of Scripture I: The Economic Work of the Triune God

CHAPTER FOUR. The Location of Scripture II: Human Persons and Human Meaning in History

CHAPTER FIVE. Scripture in History I: The Realia of Christian Scripture

CHAPTER SIX. Scripture in History II: The Intelligibility of Christian Scripture

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

General Index

Scriptural Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am overwhelmed when I recall all of the help and encouragement I have received while working on this project. I must first acknowledge my gratitude to the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for sustaining me during this work. As I have reflected and written, I have regularly felt the weight of responsibility that comes from writing and teaching about divine things (James 3.1) and have prayed countless times that these words would be relatively adequate to the reality of God’s economic work in and through Christian Scripture. My prayer is that this work will be useful and edifying for those who hope to read and understand the treasures of the written Word of God. Anything valuable in this work I owe ultimately to God. I am eternally grateful to the communities of St. John’s, Abbottsford Hall, Real Life, and St. Luke and St. Peter’s, and for my friends in the Ekklesia Project for prayer and for spiritual and emotional support through the process of writing this work.

We can become transformed vicariously, David Burrell writes in Friendship and Ways to Truth, in the transformation of those whose lives have become entwined with ours (17). My life has been entwined with—and so transformed by—countless others as I worked on this project, which began its formal life as my doctoral dissertation at Marquette University. I owe many thanks to friends and colleagues in the Department of Theology at Marquette, and to their significant others, for stimulating conversations and for the joy of their company. There are too many to name, but I must single out Stephen and Katie Waers and Ryan and Kate Hemmer for special mention. Thanks are also due to Jeremy Blackwood, Christopher Brenna, Anne Carpenter, Nick Elder, Jen Fenton, Kirsten Guidero, Jon Heaps, Geoff Holsclaw, Karen Keen, Samantha Miller, Jakob Rinderknecht, Gene Schlesinger, Tyler Stewart, Eric Vanden Eykel, and Juli Vasquez for their encouragement and feedback regarding specific aspects of this project. Thanks are also due to numerous members of the theology faculty at Marquette who taught me in seminars or took the time to discuss theology, Scripture, and professional matters with me. I owe thanks to Michel Barnes, Josh Burns, Michael Cover, Ralph Del Colle (†), Deirdre Dempsey, Julian Hills, Mark Johnson, Therese Lysaught, Joseph Mueller, Joseph Ogbonnaya, Andrei Orlov, David Schultenover, Susan Wood, and Wanda Zemler-Cizewski. I owe a great deal to professors and mentors at Johnson University and Lincoln Christian Seminary, especially John Castelein, Steve Cone, Steve Cook, Bob Kurka (†), Bob Rea, and Chris Simpson. Thanks are also due to John Barton, Adam Bean, Cynthia Crysdale, Steve Fowl, Ben Fulford, Michael Gorman, David Bentley Hart, Stephen Lawson, Matthew Levering, Eric Mabry, David Mahfood, Peter Martens, Dan McClain, Neil Ormerod, Randy Rosenberg, Matt Tapie, Roy Terry, and Jeremy Wilkins, who took time to discuss aspects of this work with me or offered encouragement. I owe special thanks to Neil Ormerod and Kevin Vanhoozer for their vital critical and constructive feedback and reassurance during the formal review process. I could not have asked for, or imagined, having better mentors and dissertation codirectors than Bob Doran and Steve Long. Those I have mentioned have undoubtedly contributed to whatever strengths this work has. They cannot, and should not, be blamed for any of its shortcomings, for which I take full responsibility.

I am thankful for and humbled by the financial support I received from the Department of Theology at Marquette during my doctoral studies; I am especially grateful for the dissertation fellowship I received during the 2014–15 school year and for nominations for two university-wide fellowships. I am also thankful to the Lonergan Research Institute for receipt of the Crowe Bursary in 2015, awarded as support for my research on this project. I also owe special thanks to Sheila Berg, Susan Berger, Stephen Little, Wendy McMillen, and the rest of the staff at the University of Notre Dame Press, who answered every question I asked promptly and with exceptional professionalism; their efforts have made the review and publication process go incredibly smoothly.

I am extremely grateful to the administration and faculty of Johnson University for entrusting me with the lofty work of forming students for theological reflection and for financial, emotional, and spiritual support since July 2015. I owe special thanks to Nealy and Jeff Brown, Mike Chambers, Lora Erickson, Heather and Jamey Gorman, Les Hardin, Kendi Howells-Douglas, Rafael Rodriguez, Tommy Smith, Gary Stratton, Jon Weatherly, Gary Weedman, Mark Weedman, and Mark Ziese for their encouraging words and patience as I finished this project. Thanks are also due to Marla Black in the Johnson University Florida library for exceptionally prompt help with acquiring resources and to Taylor Wells, Angel Domenech, Elijah Mize, and Brian Cook for their capable work as teaching assistants. I owe special thanks to my parents, David and Marie, for their constant care, words of encouragement, and prayers. Thanks are also due to my in-laws, Neal and Miriam Windham; to my siblings, Renee, Ben, Luke, and Sarah; and to those others in my family, especially Grandma Gordon, who prayed for me and encouraged me during this process. Final thanks are reserved for Charis, to whom I dedicate this work, and Stephen David, who arrived in our lives as this project neared its completion. I cannot imagine a lovelier and more thoughtful and patient partner in ministry and life than Charis. Thank you for walking alongside me with so much grace and encouragement, both in this work and in our life together.

ABBREVIATIONS

Abbreviations for the books of the Bible and other common terms generally follow the guidelines in The SBL Handbook of Style: For Biblical Studies and Related Disciplines, 2nd edition (2014).

CHAPTER ONE

Scripture at the Level of Our Times

Situation, Exigencies, and Thesis

The problem of reading the Holy Book—if you have faith that it is the Word of God—is the most difficult problem in the whole field of reading. There have been more books written about how to read Scripture than about all other aspects of the art of reading together. The Word of God is obviously the most difficult writing men can read; but it is also, if you believe it is the Word of God, the most important to read.

—Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book

Determining the function and role of Scripture in Christian life and thought and articulating the precise parameters of interpretation of the Bible have been perennial challenges for the Christian community.¹ Contemporary Christians must face such challenges head-on, though, if they are to maintain the conviction that Scripture is indeed the written Word of God. The challenges are especially acute today, when there are dozens of competing approaches to Scripture in academic, ecclesial, and secular settings. As Robert Sokolowski declares, our present postmodern situation provides an embarrassment of riches for understanding the Bible.² Popular and technical literature devoted to promoting the meaning and use of Christian Scripture has proliferated in recent years. Within academic or scholarly study of the Christian Bible, this literature can be divided roughly into three major families of approaches: historical-critical, contextual, and primarily theological. This tripartite typology is admittedly imprecise.³ Even given its imprecision, though, it is useful to the extent that it identifies family resemblances characteristic of contemporary scholarly interpretive approaches to the study of the Christian Bible.

I discuss each of the three approaches briefly below, but it is important to first note that these approaches have emerged as scholars interested in the Christian scriptures have engaged and appropriated recent developments in philosophical reflection on textual interpretation and on the general conditions and possibilities of human understanding. The most pressing challenge of our contemporary situation is to measure up to the significance of the fact that all human understanding is tied to specific times and places and to think through how this judgment should affect Christian engagement with Scripture.⁴ Historical consciousness names this dimension of contemporary reflection; contemporary readers and hearers of texts have become acutely mindful that all human meanings are nested in historical, cultural, social, and linguistic contexts.⁵ The texts of Scripture bear the marks of their specific times and places. And the human readers of these texts always interpret them from somewhere and never from nowhere.⁶ The judgment of the need to attend to the locatedness of all human expressions and interpretations has received helpful exposition in the work of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hans Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and various postmodern philosophers such as Stanley Fish and Jacques Derrida.⁷ Any full account of reading and understanding a text well must attend to the insights of such seminal figures.⁸ Human understanding of the world and of texts that precede us is inescapably shaped, if not determined, by our cultural and linguistic formation in communities of understanding. As the product of human understanding in distinct cultural settings, concepts have dates.⁹

While early Christian interpreters were not entirely naive regarding the historical and cultural differences between their own worlds of meaning and the worlds they encountered in Scripture, the recent emphasis on historical consciousness has instigated a much more thoroughgoing investigation of the diverse ancient historical, social, and cultural worlds reflected in Scripture than took place in premodern engagement with Scripture. The relatively recent major discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Oxyrhynchus papyri, the Nag Hammadi texts, the Codex Sinaiticus, and countless other ancient artifacts and texts from antiquity, coupled with the fruition of such historical consciousness, have made possible the concerted and disciplined consideration of the Bible as a historical anthology of texts that reflect multiple different ancient social, cultural, and linguistic worlds of meaning.¹⁰ Focus on the original historical settings of Christian Scripture and the concern to avoid anachronism are the characteristic features of the family of contemporary hermeneutical approaches designated by the label historical criticism.¹¹ Given that human beings who produced, edited, and passed on the scriptures are situated within and bear the marks of their distinct times and places, historical critics ask what we can understand and what judgments we can make about the authors of these texts and the functions of these texts in the ancient worlds from which such documents emerged. Practitioners of historical criticism concern themselves with the tasks of understanding the texts within their hypothetically reconstructed original settings of composition, redaction, interpretation, and use. They raise and answer questions concerning what we can know about the worlds of meaning behind the texts and the relationship of the texts themselves to these backgrounds. Historical-critical work has borne much fruit in helping contemporary readers understand the biblical texts in their own contexts.¹² It is not, however, without its problems.

Though the analysis of the historical uniqueness of the cultures attested in Scripture has its own intrinsic value, its processes and results build an impenetrable wall between the texts and contemporary people.¹³ Historical scholarship makes demands upon readers and interpreters that can only be met through the study of ancient languages and cultures; as such, it threatens to take Scripture out of the hands of everyday Christian believers. Even within the confines of the guilds of biblical scholarship, narrative criticism and the applications of structuralism and semiotics to biblical texts have emerged to remedy some atomizing tendencies common within historical criticism and to address the perceived failure of historical criticism to edify religious communities.¹⁴ Narrative approaches give direct attention not to the worlds of meaning behind the texts but instead to those worlds of meanings and values projected or created by the texts of Scripture themselves. Such literary approaches have frequently emphasized the usefulness of the texts as they stand for challenging readers to ascend to new and fuller horizons of understanding and acting in the world.

In recent years a number of so-called contextual approaches to the study of Scripture have emerged and gained influence in academic biblical scholarship. Though all reading, as I have noted above, is necessarily contextual, the aforementioned contextual approaches attend not primarily to the worlds in which ancient texts were produced or to the worlds that they depict but instead focus on the worlds in front of the texts. Such reading strategies focus on the concerns that culturally and socially located readers—especially those who have suffered from disenfranchisement and marginalization—bring to the texts from their own horizons of experience and meaning. As noted above, the commitments, values, beliefs, and practices of readers themselves inevitably affect reading and interpretation.¹⁵ Practitioners of contextual reading approaches have also challenged the hegemony of historical criticism within the guild of academic biblical scholarship by drawing attention to the fact that practitioners of the latter approach have frequently been insufficiently attentive to their own social and cultural locations and the effects of their situatedness upon their interpretive work. Because they have not been sufficiently attentive to their own social and cultural locations, historical critics have often unreflectively endorsed androcentric and narrowly Western perspectives. The pretension of historical criticism to total neutrality has revealed itself as a farce. The claim that neutral, bias-free study of Scripture is possible and that historical criticism is its embodiment dissemblingly masks the commitments necessarily involved in historical-critical engagement with Scripture.¹⁶

In addition to the development of historical criticism and contextual approaches, a rapidly growing number of historical and constructive studies on the explicitly theological nature of the task of Christian interpretation of Christian Scripture have appeared during the past twenty years.¹⁷ These efforts stem, in part, from an ecumenical groundswell of interest in both academic and ecclesial contexts in drawing on the riches of the Christian past in order to aid the task of reuniting scriptural exegesis and theology. These new theological approaches promote an emphasis on the need for Christians to identify the constitutively Christian dimensions of Christian scriptural interpretation. In Engaging Scripture, Stephen Fowl captures the emphases of these new theological approaches well. Christian interpretation of Scripture, he writes, at least in order to be distinctively Christian, needs to involve a complex interaction in which Christian convictions, practices, and concerns are brought to bear on scriptural interpretation in ways that both shape that interpretation and are shaped by it.¹⁸

Many of these theologically focused studies have attempted to recover aspects of premodern approaches to the function and role of Scripture in the day-to-day lives of Christian communities.¹⁹ Other recent studies have laudably sought to recover and present the achievements of premodern figures and movements in order to address contemporary questions about the nature and interpretation of Scripture.²⁰ The relationship of these three families of approaches to one another is unclear, even to those who affirm the relative legitimacy of each. A multifaceted question arises: How should these various approaches—historical critical, contextual, and theological—be related to one another, and how should they inform contemporary engagement with and use of Scripture in Christian communities today?²¹

The problem of knowing precisely what to do with Scripture and how to interpret it is not restricted, of course, to the academy. The various approaches that have recently emerged in the academic study of Scripture have trickled down to various ecclesial communities with varying effects.²² A significant number of studies have appeared in recent years that examine the ecclesial dimensions of Christian reading and the place of Christian Scripture in Christian community. This literature includes constructive studies, works that attempt to retrieve and employ aspects of premodern understandings of the relationship between Scripture and church, congresses of specific ecclesial traditions, and ecumenically inclined dialogues between different ecclesial communities.²³ New interfaith initiatives, such as Scriptural Reasoning groups, have also brought individuals and groups from different religious traditions together—particularly from the three Abrahamic traditions—to read the respective holy books of represented participants.²⁴

While the Bible is perhaps not as strange[ly] silent in many mainline Protestant churches as it was forty years ago, there is often still confusion about how to integrate the ongoing, and so changeable, achievements of historical approaches to Scripture with traditional practices of reverence for Scripture as the written Word of God.²⁵ As the New Testament scholar Dale Martin has recently argued, the historical-critical training that many clerical leaders received in seminary has proven impotent as an aid for effective preaching.²⁶ Contemporary evangelical groups in America, particularly communities that hold to high views of the authority of Scripture, are aptly characterized by what Christian Smith has called pervasive interpretive pluralism.²⁷ Despite the fact that these Christian groups universally agree that Scripture should be authoritative, they exhibit a great deal of diversity in their understandings of its content and application.²⁸

The problem of interpretive plurality, of course, is not restricted to evangelical groups.²⁹ Nor is it the only problem that contemporary Christian communities face regarding the use and interpretation of Scripture. Stephen Prothero’s Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t draws attention to the widespread phenomenon of biblical illiteracy characteristic of American Christianity.³⁰ Despite the fact that significant percentages of Americans—whether evangelical, mainline Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, or other—affirm the authority and centrality of Scripture for their faith, knowledge of its contents is low and is decreasing across the ecclesial spectrum.³¹

When contemporary readers, whether scholars, laypeople, exegetes, or theologians, do engage Scripture, they are frequently perplexed by the strange new world[s] that they encounter depicted within it.³² The historical, moral, and even religious distance that has opened up between the worlds of meaning mediated by the texts of Scripture—to the extent that we can understand them and make correct judgments about them—and the worlds of meaning that most contemporary readers inhabit have proven stupefying to countless Christian believers.³³ The most pressing concerns are moral in nature. What are Christians to do with an authoritative Scripture that seems to depict God as not only condoning, but even sanctioning slavery, wanton violence, genocide, patriarchy, and racism?³⁴ That such difficult texts of terror have been invoked to justify atrocities in history requires attention and a response from anyone who would seek to understand and articulate the authority of Christian Scripture in the contemporary world.³⁵ Given not only the distance and strangeness of the worlds of the Bible, but its witness to and ostensible approval of moral atrocities, one historical critic has suggested that the discipline of historical criticism should have the task of completely dismantling the cultural cachet of the Christian Bible as its only end.³⁶ To accept such a proposal is not an option for contemporary Christians committed to Scripture and its authority. But how are they to understand it? What are they to do with it?

The sheer plurality of approaches to the interpretation of the Bible and the speed at which they have emerged and developed in recent years are dizzying. At this time there is nothing even remotely close to consensus on the relationship between these extremely different approaches to the Christian Bible. They pose unique theological problems for Christians committed to the authority of Scripture and its central place in Christian faith. Recognizing the moral difficulties involved in reading Scripture today muddles the problem even more. Given the cacophony of competing approaches to Scripture, and the seemingly irreconcilable claims the different groups are making of it, is it still possible for contemporary Christians to believe in the inspiration, unity, and authority of the Christian Bible? If so, how? What should Christians expect of the Bible? How should they read it? The situation of Christian Scripture in our own times calls for a response.

The starting point for reading Scripture well, whether one’s focus is explicitly theological or religious in nature, is an adequate understanding of what the Bible actually is. As Martin has written, "The first step in learning how to interpret the Bible . . . is to make explicit what one thinks Scripture is. How one interprets Scripture depends a great deal on what one thinks the Bible is."³⁷ What it is, Scott Swain writes, must determine how we approach and use it.³⁸ But Scripture is not separable from its contexts of use and meaning. Besides clearly identifying what Scripture is, we must also locate Scripture relative to the other realities, divine and human, that surround it. Context, as contemporary philosophers of interpretation from various backgrounds regularly note, determines meaning. Anthony Thiselton argues that only the context (and perhaps agreed training) will limit pluralism against unmeant or irrelevant possibilities.³⁹

A number of scholars have recognized and responded to the problems that our contemporary situation presents for understanding the nature and purpose of Scripture and have suggested fruitful ways to move forward. This project appropriates aspects of some of these suggestions but ultimately proposes a unique way of addressing the difficulties. The present work proposes a systematic theology of the Christian Bible at the level of our own times as a means of addressing the present challenges and opportunities.⁴⁰ Such a systematic theology will provide a resource for both responsibly locating Scripture in its divine and human contexts and identifying Scripture in those surroundings. The only way to responsibly evaluate the various approaches to Scripture explained above is through having a responsible understanding of what Scripture has been and is and through situating Scripture responsibly and faithfully in its natural and supernatural contexts.

What follows, then, provides a constructive systematic account of the nature and purpose of Christian Scripture that articulates the intelligibility of Scripture and locates it within the work of the Triune God in history and within human cultural history.⁴¹ I assume that the purpose and function of systematic theology is the articulation of the intelligibility of Christian doctrines affirmed in the present at the level of one’s own time.⁴² Because I have taken a systematic approach in the present work, what follows is not structured through an exegetical appropriation of insights from premodern or contemporary figures.⁴³ Instead, specific questions and judgments about the Triune God, about the economy of God’s creative and redemptive work, about the intelligibility of human persons in history, about the material history of Scripture, and finally about traditional Christian beliefs concerning Scripture itself organize the work.⁴⁴ The remainder of this introduction therefore introduces the primary figures whose work I utilize, provides an explanation of the notion of systematic theology adopted here, and gives a justification for the rationale behind the structural organization of the following chapters.

It is important for me to draw attention to and comment on the subtitle of this project, A Systematic Theology of the Christian Bible. The presence of the indefinite article A is significant. While the scope of this work is ambitious, it cannot provide an exhaustive treatment of the objects of its inquiry and investigation. Such an account would require more research and reflection than any one person could perform over a lifetime. The present work does aspire to provide one relatively adequate account of divine Scripture in human understanding as an answer to the following questions: What is the nature and purpose of the Christian Bible, and what is its location in the contexts of the economic work of the Triune God and the cultural history of humanity?

THE PRIMARY INTERLOCUTORS OF THE PROJECT

Though this is a constructive project, it depends upon engagement with and appropriation of the contributions of a number of theologians and exegetes of the present day, the recent past, and the distant past. Prior to outlining the intelligibility of the structure of the work, then, I want to introduce my two primary interlocutors, Bernard Lonergan and Henri de Lubac, to clarify precisely how I appropriate their insights.

On any account Bernard Lonergan is among the giants of philosophy and theology of the twentieth century.⁴⁵ At first glance, however, he would appear to be a strange interlocutor for a study on the nature and purpose of Christian Scripture. What help can Lonergan offer for the task at hand? While Lonergan was not himself a biblical scholar, he did have an extensive knowledge of the contents of the Christian Bible. He was also well read in the historical-critical scholarship of his day.⁴⁶ A significant number of biblical scholars have explicitly employed insights from Lonergan’s work to address difficulties in the current situation of Scripture in our time.⁴⁷ In addition, a number of other theologians have utilized Lonergan’s work to clarify the place of Scripture in contemporary theological reflection.⁴⁸ This work builds on much of their previous work but attempts to go further by providing a wide-ranging heuristic account of the location of Scripture within history and the work of the Triune God, the location of Scripture relative to human nature and human cultural history, and, finally, the history, nature, and purpose of Christian Scripture itself. The first key contribution that Lonergan provides is his articulation of the functions and goals of systematic theology.⁴⁹ I provide an overview of his position on systematics below. But his work offers other key insights for the present systematic theology of Christian Scripture.

Lonergan’s most salient observation for the present work, to which I regularly return, is insistence on the need to pay attention to the fact that theologies are produced by theologians, that theologians have minds and use them, that their doing so should not be ignored or passed over but explicitly acknowledged in itself and in its implications.⁵⁰ The same thing must be said about biblical scholarship, whether it is historical critical, literary, contextual, or explicitly theological; it is produced by human persons, and those human persons have minds and use them, and this fact should be acknowledged in itself and in its implications. It can, and must, also be said about all humans, whether scholars or not, who engage Scripture. In his monumental work, Insight, Lonergan explains the subjective involvement intrinsic to the human quest for truth and clearly distinguishes its components. By exploring and interrogating the achievements of the philosophical traditions of rationalism and empiricism, modern scientific method, and the development and functioning of common sense, Lonergan is able to provide a relatively comprehensive and compelling account of the constants of consciousness in human nature that undergird all human understanding. Through his investigation of the dynamics of human consciousness, Lonergan demonstrates that objectivity, or the correspondence of one’s judgments with the way things are, results from the cultivation and practice of authentic subjectivity.⁵¹ This is true in every distinct field of human inquiry. We are successful as human knowers when we are attentive in our experiencing; intelligent in our questioning, conceptualizing, and imagining; rational in our judging; and responsible in our deciding.⁵² Lonergan’s phenomenological explanation of the invariant structure of human cognition is an account of the bedrock of human knowledge. It helpfully articulates the very means through which all advances in understanding and judgment are possible.⁵³ Lonergan’s achievement embraces the legitimate emphases on the linguistic nestedness, historicity, and fallibility of human knowing and yet rightly shows how the relativity and subjectivity of human knowledge does not entail a vicious relativism or subjectivism.⁵⁴ The present project can be fruitfully understood as an attempt to think through the implications of Lonergan’s axiom with reference to the nature and purpose of Christian Scripture.

Readers who are familiar with Lonergan’s work will likely more easily get the import of what I am trying to do here and elsewhere. To those who are not, I must offer an apology, in both senses of the word, for my dependence upon and use of Lonergan. Lonergan is not without his critics.⁵⁵ His work is admittedly prohibitively dense and idiosyncratic. His later work, especially Method in Theology, is extremely terse.⁵⁶ It also bears witness to Lonergan’s own intellectual development from the beginning to the end of his career.⁵⁷ His mind was a mind in motion and his manner of expression moved from what could be considered a scholastic idiom to an existential idiom.

Lonergan himself admits the difficulty of his work. In Method in Theology he suggests that readers will likely not be able to understand Method unless they have already wrestled their way through Insight.⁵⁸ The present systematic theology of Christian Scripture builds not just on Lonergan’s achievements in both of those works, but on the work of a number of others who have appropriated and extended it, including Ben F. Meyer, Seán McEvenue, David B. Burrell, David Tracy, Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert M. Doran.⁵⁹ As I proceed I define key terms and relate positions developed by Lonergan and his students to other strands of theological reflection. The heuristics for understanding the human subject, the structure of history, and the relationship between grace and human action that Lonergan and some of his students have provided have proven extremely useful for many later theologians. I have found them indispensable. I cannot promise that my readers will share this judgment but ask that they read my own work with charity. One of the great merits of Lonergan’s work was the generosity with which he engaged the work of other theologians, philosophers, and scholars. He also insisted that theology was necessarily a collaborative effort.⁶⁰ While I have utilized Lonergan’s methodological work to structure this book, I draw on the work of many other exegetes, theologians, philosophers, and historians in what follows. Henri de Lubac, in particular, serves as another major influence.

With Lonergan I understand the task of systematic theology not as the pursuit of an understanding of past documents or theologians but instead as the pursuit of an understanding of the doctrinal judgments presently held by theologians and their communities at the levels of their own times. The task of Christian systematic theology does, however, necessarily depend upon a critical appropriation of the authentic achievements in understanding and judgment of past Christian communities.⁶¹ What, then, are these achievements? With regard to the present project I must ask the question, What are the constitutive, and so necessary, Christian doctrinal judgments about the nature and purpose of Christian Scripture itself, and where can one go to find these judgments?

While modern theological historical scholarship has frequently emphasized the distance between modern and premodern forms of thought, a current in twentieth-century Roman Catholic thought centered in France and known ironically as the Nouvelle théologie was characterized by its quest for a critical recovery of the genius of the Christian tradition in the past.⁶² The theologians associated with this movement sought a ressourcement of Christian thought in its intensity and fecundity in the early centuries of its existence.⁶³ The present renewal of interest in premodern use and interpretation of Scripture that has greatly enhanced contemporary discussions of the theology of Scripture has the work of the theologians of the Nouvelle théologie as its clearest major influence. Henri Cardinal de Lubac, another giant of twentieth-century theology, has had a particularly important role in retrieving the achievements of premodern Christian thought on the nature and purposes of Christian Scripture.⁶⁴

As I have noted elsewhere, de Lubac wrote more on the history and theology of the interpretation of Scripture than on any other theological topic.⁶⁵ He was convinced that ancient Christian exegesis could serve as a resource for helping the Christians of his day understand and act in a Christian manner within the existing social, political, and spiritual circumstances.⁶⁶ In the years that have elapsed since de Lubac’s pioneering work, a number of extremely useful studies have been published that examine and expound de Lubac’s works on the history of Christian scriptural exegesis.⁶⁷ In the present work, I depend upon de Lubac’s insights, both directly and indirectly, to identify and explain some of the key constitutive Christian doctrines concerning the nature and purpose of Christian Scripture. Such doctrines are the starting point for systematic theological reflection on the nature and purpose of Scripture.⁶⁸

In his memoirs de Lubac declares that he had no disdain for systematics; he saw his own purpose, however, as the recovery of the vitality of the Christian tradition for the edification of the church of his day.⁶⁹ It is my contention that de Lubac does recover vital developments in the Christian tradition on the nature and purpose of Scripture that have relevance for contemporary theological reflection on Scripture. Contemporary systematic theology must build on the genuine achievements of past reflection.⁷⁰ De Lubac’s major works on traditional Christian understandings of the nature and purpose of Scripture provide tremendous resources for contemporary theological reflection. Beyond depending upon de Lubac’s achievements, however, I intend to build upon his work in new ways. I also consider and incorporate questions and data to which de Lubac did not, and could not, have had access. My debt to de Lubac’s recovery of traditional Christian reflection on the doctrines of the inspiration of Scripture and the relationship between the written word of Scripture and the living Word, Jesus Christ, in particular, will be clear in what follows.

Despite my obvious dependence on the work of both de Lubac and Lonergan, my primary intention is not to offer an interpretation of the work of either figure but to responsibly build on their achievements to offer a systematic theology of Christian Scripture for contemporary Christian believers.⁷¹ The exigency of responsibility requires theologians to distinguish our efforts to understand and articulate past positions from our efforts to speak and write in direct discourse about the God with whom we have to do (Heb 4.13) today. We must also measure up to what we can learn about Scripture itself from recent historical discoveries and the achievements in understanding of each of the major approaches to Scripture listed above. The present work is my attempt to articulate a systematic theology of the nature and purpose of Christian Scripture at the level of our own time that addresses both exigencies.⁷² Whatever advances, if any, the present account makes no doubt depend upon previous achievements. And those advances will themselves instigate further questions and insights that would take subsequent readers beyond the horizons limned in what follows. Whatever mistakes the present account contains, I hope, will invite readers to overturn said errors and so help to advance Christian understandings of the nature of Scripture, its meaning, and its use by providing a negative example. I trust that attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible, and loving readers will propose advances and reversals where needed.

THE APPROACH OF THE PROJECT

The systematic intention of the present work is shared with Telford Work’s excellent monograph on the nature and interpretation of Scripture, Living and Active: Scripture in the Economy of Salvation.⁷³ Living and Active, as Work states, develops a fully Trinitarian account of Scripture, establishing and exploring its divine and human character and its salvific purpose in its Church setting and beyond.⁷⁴ Work calls his account a systematic bibliology, but he never precisely defines what he means by systematic. He does note that such an account must relate Scripture to the various loci of systematic theology.⁷⁵ While I think that Work achieves a penetrating and relatively comprehensive account of the nature and purpose of Scripture, the structure and contents of Living and Active differ in significant ways from what follows.⁷⁶ The present work adopts a specific notion of systematic theology, and that notion provides the rationale for the work’s organization.

Systematic theology is arguably in need of defense at the present time.⁷⁷ For many contemporary scholars, theologians, and philosophers interested in Christian thought in the past and the present, to even attempt a systematic theology is a mistake.⁷⁸ For some, system and systematics are necessarily violent; systematics trades in explanations, and explanations are thought to be colonizing and totalizing and are to be avoided at all costs. Any system, hypothetical postmodern interlocutors might argue, violently imposes an artificial and inadequate conceptual straightjacket on the particularities of history and the particularities characteristic of specific groups and persons.⁷⁹ Wittgensteinians, emphasizing the linguisticality of all human understanding and the natural history of human language use, would perhaps suggest that we restrict ourselves to theological description instead of aspiring to theological explanation.⁸⁰ In response to Hegel’s voracious and all-consuming dialectic, subsequent continental philosophies have urged that contemporary scholars or philosophers eschew system in favor of highlighting and reveling in the difference and particularity of histories, communities, cultures, and religious traditions.⁸¹

Systematic theology does not necessarily, by its very nature, run roughshod over the particularities of histories, languages, cultures, and peoples. Systematic theologians have been guilty of such faults in the past and may even be prone to such irresponsibility in the future, but their fault does not lie in having adopted a methodology that necessarily leads to domination and colonization. To modify a phrase from Stephen Fowl, methodologies do not have ideologies.⁸² It is possible to understand systematic theology not as the pursuit of a totalizing discourse but instead, with Lonergan, as the effort to understand and articulate the intelligibility of the mysteries of Christian faith at the level of the systematic theologian’s own time.⁸³ For Lonergan, the systematic theologian affirms and appropriates the mysteries of Christian faith in doctrinal judgments that she has received within her Christian community from antecedent Christian tradition.⁸⁴ The systematic theologian does not remain content with mere repetition of those doctrines or with mere description of those doctrines; she pursues an explanation of the mysteries identified by such doctrines. Such an explanation, however, is and must remain imperfect, analogical, obscure, and gradually developing.⁸⁵ The systematic theologian holds that it is nevertheless still highly fruitful to pursue such an explanatory understanding of the true judgments about reality expressed in the doctrines of Christian faith.⁸⁶ Instead of merely describing how realities appear to her, she seeks to understand and express the intelligible, objective interrelationships of realities to one another.

I should note that I use the terms understanding and judgment, both here and elsewhere, in a technical sense. Because of the structural exigencies of systematic theology, which I explain below, I do not provide explicit definitions of those terms until chapter 4. I hope the reasons for this postponement will be clear in what follows, but I owe potentially perplexed readers at least a brief rationale for doing so. In an important sense, the theological and philosophical anthropology of chapter 4 is foundational for the whole work.⁸⁷ As a systematic theology of Christian Scripture, this work provides an understanding of the judgments of Christian doctrine. As thoughtful and informed readers will recognize, however, there is no theological or philosophical consensus on what these understandings and judgments actually are. The present project presupposes and builds upon a certain understanding of understanding itself and a certain understanding of judgments themselves.⁸⁸ In systematic theology, following Lonergan, however, the theologian is not preeminently preoccupied with the dialectical work of sorting out the coherence or truth of competing epistemologies. That is important work, but it deserves its own treatment, and others have done such work elsewhere. I leave it aside in the present project. I am not preoccupied with those foundational and dialectical concerns in a direct way, but this project does presuppose their fruit.

Near the end of his chapter on systematics in Method in Theology, Lonergan addresses a number of accusations made against systematic theology. Detractors have argued that it is speculative, irreligious, fruitless, elitist, [and] irrelevant.⁸⁹ To the first charge, Lonergan argues that systematics can and has been speculative, but what he advocates "is really quite a homely affair. It aims at understanding the truths of faith, a Glaubensverständnis. The truths envisaged are church confessions."⁹⁰ My present approach attempts to offer an understanding of Scripture in its relationship to the foundational confessions of the Christian community, particularly the Nicene Creed.⁹¹ Lonergan takes the utmost care to ward off the charge that systematics is irreligious. His account of systematics, in fact, presupposes that the theologian will have personally experienced religious conversion and that such conversion will ground her theological work.⁹² And, he writes:

when conversion is the basis of the whole theology, when religious conversion is the event that gives the name, God, its primary and fundamental meaning, when systematic theology does not believe it can exhaust or even do justice to that meaning, not a little has been done to keep systematic theology in harmony with its religious origins and aims.⁹³

Systematics is ultimately concerned with providing an understanding of the transformative religious realities—that is, the Triune God who makes Godself available—experienced by the theologian and her community. It has as its object the intelligibility of the redemptive work of the Triune God in history. To the charge that systematics is fruitless, Lonergan argues that the criteria he gives for dialectic provide a means for pruning fruitless systematic endeavors. He admits that systematics is difficult, but that admission does not constitute a reason for rejecting its legitimacy; like other difficult subjects such as mathematics, science, scholarship, and philosophy, when done well systematic theology produces good fruit.⁹⁴ The difficulty is worth meeting. Finally, Lonergan argues that systematics is only irrelevant if it does not serve as the basis for communication of the truths understood by the theologian. She cannot effectively communicate these truths, of course, if she has not understood them. Ultimately, systematics is sublated by the greater good of the propagation and dissemination of the good news of the redemptive work of the Triune God in history.

The present work, as noted above, adopts Lonergan’s approach to systematics.⁹⁵ The systematic theologian undertakes the tasks of systematics as one seeking to advance the understanding of the Christian community and through doing so to edify it. As a teacher, she must take the admonition of the author of the epistle of James to heart: Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes (3.1–2a). The systematic theologian is ultimately responsible for the positions she takes. She should certainly not undertake systematics lightly or thoughtlessly. Systematics is not without its risks.

As I noted above, the systematic theologian can and must draw from the riches of Christian tradition in seeking to articulate the intelligibility of the doctrinal beliefs of Christian faith within her present situation.⁹⁶ She is accountable to that tradition. Her responsibility to Christian tradition requires that she attend carefully to the judgments and understandings she encounters in the tradition. In faith, however, she seeks to understand not past figures and texts but instead the work of the Triune God itself, past, present, and future. She seeks to understand the work of the Triune God in her own time and the place of humanity in that work; in faith she trusts that the Triune God is continually acting, and she affirms that the people called by the Triune God have as much responsibility as ever to recognize and participate in that work.

While Lonergan uncontroversially argued that historical investigation of the Christian tradition was essential for contemporary theological reflection, he simultaneously insisted that the dictates of human authenticity required Christians to give an account of the intelligibility of their faith at the level of their own time as well. They cannot merely parrot sources. Such sources have their integrity and intelligibility in their own times and places. The process of identifying, understanding, and determining the truths mediated by such sources has its own value and norms. But that work, while essential, is not all that is needed. In Method in Theology Lonergan differentiates the tasks of historical retrieval from the tasks of appropriation, understanding, and proclamation of the faith at the level of one’s own time. By adverting to the subjective involvement that theological sources reflect—their authors, redactors, and preservers are, after all, experiencers, understanders, judgers, and deciders acting in history—and to the subjective involvement inescapably constitutive of the investigation of premodern sources required of contemporary theologians, Lonergan is able to articulate a basis for continuity between past articulations of Christian faith and present reflection on its meaning.

Contemporary believers share the same subjective constitution with premodern believers.⁹⁷ Our objects of inquiry, namely, the Triune God in God’s redemptive action and the writings that witness to that action, are also the same. The mysteries that the Triune God has revealed once and for all may be better understood, but forward movement in human understanding of these mysteries will still have the same mysteries of the work of the Triune God in history as its objects whether that understanding takes place in the first or the twenty-first century. Lonergan’s articulation of the normative structures of human cognition and understanding throughout history provides a means for identifying and affirming actual historical developments within Christian theological reflection that should be retrieved, appropriated, and, if necessary, reframed in contemporary theological reflection.⁹⁸

This work’s understanding of systematics must be located in its context in Lonergan’s broader account of the nature of theological method at the level of our time. For him, contemporary Christian theology is a communal enterprise in which a theologian mediates the truth of her religious faith to her culture.⁹⁹ Lonergan differentiates the process of this mediation into eight different and interrelated functions, operations, or activities, which he labels functional specialties.¹⁰⁰ As Lonergan stated shortly before Method in Theology was published, The eight functional specialties are a set of self-regulative, ongoing, interdependent processes. They’re not stages such that you do one and then you do the next. Rather you have different people at all eight and interacting. And the interaction is not logical. It’s attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible, and religious.¹⁰¹

Systematics or systematic theology is just one of the eight functional specialties. It cannot be undertaken apart from the others. It is intimately related