Theology and the Bible

I gave a paper on Calvin last week, picking up on the recent historical work (by David Steinmetz, Richard Muller, and others) that has given us a far better understanding of his context. One result of this is to revise our understanding of how to relate the Institutes and the Biblical commentaries. Roughly, an older way of reading Calvin saw the Institutes as the central text in his corpus, understood as some sort of proto-systematic theology, which everything else – including the commentaries – fed into; a better understanding of Calvin’s work sees his Biblical commentaries (and sermons) as central to his endeavour, with the Institutes not a systematics, but a text designed to aid Calvin in writing the commentaries, and his readers in reading the commentaries.

This reversal does, I tried to show, actually make a difference to how we understand Calvin’s theology. I ended the paper, though, with some freewheeling thoughts about the proper relationship of theology and Biblical studies. Here in St Andrews, we have been interested in this relationship for a while, of course – and mostly in the direction of how theology can influence Biblical studies. I can’t speak for my colleagues, who are far cleverer than I am, but it occurred to me in reading Calvin that I had always assumed that the final word was going to be dogmatic: after all our Biblical work was done, the final scholarly aim would be an ordered statement of Christian truth. The great texts of Reformed theology all seem to point in this direction (van Mastricht has his pars exegetica before moving on to the pars dogmatica; the great Leiden Synopsis invited the Biblical professors to feed in to a work of dogmatics, not vice-versa; &c.). This scholarship would then serve the pulpit and the pastoral visit, of course; but the basic intellectual aim was systematic and theological.

Calvin’s work suggests otherwise. The final academic task in Biblical exposition. Dogmatics is useful insofar as it serves exposition, and not otherwise. This is a surprising reversal, but one that, the more I think about it, the more I think it might perhaps be right. I have been thinking recently about the proper shape of evangelical theology, (in part because of my work with the Evangelical Alliance). It is obvious that an adequately evangelical theology ought to be determinedly Biblical, but what that looked like (having ruled out Grudem-like proof-texting as both intellectually inadequate and inattentive to the actual shape of the Biblical text) was something I struggle with. My new working hypothesis: it looks like Calvin.

New Bibles

We are on the way back from two conferences, the Society for the Study of Theology in Durham and Spring Harvest in Minehead, of which more in another post. I wasn’t expecting my major book purchases from the two weeks to be new bibles–frankly, I’ve got several more than I use as it is…

We nevertheless came back with two more, just because they seemed to genuinely add something. The first was the first sight, at Spring Harvest, of the fruit of a project I’ve known about for a while, Bible Society’s Poverty and Justice Bible. Conceived in part as an antidote to the plethora of ‘Sanctified Students’ Daily Walk Bible with Exam Helps’ or ‘Working wives’ five minute holiness devotional Bible’, this is a Bible which highlights what the text is actually about, rather than what we’d like it to be about… Something like 3000 verses are highlighted as referring very directly to issues of poverty and justice, and there are 50 thoughtful bible studies in the centre pages. The translation used is BS’s own Contemporary English Version.

The other is The Jesus Storybook Bible, published by Zonderkidz (is there a viler-named publisher anywhere?!). It’s a children’s story Bible, with good re-tellings of various Biblical narratives (and other bits–it has a go at Isaiah, for instance), but with a very deliberate slant. The introduction says, in part, this:

…some people think the Bible is a book of rules … But the Bible isn’t mainly about you and what you should be doing. It’s about God and what he has done. Other people think the Bible is a book of heroes … but most of the people in the Bible aren’t heroes at all…

No, the Bible isn’t a book of rules, or a book or heroes. The Bible is most of all a Story. It’s an adventure story about a young Hero who comes from a far country to win back his lost treasure. It’s a love story about a brave Prince who leaves his palace, his throne – everything – to rescue the one he loves … There are lots of stories in the Bible, but all the stories are telling one Big Story. The Story of how God loves his children and comes to rescue them.

It takes the whole Bible to tell this Story. And at the center [yes, it's American...] of the Story, there is a baby. Every Story in the Bible whispers his name. He is like the missing piece in a puzzle – the piece that makes all the other pieces fit..

And so each story ends with a hint of how it is a part of the big story. The tower of Babel: ‘People didn’t need a staircase; they needed a Rescuer. Because the way back to heaven wasn’t a staircase; it was a Person. People could never reach up to Heaven, so Heaven would have to come down to them. And one day, it would.’ The birth of Isaac: ‘And one day God would send another baby, a baby promised to a girl who didn’t even have a husband. But this baby would bring laughter to the whole world. This baby would be everyone’s dream come true.’

Bibles for adults and children that suggest that the text is about Jesus, and about justice, instead of about pandering to our selfish desires and pathetic insecurities – this could be very, very dangerous…

Polanus on interpreting Scripture

‘The interpretation of H. Scripture is the exposition (explicatio) of its true sense and use, arranged in clear words (verbis perspicuis instituta), to the glory of God and the edification of the church.’ Even in my inelegant translation, that’s not a bad opening gambit. The (long…) section ends with a paragraph ‘on the use of H. Scripture for consolation’: ‘…therefore however grave the evil, so great and certain is the good set against it, that it is an effective remedy for sorrow. A most beautiful example (exemplum pulcherrinendum) is Isa. 41:26 ff. …’

The words are from Amandus Polanus’s Syntagma Theologiae Christianae; it was never going to be a big seller, even in theological terms. The edition in our library, published in Geneva in 1617, runs to something over 700 pages in folio, with two columns of (I estimate) six point Latin text on each. Oh, and the printer’s Greek font is all-but-illegible, at least to my eyes. If that wasn’t bad enough, the ‘Synopsis’ at the start of the book is a masterpiece of Ramist bifurcations (I counted six levels of subdivision on the definition of theology alone), and the text itself is in classical scholastic quaestiones form. What was it Barth said of Heppe? ‘Dry and dusty as a table of logarithms …’

I pulled it out the library to check a reference. I suspect I am its first reader in living memory; it is not yet on our electronic catalogue (most of our best books aren’t…), and was apparently misplaced in the stacks, so the librarian took a while to find it. Her perseverance seemed to demand some from me; and in between the anti-Roman polemic, and the fading and tiny Latin print, I found my heart strangely warmed.

‘Infallibility’?

I am preparing a lecture on differing Evangelical views of Scripture, particularly in trans-Atlantic perspective, which I will post up here when it is done. I stumble over the word ‘infallible’: in normal English usage, it means ‘will not fail’, and so demands a qualifier (‘will not fail’ to do what?); thus confessing the Bible to be infallible without any indication as to its purpose is precisely meaningless in logical terms.

The standard claim, which I can trace back no further than Packer’s God has Spoken, although it then crops up in the Chicago Statement, the Westminster Handbook, and various other reference works, seems to be that ‘infallibility’ means ‘the quality of neither deceiving nor being deceived’ (Packer, p.111). This is generally defended etymologically: Latin in + fallo, which primarily means ‘to deceive’.

OK, but: 1. Warfield and Hodge used ‘infallibility’ to mean ‘inerrancy’ in 1881: not ‘not deceiving’ but ‘not erring’; 2. fallo does not primarily mean ‘to deceive’ when applied to inanimate objects; there it basically means ‘to fail’; 3. infallibilis is used (admittedly fairly rarely) in medieval and early modern Latin, first by Augustine I think, always with the sense of ‘not failing’ (Augustine uses it of the certainty of the divine decree of election); 4. ‘infallibility’ is never used with the sense Packer et al. want to give it in English (so the OED); 5. as far as I can presently tell, no Reformation or post-Reformation writer or confession used infallibilis of Scripture in any sense, with the sole exception of the Latin translation of Westminster, where it was a back-translation of the English ‘infallible’, and so must be assumed to have the natural sense of that word (Schleiermacher cites the ‘conf. March.’ as describing Scripture as infallible, but I have no idea what the ‘conf. March.’ is!) ; 6. the most common use of infallibilis in theology is in debates over the status of the Pope, where the word always means ‘unable to err’ (in particular circumstances, of course).

So, whence Packer’s supposed meaning of ‘unable to deceive’? Can anyone enlighten me before I have to give this lecture (Tue 26th!)?