Reading Paul, Thinking Scripture
Originally
published in Scripture’s Doctrine and Theology’s Bible. 2008. Baker Academic:
N. T. WRIGHT
Scripture, Doctrine, and Life: The Puzzle of
Perception
For many in today's church, "doctrine,"
especially when labeled as "dogma," is the dry, lifeless thing that
once seemed important but now fails to send people out to change the world. For
some such people, it is Scripture that brings them to life—the book where they
meet Jesus and find him speaking to them. They read, or listen to, Scripture in
the way that they would listen to a favorite symphony or folk song. It
recreates their world, the world where they and God get it together, the world
where all things are possible to those who believe.
Not everybody sees things
that way. For some, Scripture itself, except for highly select verses and
passages, has become as dry and dusty as dogma itself. It is full of problems and puzzles,
alternative readings and private theories of interpretation, and seems to them
like a black hole that can suck down all the energy of otherwise good Christian
people (exegetes and preachers) and give nothing much back in return. For them,
what matters is invoking the Spirit, worshipping for longer and longer,
extended prayer and praise meetings, telling others how wonderful it is to have
a living relationship with Jesus. Such people assume (since the background of
their tradition is broadly evangelical) that Scripture remains in some sense
normative, but how it exercises that normativity, or
how it "exercises" anything at all, or engages with their life and
faith remains unclear.
The third category
completes the circle. There are some for whom the books of devotion appear
stale, but for whom, as C. S. Lewis once put it, the heart sings unbidden when
working through a book of dogmatic theology with pipe in teeth and pencil in
hand. For such people, as well, the endless and increasingly labyrinthine
productions of the Great Exegetical Factory, especially the older Germans on
the one hand and the newer Americans on the other, leave them cold. The
lexicographical, historical, sociological, and rhetorical mountains of secular
exegesis all move, and every so often there emerges a ridiculous mouse that
squeaks some vaguely religious version of a currently popular self-help slogan.
Meanwhile, the real mountains—the enormous, looming questions of God and the
world, of church and society, of Jesus then and now, of death and
resurrection—remain unaddressed. Salieri,
in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, looks at Mozart's operas and declares that
Mozart has taken ordinary people—barbers, servant girls, footmen—and made them
gods and heroes. He himself, however, has written operas about gods and heroes,
and he has made them ordinary. A similar verdict awaits the contemporary
"secular" exegete who dares to look into the mirror.
"Does it have to be
this way?" asks not only the theologian but also the bishop. Where are the
so-called ordinary people in all of this? Is there a better way not only of
understanding the relationship between Scripture and doctrine but also of
allowing either or both to bear fruit in the postmodern church and world?
Scripture and Narrative
To say that I want to begin to address this with some
remarks about Scripture and narrative may provoke a sigh from at least some dogmaticians: "That is so last century, so postliberal. They are even giving it up at Yale now. Can any
good thing come out of narrative?" Well, as a reader of Scripture, I
perceive that the canon as it stands not only is irreducibly narrative in form,
enclosing within that, of course, any number of other genres, but also displays
an extraordinary, because unintentional to every single individual writer and
redactor involved, overall storyline of astonishing power and consistency. You
could say, of course, that this is all due to those who chose the books and
shaped the canon, but if you look at the ones they left out, you would have to
say either that even if you put them all in, you would still have the same
narrative or that if you put some of them in (the gnostic
Gospels, for instance), you would precisely deconstruct what would still be a
huge, powerful narrative and offer instead a very different one from which,
ultimately, you would have to exclude more or less everything else that is
there. The gnostic Gospels, if made canonical, would
eventually act like the baby cuckoo in the nest, kicking out all the native
chicks, but if the chicks got together where they had landed on the ground,
they would still have a massive family likeness. You cannot, in the end, take
the anticanonical rhetoric of much contemporary
writing to its logical conclusion without ending up having the canon again,
only now as the alternative narrative. No: what we have, from Genesis to
Revelation, is a massive narrative structure in which, though Paul, the
evangelists, and John of Patmos are, of course,
extremely well aware of the earlier parts, no single author saw the whole or
knew about all its other parts. It is as though engineers from different
workshops were invited to produce bits and pieces of cantilevers which ended
up, when put together without the different work-shops knowing of it, producing
the
I am thus taking the phrase
"thinking Scripture" in, I think, two ways. First, that as we read
Paul, we should be conscious that he is "thinking Scripture" in the
sense that his mind is full of the great scriptural narrative and the great
scriptural narratives, and that he is conscious of living in the climactic and
newly explosive continuation and implementation of the first and also of living
with the echoes and patterns of the second. But, second, part of the point is
that as we read Paul, we should be conscious not only of "Paul said this,
that, or the other" but also of "How can Paul's saying of this be
Scripture for us; how can it, that is, function as the word that addresses,
challenges, sustains us, putting us to death and bringing us to new life?"
Now of course, within the
grand narrative from the first garden to the
Is this even the right
question to be asking? Might it not seem to imply (1) that it is doctrine that
really matters, that will give life and energy and focus to the church; (2)
that Scripture is the authority for our doctrine, since that is itself a
foundational doctrine, but (3) that Scripture as we find it seems singularly
unsuited for the purpose (as Winston Churchill said about a golf club in
relation to the task of conveying a ball into a small and distant hole)? And, granted that modern and often postmodern
exegesis has left Scripture in bits all over the floor, each labeled
"early Q" or "deutero-Paul" or
"Hellenistic moral topos" or
whatever—as though that settled anything—will it help (and if so, how?) to draw
attention to Scripture's most prominent characteristic, or will this too
collapse into another pile of mere narrative theories, with actantial
analyses like the spars of the skeleton ship in The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, giving the initial appearance of being seaworthy but actually
carrying only Death and Life-in-Death?
Doctrine as "Portable Story"
I think not. I want to propose what may be a way
forward—not a particularly original one, but one that I have found helpful in
reflecting recently on that strange doctrine called "the atonement."
I want to propose that we see doctrines as being, in principle, portable
narratives.
What do I mean? When I am at home, my clothes live in wardrobes, and my books on bookshelves. But when I need to be away from home, I put them in bags and suitcases. It is not easy to carry suits, robes, and shoes, let alone books and notebooks, a laptop computer, an MP3 player, and so on, all loose, on and off the London Underground. The bags and suitcases perform a vital function. But when I get to my destination, even if I am only there for a single night, I get almost everything out, hang up the clothes and robes, and arrange the books on a desk or table, not because the suitcases were not important, but rather because they were. The bits and pieces have got where they were going and must be allowed to be themselves again.
This model suggests a
to-and-fro between Scripture and doctrine that goes something like the
following. It may be very important for the internal life of the church, or for
the church's witness to the world, that we address a question about the meaning
of Jesus' death that has come up at some point in debate How are we going to do
it? It is hard, each time you want even to refer to Jesus' death itself, to
quote even a few verses from Mark 15, Matthew 27, Luke 23 or John 19. If, each
time I wanted to refer in a discussion to the archbishop of
At this point, already, I
must introduce a further element. The conviction has been growing in me that
when Jesus wanted to explain to his followers what he thought would be the
meaning of his death, he did not give them a theory; he gave them a meal. And
the meal itself, by being a Passover-meal-with-a-difrerence,
already indicates a massive and complex implied narrative—a story about a long
history reaching a new, shocking, and decisive fulfillment—a story about
slavery and freedom, about Israel and the pagans, about God fulfilling his
promises, about covenant renewal and forgiveness of sins. And this encoded
story, this meal-as-narrative, works by doing it. Breaking the bread and
drinking from the cup are not about something else, unless that
something else is simply called "Jesus." Rather, we might better say
that theories about atonement are, at their very best, abstractions from the
Eucharist, which is itself the grid of interpretation that we have been
given—by Jesus himself!—for Jesus' death. This makes life much more
complicated, of course, since we have suddenly introduced a third and
disturbing element into the "Scripture and doctrine" debate, but at
least in the case of the atonement, we have, I think, no choice.
Creeds as Portable Story—and Therefore as Symbol
I will come back to this presently, because it might
be that the atonement is, in this respect and perhaps in others, something of a
special case. But first I want to state the obvious and then develop it a
little. The idea that doctrines are portable stories is, of course, already
present in the classic statements of Christian doctrines, the great early
creeds. They are not simply checklists that could in principle be presented in
any order at all. They consciously tell the story—precisely the scriptural
story!—from creation to new creation, focusing particularly, of course, on
Jesus and summing up what Scripture says about him in a powerful, brief
narrative (a process that we can already see happening within the New Testament
itself). When the larger story needs to be put within a particular discourse,
for argumentative, didactic, rhetorical, or whatever other purpose, it makes
sense, and is not inimical to its own character, to telescope it together and
allow it, suitably bagged up, to take its place in that new context—just as
long as we realize that it will collect mildew if we leave it in its bag
forever.
One of the things that
creeds enable Scripture to do, by being thus compressed into a much, much
briefer narrative framework, is to allow the entire story to function as
symbol. It is no accident that symbol was one of the words that the
early Christians used to denote their creeds. The creeds were not simply a list
of things that Christians happened to believe. They were a badge to be worn, a
symbol that, like the scholar's gown that tells you what this person is about,
declares, "This is who we are." That is, of course, why the creeds
are recited in liturgy: not so much to check that everyone present is signed up
to them but rather to draw together, and express corporately, the church's
response to the reading and praying of Scripture in terms of "Yes! As we
listen to these texts, we are renewed as this people, the people who
live within this great story, the people who are identified precisely as
people-of-this-story, rather than as the people of one of the many other
stories that clamor for attention all around." And this, I think, is the
role of doctrine, or one of its crucial and central roles: to ensure that when
people say the creeds, they know what they are talking about and why it
matters, and also to ensure that when some part of the larger story is under
attack or is being distorted, we cannot just come to the rescue and, as it
were, put a finger in the dyke, but rather we can discern why the attack has
come at this moment and at this point and can work to eliminate the weakness
that has allowed it to gain access.
Part of my general point
about Paul is precisely that he is constantly doing this packing and unpacking,
compressing and expanding, hinting in one place and offering a somewhat fuller
statement of the same point elsewhere. A good example of this is in 1
Corinthians 15:56-57, where Paul says (bewilderingly, since he has not been
talking about these things), "The sting of death is sin, and the power of
sin is the law; but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord
Jesus Christ." By itself, this is more or less incomprehensible, since
nowhere else in his writings to date has Paul said anything about the law being
"the power of sin." We might just about have inferred it from
Galatians 3, but it would be stronger than anything there. But in Romans 7 Paul
explains precisely this point at much greater length, ending with the same
shout of triumph. In other words, it is not simply the case that Scripture
gives miscellaneous teaching about various topics that the church can codify into
portable statements and then decodify back into
Scripture again. We can see the same process going on within Scripture itself,
not least in Paul himself, and not least at this point, when we are thinking
about sin, the law, and the victory of Christ—in other words, about atonement.
All this leads us to another important general point about the nature of
doctrine, Scripture, and narrative.
Checklists and Connect-the-Dots
It dawns on me, uncomfortably, that it is possible to
treat doctrines, not (as the creeds do) as basically a narrative but simply as
a kind of abstract checklist, dogmas to which one must subscribe but which do
not really belong at all within a story, or, more insidious perhaps still, do
belong within a story but within a story that, because it is not usually seen
as such, is quietly doing its powerful work of reshaping what these admittedly
true doctrines will now it mean and why. In other words, simply putting a
checkmark beside all twenty-nine (or however many) true doctrines is not good
enough. It could be that you are like a child faced with a connect-the-dots
puzzle, realizing that you I have to link the dots but not understanding what
the numbers are there for. You can
indeed draw a picture in which all the dots are connected, but it may bear
little relation to the picture that was intended. You can, in fact, link all
the dots, both in the classic early creeds and most of the later ones (e.g.,
the post-Reformation confessions and articles), and still be many a mile away
from affirming what the biblical writers, all through, were wanting people to
affirm. You can connect all the dots and still produce, shall we say, a thistle
instead of a rose. To take a different but related example: if I come upon the
letters "BC" written down somewhere, it is only the larger context,
the larger implicit narrative, that can tell me whether they mean
"Bishop's Council" (in an entry in my calendar), "British
Columbia" (in my cousin's mailing address), "Before Christ" (in a
book about ancient history), or the two musical notes that bear those names
(about the conclusion of Sibelius's seventh
symphony). Implicit narrative is all. If you affirm a doctrine but place it in
the wrong implicit narrative, you potentially falsify it as fully and
thoroughly as if you denied it altogether.
This point is not
dissimilar to one made by Robert Jenson,[2]
though I think he has not done enough to ward off the suspicion that his own
proffered solution is subject to the same critique that he has offered of other
theories. Writing about the doctrine of the atonement, he suggests that what is
wrong with the three main models—Anselm, Abelard, and Christus
Victor, to put it bluntly—is that all of them are placing the death of Jesus
within a narrative other than the one that Scripture itself proposes. Scripture
is not talking about the honor or shame of a medieval nobleman, or about a
program to educate people in how to love God, or about monstrous mythical
powers and how they might be defeated. I think, actually, that Scripture is
more obviously talking about the last of those, but that is another question to
which we may return. My difficulty with Jenson (and I suspect that he is
building up to addressing this in a fuller work for which the 2006 article is a
brief flyer) is that his alternative narrative, which is about the
relationships between the three persons of the Trinity, while very interesting
and not at all unrelated to the story that Scripture tells, is still not that
story itself and still avoids the really important part of the whole thing, the
thing to which the church has persistently given far too little attention
(including, I believe, the classic creeds themselves): the story of Israel.
It is this story that
drives the whole of the New Testament, which is not surprising, because it is
what drove Jesus himself. When Paul says that "the Messiah died for our
sins according to the scriptures," he does not mean that if we look hard
enough, we can find a few helpful proof texts. What he means—and what we see in
the great sermons in Acts, particularly chapters 7 and 13 and the subsequent
summaries of similar material—is that the story of Israel from Abraham to the
Messiah is seen as the plan of the one Creator God to save the whole world. It
is remarkable how difficult it is to get this across to people who are deeply
embedded in a rather different story, one that reads simply "creation,
sin, Jesus, salvation." Interestingly, of course, if you miss the
"Israel" stage of the story, not only do you become a de facto Marcionite, as many, alas, in both Protestant and Catholic
traditions seem to be, but you also leave yourself, most likely, without an
ecclesiology or with having to construct one from scratch far too late in the
narrative. There are, of course, all kinds of clues in the New Testament to
indicate that something is badly wrong here, and the story of exegesis, not
least in the Protestant and evangelical worlds, has sadly included several
quite clever moves for rendering these clues (e.g., Rom. 9-11) irrelevant. The
story of
The question presses, of
course, as to how paying attention to the story of Israel enables us to
understand what the New Testament writers are saying about the cross, not to
mention how we might, having understood, work toward a more biblical
formulation; or how all this integrates, as it must if it is to be true to
Jesus and the New Testament authors, with the Eucharist and the life of the
community that is formed around it. But the same point could, and perhaps should,
be made in relation to other doctrines, not only the atonement. Christology,
for instance, has, in my view, suffered in the Western tradition because of
people simply putting a checkmark in the "Jesus is divine" box
without really stopping to think which god they are talking about, what it
means within the biblical narrative to say such a thing, and how this
integrates properly, not merely accidentally, as it were, with the other box
that people will usually check," the "Jesus is human" box. The
signs that all is not well include, on the one hand, a kind of
"superman" theology wherein Jesus is "the man from outside"
coming with miraculous, "supernatural" power to "zap"
everything that is wrong, all conceived within a strictly dualistic view that
ends, not surprisingly, in his followers being miraculously "raptured" up to join him in "heaven," and,
on the other hand, an official acknowledgment that Jesus was human, which
nevertheless leads to no engagement whatsoever with the question of what it
meant to be Jesus of Nazareth, to live and think as a first-century Jew
longing for God's kingdom, to be possessed of a deep and radical vocation and
to construe that in terms and stories available to a first-century Jew, and so
on. The enormous resistance to this latter project tells its own story, which
cannot be reduced, in my view, simply to reaction against, say, the Jesus
Seminar and some of its sillier forebears.
The mention of the
"rapture" points to a further example of how not to connect the dots.
For many Christians, the question "Do you believe in the second
coming?" means, quite simply, "Do you believe in the
dispensationalist rapture doctrine?" and indeed there are some who would
love to believe in the genuine New Testament doctrine of the second coming who
feel obliged not to put a checkmark in the box because they cannot and will not
swallow the rapture. Rapture theology is what you get, in other words, when you
take the doctrine ("He will come again with glory to judge the living and
the dead, and of his kingdom there will be no end") and put it, first,
within a heaven-and-earth dualism in which the only point of human existence on
earth is to work out how to leave it with a ticket to the right destination,
and, second, within a very localized nineteenth-century reading of one
particular set of texts, especially 1 Thessalonians 4:17, which flesh out,
within that larger (wrong) story, what the "second coming" might look
like. Again, there is enormous resistance to any attempt within these supposedly
biblical circles to tell the genuinely biblical story about heaven and earth,
and new heavens and new earth, and about the good Creator God, who has promised
to unite them into one in Christ Jesus (Eph. 1:10, which itself stands at the
heart of a prayer story that is a Christ-and-Spirit-shaped version of a Jewish
creation-and-exodus celebration).
Many other examples could
be given, but I trust the point is taken. This leads me to a final observation.
What Does "Listening to Scripture" Actually
Mean?
Part of the long-term debilitating result of a
moribund and overly footnoted exegetical tradition—somewhat, we may suppose,
like the endless annotations upon annotations of the late medieval period—is
the apparent failure in many parts of today's church actually to engage with
Scripture or to listen to it with any seriousness. Here, of course, the normal
locus might be thought to be the sermon; however, in many Western churches, the
exegesis offered from the pulpit is bare and uninspiring and often is either
rather obvious or just plain eccentric. No doubt there are noble exceptions in
every direction, but I have an uncomfortable suspicion that most Western
Christians, at least in mainline denominations, know what I am talking about.
And if that pushes the emphasis elsewhere, where is that "elsewhere"?
In small Bible study groups? Fine, but do they produce fresh, vibrant readings
of Scripture that then can be passed up the food chain to the larger community?
In other groups of clergy and other ministers? Fine, but is this an exercise in
mutually assisted devotion rather than a real grappling with key passages and
issues with a view to taking some action? In synods? We draw a discreet veil
over the mere suggestion. In doctrine commissions and other similar groups?
Well, perhaps; but I must say, as one who has been a member of several such
bodies, that the best that one can normally hope for is flashes of insight
mixed with heavily negotiated compromise statements that end up reflecting not
just last century's exegesis, but the wrong bits of last century's exegesis.
Yet most churches include
in their formularies and/or statements of intent something about
"listening to Scripture" or even "listening to Scripture
together," and church members regularly refer back to this in their synod
debates and the like. Yes, sometimes noble efforts are made, such as at
successive Lambeth Conferences, where serious Bible
study has, thank God, been a major, important, and cross-cultural feature. But
my concern, granted that that is an exception, is twofold. First, ought we not
to be thinking hard about what could and perhaps should be done in this area,
aside from what we are currently doing (and not doing very well)? Second, is it
not at this point that there is a real danger of those who want to get the
church refocused and reenergized trying to do so by, as it were, going behind
the back of Scripture (lest we get bogged down in that moribund exegetical
tradition again!) and leaping straight for something called "doctrine"
instead?
That may be a false fear,
but it should perhaps be named just in case. I will not attempt to answer it,
but, in answer to the former question, it is worth drawing attention, within
the more catholic end of the church, to two phenomena. First, there is the
"Ignatian method" of reading Scripture,
normally done individually and normally for personal devotional engagement and
enrichment but sometimes perhaps in groups and with more wide-ranging results.
I am not aware that people tend to emerge from an Ignatian
meditation eager to go and put some fine-tuning into one or another of the
church's doctrines, but perhaps they should. Second, there is the liturgical
reading of Scripture, and particularly of the Gospel reading, as the climax and
focus of Scripture, seen as one mode of the personal presence of Jesus with the
worshiping congregation, symbolized by making the sign of the cross at the
Gospel reading during the Eucharist and at the "Gospel canticle" in
morning and evening prayer. I suspect that this phenomenon remains inarticulate
for most worshipers even in the traditions where it is the norm, but it is
likewise worth drawing out and reflecting upon.
Moreover, I am suggesting
that the Eucharist is in fact the primary and indeed dominical grid for understanding
Jesus' death. I recognize that the word understanding is actually changing in
meaning as I say that, so that it is forced to encompass physical and social
actions and realities as well as mental states and abstract ideas. It is
therefore perhaps germane to my more focused question that we might contemplate
the eucharistic reading of Scripture in terms of that reading being one part of
the necessary and formative action within which the Eucharist means what it
means. It thus enables God's people to "understand," in this deeper
sense of being grasped by the reality at every level, who Jesus the Messiah was
and is and what his death really did accomplish.
Scripture, Exegesis, Dogma, and Church:
Some Concluding Pauline Proposals
I know only too well,
from both sides of the table, as it were, the frustration felt by the preacher
or dogmatician who is told by the exegete, "The
text does not actually say that." I hope that the dogmatician
also recognizes the frustration that the exegete feels when told, precisely in
his or her effort to be obedient to one of the primary Reformation dogmas,
about Scripture itself, "Do not give us that exegetical mish-mash; we want
results, good solid doctrines that we can use and preach from." (Ernst Käsemann commented on this point in a typical statement
about those who are concerned only with "results" needing to keep
their hands off exegesis, because it has no use for them, nor they for it.[3] I understand his point, but I insist
that we must keep on trying.) I return,
instead, to the category of narrative. Rather than trying to filter out the
actual arguments that Paul is mounting in order to "get at" the
doctrines that, it is assumed, he is "expounding," I have stressed
that we must pay attention to those larger arguments and to the great story of
God, the world, Israel, and Jesus, giving special attention to the
"Israel" dimension, which is regularly screened out in dogma but is
regularly vital for Paul, and within which the cross means for him what it
means for him. Closer exegetical attention would show that what the tradition
has usually called "the atonement"—that "portable story"
within which so much implicit exegesis and dogma has been baggaged
up, sometimes uncomfortably—is not a suitcase that Paul employs. It is, perhaps,
a sub-suitcase, a compartment within his larger luggage—perhaps something akin
to the way Schweitzer saw justification as a Nebenkrater
within the "main crater" of "being in Christ," though of
course I disagree importantly if obliquely with his particular point. But it is
not the main thing that Paul is talking about.
Where
does that leave us in terms of the questions posed earlier on? To begin with,
it means that we must constantly struggle to hear Paul within the world of his
implicit, and often explicit, narratives, especially the great story that
starts with Abraham (itself understood as the new moment within the story that
starts with Adam and, indeed, with creation itself) and continues through Moses
to David and ultimately to the Messiah. Protecting Paul from that story—that is
not too strong a way to put the matter—has been a major preoccupation both of
some academic exegetes who have wanted to locate him solely within a
Hellenistic world and of some dogmaticians and
preachers who have wanted to make sure that he is relevant to, and addresses
clearly, the pastoral and evangelistic issues of which they are aware. But it
is precisely at this point, as I have stressed, that the doctrine of
Scripture's own authority presses upon us. By what right do we take Scripture
and find ways to make it talk about the things that we want it to talk about?
I
suggest, in fact, that the key point is to develop more particularly our
reflections on the way in which Scripture is used, heard, and lived with within
the actual life of the actual church. The belittling of Scripture into a short
and puzzling noise that intrudes upon our liturgy here and there is dangerous
and destructive, especially, of course, in churches where there is not even
much a strong dogma to take its place. And the use of Scripture as the peg to
preach sermons that the tradition, even the evangelical or Protestant
tradition, has decreed we ought to preach is always in danger of self-delusion.
In short, we have to discern and attempt ways of letting Scripture be heard not
only when it says something that we understand but want to disagree with (that
is where "the authority of Scripture" normally bites), but also when
it says something that we do not understand because we have carefully screened
out, or never even imagined, the narrative world within which it makes sense.
One of the main ways this needs to be done is, of
course, through sustained teaching by preachers and teachers who are themselves
soaked in Scripture. Fair enough. But I do think that our churches and parachurch organizations could and should do more to help
people understand the great narrative of Scripture, by sustained readings,
public and private, by drawing attention to the great narrative themes and
encouraging people to explore them, by discouraging the nonnarratival
or deconstructive songs that have swept in through today's cheerful and
unthinking postmodernity, and by encouraging and
creating new words and music to get the great themes into people's heads and
hearts. All these suggestions remain a great challenge at the level of pastoral
and ecclesial practice. But I think, as well, that at the academic level we
need to see far more open exchange between serious historical exegesis—not done
in a corner or by bracketing out questions of meaning, doctrine, and life but
instead engaging with the realities of which the text speaks—and a dogmatic
theology that itself remains open to being told that it has misread some of its
own key texts. This, in other words, will be a dogmatic theology that itself
does not hide in a corner or bracket out questions of history, text, and
original sense.
We are once again at the
fault line bequeathed to us by our Western culture, not just in modernity but
going back at least as far as the medieval period; and if we are ever to have
any hope of straddling that crack without falling down into it, the doctrine
called "authority of Scripture" (which declares that Scripture is the
way through which God the Holy Trinity activates, through the Spirit, the authority
that the Father has delegated to the Son) insists that it is by paying
attention to Scripture itself that we will find not only the bridges over the
chasm but also the means to make the earth move once more and bring back
together what should never have been separated in the first place. If
reflecting briefly on Paul's doctrine of reconciliation helps us to glimpse a
pathway toward the reconciliation of two camps within the church that have been
circling one another suspiciously for far too long, and perhaps two personality
types that have projected themselves a little too enthusiastically into that
polarization, I think that Paul himself would heave a sigh of relief and
suggest that now, reunited, it might be time to get on with the task of
coherent living and preaching the gospel.
[1] Wright,
N. T. 2005. Scripture and the
Authority of God.
[2] Jenson,
Robert W. 2006. “On the Doctrine of Atonement.” CTI
Reflections 9:1-13.
[3] Käsemann, Ernst.
1980: viii. Commentary
on Romans. Trans. G. W. Bromiley.
Scripture’s
Doctrine and Theology’s Bible: How the New Testament Shapes Christian Dogmatics is available for purchase online at