What Does This Mean?

Lutheran and the Christocentric Reading of Scripture

It is clear that that recent biblical scholars, such as Ben Collett (and every orthodox Lutheran?) desire to place human reason back to its proper place underneath Scripture. Ben Collett reminds his readers of the early creeds, particularly the Nicene Creed. The Creed offers its own “set of objective controls upon Biblical meaning by which to critically assess Biblical interpretation and adjudicate its claims to meaning.” (Don C. Collett, Figural Reading and the Old Testament, 162). Effectively, Collett encourages students to return human reason to its ministerial role, that is, reason being normed by Scripture.

It is refreshing to see people outside the Lutheran camp realize this! This is the treasure our church has had since the beginning, and it is built into our own Confessions! This understanding of interpreting Scripture would soon give way to the formulation of the Book of Concord, which states that Biblical exposition serves as the norma normata under the norma normans of Scripture (FC Ep, 1.2).

The Old Testament points to and has its center on Christ. This Christological reading is inherent in the Scripture, and is established by the Lord. Scripture is God’s self-revelation to humanity that they might know Him through Jesus Christ as the Savior of the world from sin, death and hell. Though human reason received a magisterial role in various worldviews that came after the Christian theistic worldview, it now returns to its ministerial role under the guidance and teaching of Scripture. As it turns out, the Christian theistic worldview and methods of interpretation that foster this worldview never fully left the scene. Several theologians, throughout all of history, have continued to work under the Christian theistic worldview presuppositions even though the rest of the world despises it. Yet even today, it seems that the methods of Christocentric interpretation of Scripture are, by God’s providential grace, making a much-welcomed return to the academy as more books and studies are coming forth.

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
St. Peter’s Lutheran Church
La Grange, MO

St. Mary Magdalene

Yesterday the church remembered and celebrated St. Mary Magdalene. Before the new hymnal came out the Gospel lesson for her day was Luke 7:36-50, the story of an unnamed prostitute coming into anoint the head and feat of Jesus while he was eating at the table of a Pharisee. We learn more about Mary from the next chapter of Luke’s gospel: she had 7, yes 7, demons cast from her. You put that all together and you a picture of a woman who knew God’s grace and knew it came from Jesus, God’s own Son in the flesh, and it makes sense as to why she stuck so closely to Jesus, following him and providing for him and the disciples out of their means.

Mary you might say is an unlikely saint. But are not we all unlikely saints? Becoming a Saint is not something that we do for ourselves, no we must be acted upon. God must do the work of making us saints. Just as he did for Mary. Just as he has done for you dear saints loved by God.

If you keep score of this stuff just think about who God chooses to be his own. Abraham, he was the son of an idolater and a liar as the story in Egypt shows. Jacob was a deceiver. Judah took a prostitute who happened to be the wife of his dead sons. David, the best of the Old Testament Kings, had a man killed because he would not lay with his wife to cover up the fact that David had taken her for himself and that a child was on the way. The ones chosen by God are not saintly by the world’s standards at all. That’s just the Old Testament, the New Testament is just as littered with unlikely saints, Paul being the most profound.

But that is what our Lord does. He does not find saints, instead he makes them. He makes saints out of sinners. He takes hold of them, gives them his love, through his Son Jesus, says, “Forgiven, free, mine!” He makes them clean, He cleanses them just as He cleansed you by water and the word to be his holy bride. And that’s no matter who you are. Jesus wants you for himself. He came that you might be His and His alone.

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
St. Peter’s Lutheran Church
La Grange, MO

Returning to Christocentric Reading of Scripture

Throughout the history of Biblical interpretation, alarms have been ringing throughout history concerning the deterioration of Biblical interpretation. You might say Luther was one. Brevard Childs was one such alarm bell who raised a warning when he introduced his canonical approach to interpretation as a means to return to theological interpretation of the Bible.

However, even he could not remove himself from the historical critical methodologies that held sway, holding to a complex redaction model of transmission. Yet, it is refreshing to see Childs interact with the final form of the text. At the very least, through Childs’s canonical approach, a theological unity across books of the Bible is once again accessible. One of Childs’s own students, Christopher Seitz, moved further away from the higher historical methods as he engaged in his own figural interpretation.

Ben Collett another scholar who has called for Biblical interpretation to take a page from the early church and return to a Christological reading of Scripture. As he dedicates his book, Figural Reading the Old Testament, he expresses the hope that figural reading will spring forth again in the land of Origen.

Collett takes the importance of history seriously. However, one needs to understand how he speaks of history, especially when it comes to creation. Collett speaks of a difference between scriptural days and human days. He writes, “Contrary to popular stereotypes of modernity, figural reading is not a non-historical strategy for reading Scripture but a species of historical reading rooted in Scripture’s literal sense.” (Don C. Collett, Figural Reading and the Old Testament, 2) He also argues through the book that “Scripture’s literal sense is not merely an authorial or historical sense but fully embedded within a creational and providential ‘rule’ for reading Scripture’s canonical, final or ‘full’ form.”(Don C. Collett, Figural Reading and the Old Testament, 3).

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
St. Peter’s Lutheran Church
La Grange, MO

Post Modern Reading of Scripture

In Post-Modern Biblical reading, reader-response methodologies have become more and more the norm in Biblical Interpretation. Many Post-modern readers of Scripture would not say interpretation. They are merely readers, or children on the playground that is a text, making up games and rules as they run along.

One reader-response interpreter is Edgar Conrad. For Conrad, there is no meaning outside the text’s present reception. The reality and meaning of the text come into existence the more the reader reads the text. There is no meaning that originates from either a divine author or a human author. Following Stanley Fish, who believes that communities dictate meaning, Conrad works through the book of Isaiah. In so doing, he, as the reader of a particular community, begins to see rhetorical devices that structure the book. However, I should stress that Conrad creates this structure and meaning as he reads. The structure is a creation of the reader, not the text or author.

Other methodologies have been conceived in recent years, holding to the idea that the ‘suppressed’ voices deserve equal representation in the task of interpretation of the Biblical text. This call for equality leads to many ‘readings’ that celebrate queer, feminist, liberation, or other curious agendas. The list of new ideas is extensive because each interpretive reading is just as valid as any other. Deconstructionism has thrown out all of the rules.

Every reader and interpreter are committed to some kind of a worldview. As demonstrated, the postmodern worldview is diametrically opposed to the Christian theistic worldview. Derrida is said to have been opposed to and committed his work toward the deconstruction of the idols of reliability, determinacy, and neutrality. For Derrida, words are never reliable, their meanings are indeterminate, and they are never neutral. This is completely opposed to the Christian theistic worldview, which relies on the Word of Scripture for knowledge.

What is certain in the creation of meaning is the continued reliance upon man’s own reason and abilities. If God is dead, as Nietzsche claimed, and words cannot convey any meaning that go beyond other signs, as Derrida suggests, then it is impossible to find meaning, or it is non-existent altogether. There is no inherent truth, only that which is created subjectively within each independent ‘reader.’ Deconstructionism lifts up every voice equally so that no single voice dominates. This is a return to Babel.

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
St. Peter’s Lutheran Church
La Grange, MO

Jacques Derrida: the Reader Decides What Scripture Means

An important lesson to take away thus far from this large series that started as “Digging into the Old Testament” and has morphed into a Hermeneutics study is the necessity of receiving the Bible as history. Humanity, up to the age of the Enlightenment, effectively stayed beneath Scripture as a student at the feet of a teacher. Scripture had something to teach humanity about God and how He reveals Himself to His creation. As time moved on, a major shift took place. Reason reigned supreme, and even as world events, such as war, raged on and human optimism waned, reason never saw its high ivory tower demolished.

In the age which we currently live, reason has continued to march forward, now to the point that Scripture is effectively irrelevant for daily life. Kevin Vanhoozer diagnoses the problem in his book Is there a Meaning in This Text. He concludes that in today’s landscape, meaning of a text comes from the reader, not the author or the text. While existentialism tried to “transcend nihilism” ( Sire, Universe Next Door, 112 ), the tenets of nihilism claimed victory, and much postmodern thought falls in line. Vanhoozer notes the death of God rang the alarm bells that the author was far behind.

Jacques Derrida is the father of Deconstructionism and possibly the postmodern age. In quick work, Derrida argues that meaning and author are not connected. In fact, there cannot be one correct meaning. Words are only signs that point to more signs, which cannot move beyond or above to some higher meaning. Not even author’s intentions are understood to convey meaning. Instead, meaning is purely subjective. The text becomes a jungle gym for readers to exercise their own creativity. Readers create whatever meaning they desire.

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
St. Peter’s Lutheran Church
La Grange, MO

Christian Existentialism

Very few Christian Existentialists argued for the Bible to be understood as factual history. Thanks to what came before in the time of the Enlightenment, they believed that Biblical history is uncertain and unimportant, yet it stands “as a model or type or myth to be made present and lived is of supreme importance.” (James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door, 139). Christian existentialism lost interest in the facticity of the Bible, and religious implications became the only conclusion that mattered.

The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most important event recorded in the Bible, but many question whether or not Jesus actually rose from the dead at all. Barth believes the resurrection of Jesus took place in space and time. Rudolph Bultmann did not, saying the resurrection was “utterly inconceivable.” (Rudolph Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth, 39) However, this is not a problem for the radical existentialist. Preaching the religious implications of the text is not concerned with the historical facticity of any particular event. Speaking of Jesus and the Christian faith Bultmann writes:

“But Christian faith did not exist until there was a Christian kerygma; i.e., a kerygma proclaiming Jesus Christ—specifically Jesus Christ the Crucified and Risen One—to be God’s eschatological act of salvation. He was first so proclaimed in the kerygma of the earliest Church, not in the message of the historical Jesus, even though that Church frequently introduced into its account of Jesus’ messages, motifs of its own proclamation. Thus, theological thinking –the theology of the New Testament—begins with the kerygma of the earliest Church and not before.” (Rudolph Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, 3)

He taught that it is not that the resurrection itself that is important, but how the preaching of it transforms the lives of the hearers. Ultimately, Biblical events are nothing more than symbols that help convey some meaning, and should not be taken literally. This is the form of allegory that should be avoided at all costs because the matter of a foundation of faith is at risk. When the preaching of the resurrection of Jesus is detached from its history, the preaching of the apostles and early church is also abandoned and all the treasures they extended to the church are lost.

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
St. Peter’s Lutheran Church
La Grange, MO

The Death of God Movement

God was declared dead by the naturalist or nihilist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882. The study of the Bible became an endeavor that inevitably put the core tenets of the Christian faith in the crosshairs. One could take a few different approaches to address the problem: either completely distrust any knowledge that would seem to contradict the Scripture, or, as Nietzsche suggested, reject Christianity. Adolf von Harnack introduced an alternative view called ‘protestant liberalism.’ Within this movement, which was much more popular prior to the first world war, was to hold high view of humanity and its abilities alongside Scripture. For instance, Harnack’s teacher, Albrecht Ritschl, believed that the preaching of Jesus concerning the Kingdom of God should be understood to mean that human society would improve over time.

However, as the twentieth century progressed through war, a tremendous shift occurred. The world appeared to be sitting in the pits of utter despair on the way to nihilism. Biblical scholars tried to find an off ramp rather than follow down that same path. As different worldviews separated the text from its actual proclamation, God had been reduced to Jesus, and Jesus reduced further into a good man with a good word about good living. Theistic Existentialism, following some of the themes of Søren Kierkegaard, came into vogue with one its main proponents being Karl Barth.

Barth argues that theology had become too focused on anthropology. Barth instead focused on the ‘otherness’ of God. He also called for a return to the word of God, writing,

“Theology stands and falls with the Word of God, for the Word of God precedes all theological words by creating, arousing and challenging them. Should theology wish to be more or less or anything other than action in response to that Word, its thinking and speaking would be empty, meaningless, and futile.” (Karl Barth Evangelical Theology, 17)

While this might sound very similar to the worldview of the early church, there are distinct differences. Barth affirms that God created all that exists. However, God is holy other, so Barth contends that creation is inadequate to reveal or teach anything about God. It is only in Jesus Christ that God is connected to creation. The result of these principles is that for the theist existentialist, knowledge of God is a question of faith and not reason. There is still doubt about whether or not God could actually be known.

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
St. Peter’s Lutheran Church
La Grange, MO

Deism and Naturalism

In my last post, I talked about the deist worldview. However, Deism is only a pitstop on the way to full blown naturalism. Sire in The Universe Next Door writes:

“In [Christian] theism God is the infinite-personal Creator and sustainer of the cosmos. In deism God is reduced; he begins to lose his personality, though he remains Creator and (by implication) sustainer of the cosmos. In naturalism God is further reduced; he loses his very existence.” (Sire, Universe Next Door, 59)

It is during this time in particular, between deism and naturalism, that several different approaches to reading Scripture began to show up, particularly those related to the idea of scientific inquiry. Of those approaches, one of the most dynamic is called higher historical criticism. Following the queues of Gabler, a group of scholars around the beginning of the early twentieth century began close and careful study of the history of religion. Hermann Gunkel and Julius Wellhausen were two such scholars.

In reading Scripture, especially the Old Testament, Wellhausen, called the father of what is commonly referred to as the Documentary Hypothesis, argued that multiple strands of various factions from religious entities struggled with one another for superiority within the Biblical text itself. The questions began to really revolve around the composition history of the books themselves. Wellhausen’s views of Scripture are quite different from the early church and reformation era commentators. The literature is no longer deemed sacred. Scripture is the evidence of warring parties or social groups trying to gain the upper hand over one another.

It was now the job of the historical critic to ‘reconstruct’ the history and events which shaped what was written in the Bible. Another scholar Bernhard Duhm, attempted to find the historical references that best connected to the prophecies of the prophet Isaiah. Ultimately, this became the problem that many later and more recent scholars have held against the historical critical methods: if a historical reference is not easily found, there is nothing to say except that this particular section of Scripture was added at a much later date. Thus, for Isaiah and other books, like the Pentateuch, the idea of multiple authors arose.

As one can see, this historical critical method, as introduced into mainstream academic theology by the likes of Wellhausen and Duhm, has a low view of Scripture. It is no longer perceived as the very word of God, but the word of various political and religious factions. Along with that low view of Scripture, they also had an even lower view of the prophets they interpreted. The worldview that begins to show through the cracks resembles that of deism or naturalism more than the Christian theistic worldview. This worldview holds that the Bible is not God’s special revelation through which He reveals Himself to His creation. The two Testaments are not really united because of all the competing strands. There is no one united theology for men like Duhm or Wellhausen. They have placed their own rational mind above and over the text, effectively making the text fit their own mold. The methods that follow in line, such as redaction and form criticism, also seem to have the same worldview presuppositions.

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
St. Peter’s Lutheran Church
La Grange, MO

Deism

During the Enlightenment a shift (or multiple shifts?) took place when it came to the question of worldview. two major worldviews took the stage, pushing the Christian theistic worldview further off stage: deism and naturalism.

James Sire (author of The Universe Next Door: A Catalogue of Worldviews) describes deists as holding to the idea that a transcendent god created the universe, but then left it to run on its own. Often the god of deism is described as the master clock maker and the world as his clock. The creator god built the world, wound it up, and left it to run undisturbed. Deism allows for a god to exist insofar as he created what is seen. This god can be known somewhat by studying what he made. However, deism does not allow for special revelation, because the god of deism does not communicate with people.

In essence then, Scripture cannot give any additional information to man about god excluded from what is already made known via creation. The deist conception of god could not break into history, nor could he be known through history, as the Christian theistic worldview and Scripture portray Him. Also, because of the stance towards special revelation, the concept of sin and the fall into sin as presented in the Scripture is denied, as well as, the revelation of Jesus Christ being both true God and true Man in One Person.

It does not appear that Gabler held to every aspect of what is being described as the deistic worldview. It seems Gabler lies somewhere in between the worldview of Irenaeus and this deistic worldview. Certainly, it can be seen that Gabler places more emphasis on man’s capability to separate out the “unchanging truth of the bible from the mythical imagery that shrouds it.”(Ben C. Ollenburger, The Flowering of Old Testament Theology, 5)

Within the deistic worldview, interpretation of Scripture effectively becomes unwarranted. Rather than Scripture, the natural sciences emerge as the guiding principle. This strategy abandons any notion of the miraculous events of Scripture because they cannot be scientifically proven. The miracles contained in Scripture were either removed entirely as found in Jefferson’s Bible, or explained away via science.

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
St. Peter’s Lutheran Church
La Grange, MO

Biblical Theology and Abiding Truth

Near the end of the eighteenth century, a man by the name of Johann Phillip Gabler spoke about the subjects of historical interpretation and Biblical theology. He proposed that Biblical and dogmatic theology are different tasks. For Gabler, Biblical theology is the primary goal when interpreting Scripture. He described Biblical theology as first consisting of historical exposition that treats the Biblical statement within the author’s historical setting. After the historical context is understood, then the philosophically informed explanation of the statement is provided that determines the abiding Biblical truth.

As can be seen from Gabler, Scripture was not taken at face value to be true and abiding on its own right by itself. That determination is now supplied by the reader. Also, as part of this proposal, Gabler “borrowed from the classical and Biblical scholars Heyne and Eichorn, that people in more primitive stages of development expressed themselves in ways suited to their limited rational powers, namely in mythical images.”

If Gabler is correct, the Old Testament was to be considered inferior to the New Testament. The unity of the Two Testaments is in jeopardy because the OT is inferior to the NT simply because it was from an earlier era. As Gabler’s one time colleague Georg Lorenz Bauer would argue, “a separate theology would have to be written for each of them.” (Ben C. Ollenburger, The Flowering of Old Testament Theology, 5) This idea certainly goes against that of the early church interpreters and those of a more conventional Christian theistic worldview. The interpreters of the late eighteenth century relied much more on their rational mind than in trusting that the words of Scripture did record accurate accounts of history.

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
St. Peter’s Lutheran Church
La Grange, MO