Theological Interpretation of Scripture

The second session I went to at SBL was dramatically different from the first. This was the “Theological Hermeneutics of Christian Scripture.” The specific topic under discussion was “Christ in/and the Old Testament”. It was moderated by Christopher Seitz and consisted of ten minute presentation by Kathryn Greene-Mccreight (St John's Episcopal Church), Robert Wall (Seattle Pacific University), John Goldingay (Fuller Theological Seminary), Christopher Wright (Langham Partnership International), and Murray Rae (University of Otago) followed by forty five minutes of discussion. In my opinion the presentations themselves were not that interesting, as the panelists simply repeated key basic ideas from their work, and ten minutes was not enough time to give much that was interesting. But when the questions started coming in the discussion became much more interesting. There was a fairly strong divide on the panel between those more in tune with theological interpretation of Scripture (Seitz, Greene-Mccreight, Wall, and Rae) and those opposed (Goldingay and Wright).

There seemed to be two main issues getting discussed. One was a metaphor that had been made by Wright in his presentation. He said that when he was on a train to Edinburgh, he was heading towards Edinburgh but the scenery was not Edinburgh. Similarly, while the OT is christotelic, heading towards Christ, Christ is not found in every OT text. When one looks back, the scenery makes sense as going towards Edinburgh, but that is only a small glimpse and only in hindsight. In response, Murray noted that the voice of Jesus is waiting for us Edinburgh and we shouldn’t be too concerned about the scenery, and Greene-Mccreight said that we are in Edinburgh, not on the train anymore. Wright later said that we need to read the OT not just in light of the Gospel but also in light of Revelation: The first advent is not the end of the story. So, in a sense, (my spin here) we are in not Edinburgh yet, but we passed a key via point on the way to Edinburgh. There was discussion about how to preach OT stories, with Goldingay and Wright wanting us to focus on what God was saying through those texts to the Israelites, while the other panelist wanted to see more of a Christocentric perspective. Wright noted that Luke 24 says that Jesus began with the Scriptures, not himself, when he talked with his disciples.

The other major topic was the role of the rule of faith. Goldingay bluntly stated that “the rule of faith is a disaster”. No beating around the bush here! He didn’t explicate much what he meant, but it seems that he didn’t want later meaings being read as the meaning of the earlier text. He explicitly said he wanted to stay with the meaning/significance bifurcation, not what the text means today. Seitz said that we should get rid of the terminology of the rule of faith since all it does is cause confusion and that in his ears the rule of faith does not mean creed. Greene-Mccreight said that the rule of faith was useful for ruling out false interpretations like Mormonism, which is a mistake (after saying this she apparently realized she was at SBL and one does not say things like this at SBL and so backtracked a little bit to tone down her rejection of Mormonism). All in all, this was a fascinating discussion and I only wish that all the SBL sessions could be so interesting.

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