When I was Protestant, I held to the primacy of scripture in my theological reasoning, meaning I thought the task of theology was only to faithfully interpret scripture and find its internal unity and story. If we rolled up our sleeves and just dug hard enough using the best historical tools, then we could discover what Christians are supposed to believe. If there were differences among Christians in this scientific enterprise, then it was not the Bible’s doing but Christians of either bad reasoning or bad character (the perspicuity of scripture). In other words, I optimistically held to the ideal of “pure exegesis” over “eisegesis.”
Over time, however, I realized that one’s prior commitments and intuitions on everything from morality to aesthetics would play an inevitable and significant role in one’s interpretation. And so the ideal of “pure exegesis” was nuanced in my thinking, as I recognized the tools of philosophy and even one’s own worldview are necessary to synthesize and interpret scripture. For example, if scripture says something that we find unconscionable or maybe “too Catholic” or “too Protestant”, then we will conveniently claim that the passage in question is “obscure” and insist that we must find a more “clear” passage to interpret the difficult one. So much for Luther’s maxim.
It was not until after I became Catholic and had shed some of my remaining Protestant intuitions that I saw my original thinking was lopsided and ahistorical. In the earliest decades of the Jesus movement there was not a completely recognized New Testament canon. There were certainly texts upon which a good number of Christians agreed, some of which are in our New Testament canon today and others not, but by no means a complete or monolithic set of “New Testament” books that could be readily referenced as a universal norm. As thinkers like St. Irenaeus advocated, one should therefore consult the preaching of the churches founded by the apostles, hearing the “apostolic key” (my term) by which other doctrinal notes could be judged.
Moreover, the “most complete” scriptures available to the early Christians were Israel’s scriptures. Preaching and deriving Christian doctrine from these texts was not a straightforward endeavor but required the use of typology and other spiritual methods to find Christ in the text, and the use of these methods required the preacher to either know of an actual intertextual connection made by the apostles (e.g., Matt. 2:15 and Hosea 11:1) or the “apostolic key” to discern which typologies and connections sounded in harmony with apostolic theology. This “apostolic key” could not have been the entire biblical canon, since that was not settled until much later. There had to have been another rule ringing through the ears of the earliest Christian leaders to protect their flocks, to allow and prohibit certain books and practices, to interpret Israel’s scriptures and reveal the New Covenant.
This same “key” was used at Nicaea I to settle whether Jesus Christ is consubstantial with the Father or not. Lee Martin McDonald writes,
“It is also true that the church could not establish a canon of the NT Scriptures without first establishing its core teachings and that it took some time for churches to agree – largely – on those orthodox teachings. After that, it was easier to agree on what books of the NT cohered with the teachings that were foundational for early and subsequent Christianity. The question of the authority of Jesus as Lord of the church never wavered in antiquity, but who Jesus was (a divinely empowered human being, an angel, divine being, etc.) and his relationship to God were less certain for a period of time in some churches. After such issues were clarified at Nicaea, the matter of canon formation, that is, determining which books best cohered with the church’s accepted traditions and teachings about Jesus, were then more clear to the majority of church leaders. After Nicaea (325), lists or catalogues of Christian scriptures began to appear” McDonald, Lee Martin. The Formation of the Biblical Canon: The New Testament - Its Authority and Canonicity. Vol. 2. 2 vols. Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2020, 2:127. Emphasis added.
In other words, theology came before scripture. One had to first know the general shape or core of the apostolic teaching in order to narrow which texts could or could not have been inspired by God.
Before one objects that the formation of the canon is a special instance of theology preceding the text, it should be recognized that while it might be the most pronounced it is not the only one. Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants have different ways of synthesizing the entire biblical canon into one story, and this one story will favor certain themes that will (unsurprisingly) result in favorable outcomes for their respective traditions. The Protestant notion of the perspicuity of scripture might not break down when examining individual sentences or even entire books in the Bible, but it certainly does when one has to synthesize the entire canonical corpus into clear and definite conclusions on certain matters such as whether “the Bible” condemns slavery as evil or not. Conservative Protestants who repudiate slavery will argue that we must look at the “entire narrative” of scripture in order to see its opposition to slavery, but these “entire narrative” readings sometimes seem to be a way to read one’s preferences into the text.
Interpreting the Bible is not like interpreting a legal constitution or a set of well-worded statutes. It is like interpreting literature, where such texts can lend themselves to a myriad of readings and interpretive schools seemingly by design. We might have made fun of our English teachers for fixating so much on the color of certain objects in a book or random phrases among characters only to discover the same moves in the history of biblical interpretation.
Even the “historical-grammatical” method which is prided among conservative Protestants as a thoroughly “historical” approach to the Bible must stop from admitting that there are contradictions in or across the Bible books, and so in the eyes of the secular academic the “historical-grammatical” method isn’t really “historical” but uses historical methods so long as they agree with one’s theology. Although one might try to avoid making biblical exegesis like the interpretation of other literature, there is a point at which one must become creative to make pieces fit together.
This is all to say aloud the disquieting suggestion that we are not purely exegeting the text of scripture. We are bringing our own theologies or philosophies into interpretation, and so there will be issues that the Bible or biblical exegesis cannot settle for us. In other words, the Bible will not be our only source for doctrine; we will use our prior commitments to find those doctrines that we think the Bible is asserting. We will have certain assumptions on how the Bible will or should assert what is necessary for belief by first considering to ourselves what is necessary and therefore necessary for belief.
At the same time I do not believe that the Bible is useless or that biblical interpretation is meaningless. We need to reevaluate the entire enterprise in light of the sober realization that theology comes first. Interpretation is really a balancing act and more of an art than a neat science.
There are two analogies that will help illustrate how I maintain this delicate balance.
Music and Notes: I would consider scripture to be like musical notes on a page, bare and without instructions, and the theologian to be like the player who can play the notes in all kinds of ways but must essentially follow the notes on the page. They can add crescendos if they think the notes lend themselves to that sound, or diminuendos if the notes seem to demand as much. They will have to figure out the key on their own, discerning whether a note is sharp or flat depending on how the note sounds in their theological ears.
Dancing: I would consider scripture and the theologian to be like two dancers. Assuming that the dancing is not strictly choreographed but more free flowing, there is an interesting interplay between structure and freedom in such a setting. Both dancers provide certain limits on what the other person can do, one cannot do a totally exotic or unexpected move but must follow a natural and appropriate flow with the other person. At the same time, they do not have to follow a predictable pattern but can add an extra twist or move so long as the other person can receive and reciprocate the dance. Although theology must make the first move to initiate the dance, scripture must be able to receive the theologian’s move in some sense and the theologian in turn must carefully follow his or her partner while maintaining the life and creativity of the dance.
Thus, the questions of true philosophy and our claims on the nature of God and ultimate reality come before the study of scripture. Once an answer has been given to those questions, scripture enters the dance or provides her musical notes for the musician, and the test becomes whether the theologian can come up with a convincing relationship and synthesis between his philosophy and the scriptural text. On the one hand respecting good reason and on the other hand respecting the scriptures.
The way to measure whether this dance or song is done well is the next question I think all should consider. It will involve considerations of hermeneutical virtues and even come down to tests of beauty and goodness I suspect. I think it is still possible even in this paradigm for scripture to limit theology in the sense that the theologian might be insisting upon something that scripture cannot provide. If the theologian wants the biblical story to be purely rational and banish all miracles, then I think this is a clear instance where one can imagine the text limiting the theologian by saying, “You should dance with another book.” Such a move is too exotic for the theologian’s partner.
But, let us first move past the idea that we are all just simply interpreting scripture and purely deriving our theology from it.
Theology precedes scripture, and scripture gives shape to theology.
As a Catholic, I believe that God, the divine author, through the magisterium gives us dogmas and doctrines that help clearly define certain boundaries by which the theologian must follow. Rather than being a burden or constriction, magisterial rulings are like the notes on the page being labelled as sharps or flats, as staccatos or vibratos, by the composer Himself with the use of His pen, the Church. I take these things on faith, because I believe it is reasonable to do so based on what I believe about God and what I take to be my rational desire for Christianity to be true and effective.
Loved the dance analogy here, Suan! I’ll go out on a limb to say I don’t really think there’s a way around this. At least, I can’t think of a philosophically sound one. I’d wager that it’s better for a Protestant to recognize that than to try to deny it. I imagine the next questions will have to do with sources vs. norms and determining the role of reason and ecclesial judgments.