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‘The Word of God taking up space’: Assessing the christological analogy for scripture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 May 2024
Abstract
This essay provides an assessment of the christological analogy for scripture, particularly for its usefulness in aid of a theological ontology of scripture. This analogy implies that scripture has something like ‘two natures’ – human and divine – like Jesus Christ has two natures. I argue that assessment of the analogy has been impaired by a lack of clarity in its application. On the one hand, the ambiguity relates to a tendency to apply the analogy for the (modernist) purposes of securing epistemic authority. On the other hand, I show that there are in fact three distinct forms of the analogy, each implying different things about the ‘twoness’ of scripture as well as its unity. After outlining the three forms of the analogy, I critically assess the unity they ascribe to scripture by means of the analogy.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 Jenson, Robert W., ‘A Space for God’, in Mary, in Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (eds), Mother of God (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), p. 55Google Scholar.
2 A key thesis of Ian McFarland's ‘Chalcedonianism without reserve’ is that when Jesus is seen, nothing other than human flesh is seen (see his The Word Made Flesh: A Theology of the Incarnation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2019), p. 6). But this does not deny that the person whose human flesh we see is the Second Person of the Trinity. So, riffing on the Johannine account of Jesus’ resurrection (John 12:32), Mike Higton says, ‘the love of God always exceeds its embodiment in any one location, and calls forth other embodiments’, such that ‘Jesus embodies the love of God perfectly not by containing it in one location, but in a life that cannot be contained. Jesus rises from the dead, and draws all people to himself.’ Higton, Mike, The Life of Christian Doctrine (New York: T&T Clark, 2020), pp. 171, 171n3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics [hereafter CD] I/2, eds Geoffrey W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), pp. 473–537Google Scholar.
4 East, Brad, The Doctrine of Scripture (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2021), p. 78Google Scholar.
5 For example, Castelo, Daniel and Wall, Robert W., The Marks of Scripture: Rethinking the Nature of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019), pp. 22–33Google Scholar; East, The Doctrine of Scripture, pp. 78–83; Sparks, Kenton L., Sacred Word, Broken Word: Biblical Authority and the Dark Side of Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2012), pp. 23–9Google Scholar; and Work, Telford, Living and Active: Scripture in the Economy of Salvation (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 15–27Google Scholar.
6 Sarisky, Darren, Reading the Bible Theologically (Cambridge: CUP, 2019), pp. 26, 26n49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Cf. Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Curley, Edwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994)Google Scholar, chs. 33, 35 and 36; Spinoza, Benedict de, Theological-Political Treatise, ed. Israel, Jonathan, trans. Silverthorne, Michael and Israel, Jonathan (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), chs. 1–2, 12 and 15Google Scholar. For some philosophical and historical commentary, see Nadler, Steven, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 104–42Google Scholar.
8 Christopher Ben Simpson also argues that modern articulations of inerrancy – like those expressed by the fundamentalist movement – are responses to a perceived epistemic crisis in a secular age; see his Modern Christian Theology, 2nd edn (New York: T&T Clark, 2020), pp. 297–300.
9 For instance, Wayne Grudem relies on an ontological identification of the words of the Bible with God's own utterance: ‘Since the words of the Bible are God's words, and since God cannot lie or speak falsely, it is correct to conclude that there is no untruthfulness or error in any part of the words of Scripture’ (Systematic Theology, 2nd edn [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2020], p. 73). Grudem's conclusion depends on the direct attribution of the words of the Bible to God in the premise. Grudem has adopted, at least implicitly, a form of christological analogy from The International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, ‘The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy’ (Dallas Theological Seminary Library, 1978), https://library.dts.edu/Pages/TL/Special/ICBI_1.pdf. For a critical assessment of ‘determinate’ accounts of meaning, see Stephen E. Fowl, Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 33–40.
10 On the ‘epistemizing’ of scripture, see Abraham, William J., Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology: From the Fathers to Feminism (New York: Clarendon, 1998), pp. 1–21Google Scholar. On the ecclesial context of reading, see the brief dialogue in Fowl, Stephen E., Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2009), pp. 2–5Google Scholar; and Work, Living and Active, pp. 19–27 and passim. In the latter two cases, the broader ends of theological reading press against an inerrantist construal of biblical authority, especially when the latter presumes a fixed, determinative ‘meaning’ in scripture to which readers are to submit.
11 Cf. Anna Carter Florence, Rehearshing Scripture: Discovering God's Word in Community (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2018).
12 Barth, CD I/2, pp. 520, 526.
13 Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), pp. 5–6.
14 See Sarisky, Reading the Bible Theologically, pp. 24–6.
15 Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).
16 See Ian A. McFarland, From Nothing: A Theology of Creation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2014); Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge: CUP, 2010); and Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018).
17 I use ‘compatibility’ here in partial debt to Katherine Sonderegger, The Doctrine of God, vol. 1 of Systematic Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2015), although I have reservations about her non-christological articulation of God's compatibility.
18 Barth, CD I/2, pp. 457–537.
19 Ibid., pp. 457–72, 541.
20 Cf. John Webster, Barth (New York: Continuum, 2000), p. 55.
21 This can be seen in part in the way that Barth articulates the singular ‘subject’ of scripture in its freedom and distinctiveness over-against other subjects; cf. Barth, CD I/2, pp. 673–85; also Robert W. Jenson, Canon and Creed (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010), pp. 81–2.
22 Barth, CD I/2, p. 500 (emphasis added).
23 For the classic presentation of Barth's ‘actualism’, see Bruce L. McCormack, ‘Grace and Being: The Role of God's Gracious Election in Karl Barth's Theological Ontology’, in John Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), pp. 92–110. For an alternative account, but which (as far as I can tell) still fits with the summary presentation given here, see George Hunsinger, Reading Barth with Charity: A Hermeneutical Proposal (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), pp. 133–5, 178–80.
24 In present-day usage, the word ‘literal’ seems to imply both univocity of meaning and strict facticity (usually vaguely identified by opposition to what is ‘fictional’ or ‘poetic’). By contrast, patristic and medieval exegetes worked with a more flexible notion of the literal as ‘according to the letter’ and focused on how ‘the letter’ conveys deeds and events (littera gesta docet). The literal sense in premodern usage, then, could equally be called the ‘overt’ or ‘surface’ sense. This meaning of ‘literal’ is not defined by contrast with fiction or poetry, both of which can also be read ‘literally’ (viz., read ‘as the letters go’, in part for their overt display of deeds and events). Or, to put it in the language of speech-act theory: for premodern exegesis, the literal sense can apply to any illocutionary force as discernible at the locutionary level; in modern usage, the literal sense is granted for only some kinds of illocutionary force (e.g. J. L. Austin's ‘constative’). The speech-act analogy shows that, for premodern exegesis, spiritual senses are often at the level of perlocutionary force, especially insofar as that exceeds the illocutionary (i.e. the perlocutionary force is not reducible to authorial intent). Because modern interpreters are likely to think of ‘literal’ as one kind of illocutionary force, they are likely to oppose the literal to the spiritual, because the latter is understood as a different kind of illocutionary force rather than ways the perlocutionary force might exceed the illocutionary.
25 See Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. Marc Sebanc, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 15–74.
26 Origen, Homilies on Leviticus 1–16, trans. Gary Wayne Barkley (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1990), Homily 1.29.
27 Frances Young, Virtuoso Theology: The Bible and Interpretation (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 1993), pp. 155, 158–9.
28 See Francis Watson, ‘The Bible’, in John Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), pp. 59–61.
29 John Webster, Word and Church: Essays in Church Dogmatics (New York: T&T Clark, 2001), p. 31 (emphasis added).
30 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ‘Scripture and Tradition’, in Kevin J. Vanhoozer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), p. 165 (emphasis added).
31 ‘Objects which in and of themselves serve only and precisely to veil God (for they are, in themselves, not God) are taken up into a relationship with God where their natural capacities are wholly transcended and where they are rendered transparent with respect to God.’ Trevor Hart, ‘Revelation’, in John Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), p. 46.
32 For more thorough development of this concern, see Brad East, The Church's Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2022), pp. 258–62.
33 Barth, CD I/2, p. 530: ‘we cannot regard the presence of God's Word in the Bible as an attribute inhering once for all in this book as such … But in this presence [of the book as such] something takes place in and with the book, for which the book as such does indeed give the possibility, but the reality of which cannot be anticipated or replaced by the existence of the book. A free divine decision is made. It then comes about that the Bible, the Bible in concreto, … is taken and used as an instrument in the hand of God’.
34 See again, Hart, ‘Revelation’.
35 It could also be called a ‘hermeneutical union’, since it involves a christomorphic interpretation of reality.
36 See Boersma, Hans, Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), pp. 12, 189Google Scholar.
37 For Origen, scripture's demand for sacrifice from God's people could now be read as demanding a different kind of sacrifice than the literal sense seems to require. See his Homilies on Leviticus 1–16, Homily 1.29; see also Williams, Rowan, On Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 30–1Google Scholar.
38 See Hollon, Bryan C., Everything is Sacred: Spiritual Exegesis in the Political Theology of Henri de Lubac (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2008)Google Scholar, p. 4n4, who suggests that even de Lubac did not advocate a simple ‘return to the days of pre-critical exegesis’. One possible reconfiguration of spiritual exegesis is ‘theodramatic’ exegesis, in von Balthasar's sense. See for instance, Matthew W. Bates’ treatment of prosopological exegesis as ‘theodramatic’ in his The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament (Oxford: OUP, 2015), pp. 5, 32–6, 85–114, 190–202.
39 We might frame this in terms of double agency, so that human authors are material, efficient and formal causes of scripture (the agents ‘behind the speech’) and the Son is the final cause (the agent ‘ahead of the speech’). The union would be non-competitive in this framework, because the ‘agencies’ of human authors and the divine author would be operative at different ontological levels. For some ways of articulating such double agency in scripture, see Wolterstorff, Nicholas, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge: CUP, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
40 Hollon, Everything is Sacred, p. 124, summarising Rowan Williams.
41 Williams, On Christian Theology, pp. 30–1.
42 An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Wesleyan Theological Society in March 2022. I am thankful for the discussion in that session, which helped me to clarify the argument and aims of the essay; special thanks to Mark Gorman, Justus Hunter, Jerome Van Kuiken, and Robert Wall. Additionally, my argument benefited greatly from conversations with Scott Dermer and Renee Dutter Miller.