The Reluctant Protestant

What follows is an excerpt of a paper I wrote this semester. The paper advocated a sort of post-Augustinian interpretation of Genesis 1. This is a tangent I got off on for a couple of pages (but luckily my prof. liked it). As a short bit of context, Emmanuel (my Seminary) is firmly committed to the biblical critical project. As a student, one may leave without an appreciation for historic and systematic theology, but nobody leaves without a relatively firm grasp on how to be a biblical critic (even those who don’t finish). As my appreciation of systematics has grown I’ve become more and more hostile to biblical criticism since I’m surrounded by it. I’ll go with it to the degree it raises many needed correctives, but its time to move beyond its epistemic short-sightedness. Anyway, here’s the excerpt:

The biblical-critical claim that a text’s semantic horizon is utterly limited by those meanings determined to be socially and historically possible is methodologically inadequate and anachronistic. This presumption is methodologically inadequate because it actively prohibits a text from truly being comprehended. A reading of a text’s total meaning is attempted in light of merely a part of the tradition the text was composed to participate in (the material and social conditions contemporary to the text’s composition). As Brevard Childs and Stanley Hauerwas have noted, all biblical texts were composed in order to look outside their immediate context insofar as they seek to be intelligible to a tradition that is presumed to develop in unexpected ways in the future. Thus, the biblical critical presumption that “original meaning” is totally determined by those conditions contemporary to composition simply cannot do justice to the very raison de etre of every text in the Bible: to participate in a tradition that has not yet ended. In other words, of every text’s “original meaning” it can be said that, originally, the text was not understood to yet be totally meaningful.

This methodologically inadequate presumption, which has always been the inherent guiding principle of the biblical-critical project, is also anachronistic. It is such because the presumption that a text was composed as though its meaning is complete and finally relevant upon composition is precisely the manner in which biblical critics read and write the literature of their own guild. Even articles and shorter monographs that do not presume to exhaust all there is worth knowing about a particular text still imagine to be finally relevant to the discussion totally in terms of a piece’s meaning as intended by the author. They read the Bible, in turn, as if its authors possessed the same expectations. Given that the biblical critical project was not a discursive possibility until the rise of modernity, this transference of its standards of possible meanings renders biblical criticism hopelessly anachronistic.

All this is not to say that because the biblical authors wrote within a tradition they expected to change and progress we are justified in reading “their” texts in light of the progressed tradition. To argue such would be methodologically flawed in the same manner as biblical criticism. Christians justifiably read Scripture in light of the tradition because this tradition, properly understood, is the ultimate arbiter of meaning.

Indeed, could one not argue that as Christians we have never argued that our reading is legitimate insofar as it “fits in” with the readings of the past? Haven’t we been much more bold than this? We have argued, it seems, that the world-view of orthodox Christianity subsumes and perfects all it comes into contact with: discarding what is wrong and completing what is right. The boldness of the Christian claim thus disarms biblical critical insights as not so much a new interpretation of the facts as an objection to the legitimacy of reorienting everything in light of Christ.