Browsing by Subject "Biblical Interpretation"

This dissertation lays the groundwork for a reevaluation of early Protestant understandings of salvation in the sixteenth century by tracing the emergence of the confessional formulation of the doctrine of justification by faith from the perspective of the history of biblical interpretation. In the Introduction, the author argues that the diversity of first-generation evangelical and Protestant teaching on justification has been widely underestimated. Through a close comparison of first- and second-generation confessional statements in the Reformation period, the author seeks to establish that consensus on this issue developed slowly over the course over a period of roughly thirty years, from the adoption of a common rhetoric of dissent aimed at critiquing the regnant Catholic orthopraxy of salvation in the 1520's and 1530's, to the emergence of a common theological culture in the 1540's and beyond. With the emergence of this new theological culture, an increasingly precise set of definitions were employed, not only to explicate the new Protestant gospel more fully, but also to highlight areas of divergence with traditional Catholic teaching.

With this groundwork in place, the author then examines the development of several key concepts in the emergence of the confessional doctrine of justification through the lens of biblical interpretation. Focusing on two highly contested chapters in Paul's epistle to the Romans, the author demonstrates that early evangelical and Protestant biblical exegesis varied widely in its aims, motivations, and in its appropriation of patristic and medieval interpretations. Chapter 1 consists of a survey of pre-Reformation exegesis of the first half of Rom 2, and the author demonstrates that this text had traditionally been interpreted as pointing to an eschatological final judgment in which the Christian would be declared righteous (i.e., "justified") in accord with, but not directly on the basis of, a life of good deeds. In Chapter 2, the author demonstrates that early evangelical exegetes broke away from this consensus, but did so slowly. Several early Protestant interpreters continued, throughout the 1520's and 1530's, to view this text within a traditional frame of interpretation supplied by Origen and Augustine, and only with Philipp Melanchthon's development of a rhetorical-critical approach to the text were Protestants able to overcome the traditional reading and so neutralize the first half of Rom 2 as a barrier to the emerging doctrine of justification by faith alone.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 all deal with the reception history of what is arguably the central text in the Reformation debates concerning justification by faith, Rom 3. Chapter 3 turns once more to patristic and medieval interpretation, and here it is argued that that two major strands of interpretation dominated pre-Reformation exegesis. A "minority view" contrasted justification with works of the ceremonial law, arguing that Paul's assertion of justification "apart from works of the law" was aimed at highlighting the insufficiency of the Jewish ceremonial law in contrast with the sacraments of the Catholic church. In contrast with this view, the "majority view" (arising again from Origen and Augustine) argued that the contrast was properly viewed as one between justification and works of the moral law, thus throwing into sharp relief the problem of justification in relation to good works. This tradition generally followed Augustine in drawing a contrast between works of the law performed prior to, and following upon, the initiation of justification as a life-long process of transformation by grace, but at the same time insisted that this process ultimately issued in the believer fulfilling the demands of the moral law. In Chapter 4, I turn to Luther's early exegesis of Rom 3, as seen in his lectures from 1515. In contrast with Luther's own description of his "Reformation breakthrough" later in life, I argue that Luther did not arrive at his new understanding of justification in a flash of inspiration inspired by Augustine; rather, his early treatment of Romans is unimpeachably Catholic and unmistakably Augustinian, although there are indications even in this early work that Luther is not entirely satisfied with Augustine's view. In Chapter 5, I consider the ways in which Luther's followers develop his critique of the Augustinian reading of justification in the first generation of the Reformation. Throughout this period, it was unclear whether Protestant exegesis of Paul would resolve itself into a repristinization of patristic theology, inspired in large part by Augustine, or whether it would develop into something genuinely new. The key turning point, I argue, came in the early 1530's with Melanchthon's rejection of Augustine's transformative model of justification, and his adoption in its place of a strictly forensic construal of Paul's key terms. Many of Melanchthon's fellow reformers continued to operate within an Augustinian framework, however as Melanchthon's terms passed into wider acceptance in Protestant exegesis, it became increasingly apparent that the Protestant reading of Paul could not ultimately be reconciled with patristic accounts of justification.

In this dissertation I offer a constructive account of the church’s role in the process of reading and understanding Scripture. This task has become especially relevant due to the recent popularity of “ecclesial hermeneutics.” In response to intellectual trends that sought, explicitly or implicitly, to remove Scripture from the sphere church and relocate it within a supposedly more hermeneutically salubrious environment (e.g., the academy), many ecclesial readers have endeavored to return Scripture to its proper home. As Bonhoeffer claimed in 1933, presaging contemporary trends, Scripture is “the book of the church” and must be “interpreted as such.” Drawing from various theological and philosophical developments that emerged during the latter half of the 20th century, Christian interpreters have felt emboldened to follow Bonhoeffer’s lead, not only tolerating but prioritizing and accentuating the particularity of their ecclesial vantage point and the unique form of thinking constituted by its language, traditions, and practices.

This dissertation enters the debate at just this point. Ecclesiology has obviously carried great weight in recent conversations about biblical interpretation, but rarely has ecclesiology itself become a direct object of theological focus within them. Ecclesial hermeneutics has remained ecclesially ambiguous. In this dissertation, therefore, I ask an ecclesiological question as a means of answering a hermeneutical one. I set out deliberately to consider what it means to read in, as, and for the church. What “church” is presupposed in theological interpretation? What practices come embedded within it? And how does this shape the ends of faithful interpretation? In short, how, precisely, does the church function as a hermeneutical space?

Beyond merely describing what others have offered, I put forward a constructive vision. I propose to understand the church as a confluence of four dynamics, each of which is marked by a particular relationship. Together, these four dynamics constitute the church as a hermeneutical space. In short, the church exists (1) in relationship to the risen Christ, (2) in relationship to its own historical-institutional past, (3) in relationship to a particular place and the concrete bodies gathered there, and (4) in relationship to the world. Each of this dissertation’s four parts focuses on one of these dimensions, showing how its particular aspects carry hermeneutical significance. Each part consists of two chapters. In these two chapters I first focus on the hermeneutical implications of a given dimension and then listen to Bonhoeffer as a means of complexifying and deepening this analysis. It thus becomes evident that the coherence of my project owes much to Bonhoeffer, whose voice serves as the keynote that allows me to draw diverse others into conversation.

Listening to Bonhoeffer, I hope to show that these four dimensions cohere to shape the church as one hermeneutical space. This coherence is important, for I argue that recent proposals within ecclesial hermeneutics have accentuated particular dimensions of the church, but have failed to do so comprehensively. In other words, explicitly ecclesial hermeneutics commonly display onesided tendencies by relying on a truncated account of the church in which only one dimension of ecclesiology carries hermeneutical significance. Beyond being theoretically deficient, this tendency exerts a distortive effect at the level of practice. What is needed, then, is a more complex ecclesiological imagination, the fruit of which will be a more complete and theologically robust account of what it means to read in, as, and for the church.

While this dissertation’s animating concerns are deeply theological, they are altogether practical. A properly theological account of hermeneutical faithfulness is impossible without attention to the actual activities involved in the reading process. Bonhoeffer understood this well, and he proves himself to be a pastoral theologian by the facility with which he moves from the theoretical to the practical realm. Following Bonhoeffer’s example, I hope to make a constructive claim not only about a theology of Scripture or scriptural hermeneutics but about the practices and habits that sustain faithful reading.

While my heavily Christological focus (Part One) may seem to perpetuate the same onesidedness I seek to correct, I hope to show that when properly construed, the Christological dimension of the church is capacious enough to include the others. By jointly imagining the church’s historical-institutional past (Part Two), life together (Part Three), and missionary relationship to the world (Part Four) in terms of Jesus’ ongoing presence and particularity, we will find the resources necessary to imagine the ecclesiology that serves as a space for faithful reading. What ultimately emerges from this account of Christ and the fourfold account of the church that corresponds to him is a hermeneutic of discipleship, a way of thinking vis-à-vis Scripture that takes place in the wake of Christ’s ongoing action and ultimately aims at participation in it.

This dissertation seeks to disclose the reconciling power of Christian preaching, and examine the homiletical task through the lens of Jesus' command to "love your enemies." Because the heart of Christian preaching lies in the Word of God revealed as the Prince of Peace, Gospel proclamation and reconciliation are perpetually intertwined. God's message of reconciliation has irrupted in history through a Son who not only forbids the killing of enemies, but also commands his followers to love them. Yet, in the wake of history's bloodiest century, Christians continue to sanction divisive, violent responses to those considered strangers and enemies--even those who also claim the name "Christian." The time is ripe for an analysis of the proclaimed Word of God as a potent catalyst for reconciliation.

The church needs a theology of preaching that offers an alternative to the world's language about enemies. My contention is that a theological investigation of enemy-language will have a positive impact on the theory and practice of Christian preaching, while unearthing new possibilities for churches and other faith communities beset by seemingly insurmountable conflict. I challenge presumptions about who our enemies truly are through descriptions of the rhetorical, theological, and homiletical elements of gospel proclamation in communities torn by conflict. What I finally hope to show is that because God has entrusted the church with the message of reconciliation, preaching is then an inherently reconciling practice, unintelligible apart from its nature as an address to God's former enemies. Reconciling sermons address and sustain churches with cruciform speech, or gospel-shaped language redeemed by God's Spirit, through which disciples are summoned to recognize and embody the forgiveness of the crucified yet risen Jesus, and equipped to exemplify, as ambassadors of reconciliation, the radical consequences of Christ's lordship.

Methodologically, the dissertation pursues a theological analysis of preaching based on the relationship between the God of Jesus Christ and humankind. This reconciliation encompasses all things, past, present, and future. Such an assertion proceeds from a paradox: the world rejects Christ, and yet God has reconciled the world through Jesus on the cross (2 Cor. 5:18). Consequently, as Richard Lischer has said, reconciliation is the "animating principle" of preaching. God's reconciling action in Christ is the essential, constitutive homiletical thrust. Thus, sermonic language must align itself with God's reconciling action in Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.

The dissertation advances these claims through a theoretical analysis of the "enemy" as it occurs in theological discourse, biblical interpretation, homiletical rhetoric, and constructive theologies of preaching and reconciliation, as well as through theological investigations of the preaching of Will Campbell, and sermons directly related to The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Overall, the dissertation combines the traditional disciplines of homiletics, theology, biblical interpretation, and rhetoric with contextualized field studies of "reconciling sermons." The ultimate hope of this work is to invite the field of homiletics and the church it serves toward a more comprehensive acknowledgement of the crucial, reciprocal relationship between preaching, reconciliation, and peacemaking.

The book of Leviticus literarily portrays an encounter between YHWH and Israel that is mediated through discourse. In keeping with the priestly creation account, the book of Leviticus shows the divine discourse at Sinai to be a world- and people-shaping constitutive force: new forms of life are generated that take shape in the daily rhythms of Israel’s cultic and communal life in the wilderness. Although the divine instructions are not directly addressed to the twenty-first century reader, an unconventional use of literary techniques destabilizes a clear sense of grammatical tense or narrative time so that the reader is included in the discourse mediated through the text. This suggests the intriguing notion that the experience of reading Leviticus, maximally understood as the various stages of reading and study that are involved in the process of interpretation, may be analogous to Israel’s experience of encountering the divine discourse at Sinai. This study thus examines the notion of discourse as a way to open up a new understanding of the kind of text that Leviticus is and how it may communicate in the text-reader relationship.

Although recent scholarship has seen a resurgence of interest in Leviticus, the book’s basic character as discourse has largely been overlooked. Scholarly treatments have overwhelmingly focused on what Leviticus may have “said” in its historical context rather than what it may “say” in the contemporary discourse between text and reader. In conversation with Paul Ricoeur and George Steiner, this study argues that the literary presentation of Leviticus asks us to approach the text as a potential conversation partner. It articulates a notion of interpretation as a process of coming to recognize the life-possibilities on offer in the vision of life that a text portrays. This construal of the task and aim of interpretation enables the discourse of Leviticus to generate new ways of thinking and being for contemporary reading communities, as demonstrated through three exegetical probes that seek to connect the function of speech in the priestly writers’ portrayal of life in the wilderness community to the ways that speech is enacted in contemporary discourse. The study concludes that the vision of life that the priestly writers project in the book of Leviticus opens up a number of promising directions of thought that can generate new life-possibilities in and for contemporary reading communities.

The book of Leviticus literarily portrays an encounter between YHWH and Israel that is mediated through discourse. In keeping with the priestly creation account, the book of Leviticus shows the divine discourse at Sinai to be a world- and people-shaping constitutive force: new forms of life are generated that take shape in the daily rhythms of Israel’s cultic and communal life in the wilderness. Although the divine instructions are not directly addressed to the twenty-first century reader, an unconventional use of literary techniques destabilizes a clear sense of grammatical tense or narrative time so that the reader is included in the discourse mediated through the text. This suggests the intriguing notion that the experience of reading Leviticus, maximally understood as the various stages of reading and study that are involved in the process of interpretation, may be analogous to Israel’s experience of encountering the divine discourse at Sinai. This study thus examines the notion of discourse as a way to open up a new understanding of the kind of text that Leviticus is and how it may communicate in the text-reader relationship.

Although recent scholarship has seen a resurgence of interest in Leviticus, the book’s basic character as discourse has largely been overlooked. Scholarly treatments have overwhelmingly focused on what Leviticus may have “said” in its historical context rather than what it may “say” in the contemporary discourse between text and reader. In conversation with Paul Ricoeur and George Steiner, this study argues that the literary presentation of Leviticus asks us to approach the text as a potential conversation partner. It articulates a notion of interpretation as a process of coming to recognize the life-possibilities on offer in the vision of life that a text portrays. This construal of the task and aim of interpretation enables the discourse of Leviticus to generate new ways of thinking and being for contemporary reading communities, as demonstrated through three exegetical probes that seek to connect the function of speech in the priestly writers’ portrayal of life in the wilderness community to the ways that speech is enacted in contemporary discourse. The study concludes that the vision of life that the priestly writers project in the book of Leviticus opens up a number of promising directions of thought that can generate new life-possibilities in and for contemporary reading communities.

This dissertation examines Theodore Beza’s reading of four Old Testament poetic books – the Psalms, Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs – to demonstrate his contribution in the history of biblical interpretation. While previous scholarship has largely focused on Beza’s contributions to the New Testament, highlighting his role as a text critic, this present study of his works on the Old Testament books sheds light on political and religious dynamics within Beza’s interpretive approach beyond his text critical influences. This study portrays Beza as a pivotal figure in the Reformed faith during the political and religious upheavals of the late sixteenth century, analyzing the ways in which he utilizes biblical exegesis to comfort persecuted churches and cultivate proper piety amongst afflicted believers. In doing so, Beza employs the Old Testament biblical characters – David, Job, and Solomon – as teachers of Reformed doctrines and paragons of Christian piety, particularly in their steadfast patience and unwavering trust in divine providence amidst adversity. His writings on these poetic biblical texts reflect his commitment to promoting a specific theological agenda for the church through the practice of biblical exegesis.

This study explores each of Beza’s interpretations of the four poetic books with special attention to his exegetical method, principal themes, and pastoral applications. In his paraphrases of the Psalms, Beza draws parallels between David’s history (Christ’s history in certain psalms) and sixteenth-century believers, highlighting themes of godly kingdoms and righteous rulers, while also offering practical guidance on applying imprecations for contemporary Christians. In his commentary and paraphrases on Job, Beza focuses on Job’s history and his particular place as a member of the true church, laying the ground for using this biblical figure as a positive example for the afflicted believers of his time. In his paraphrases of Ecclesiastes, Beza conveys lessons on divine providence and the highest good through the lens of Solomon’s experience as a king. Furthermore, in his sermons on the Song of Songs, Beza employs allegorical interpretation to underscore the nature and identity of the true church throughout salvation history, from the Old to the New Testaments, on which he grounds the authority and succession of the Protestant churches over against the false churches of his time.

An analysis of Beza’s approach to these poetic books reveals consistent patterns in his emphasis on literal and historical exegesis, his focus on themes of divine providence and God’s care for God’s people as an overarching theological framework, and his reading for the edification of the persecuted church through the lens of David, Solomon, and Job. Beza’s use and application of his Old Testament readings within his political and religious milieu underscore the important role that biblical interpretation played in promoting his theological program. Consequently, these findings demonstrate Beza’s place as a consolidator of Reformed confessional identity in his exegetical and theological commitments. This study offers an understanding of Beza as an exegete dedicated to reinforcing Reformed exegetical practices, while adeptly applying his interpretations to address the specific political and religious challenges of the late sixteenth century, thereby offering comfort to churches and believers enduring persecution.