Tag Archives: canon

A New Hearing for an Old Word

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Alongside these editorial and compositional factors, moreover, are important hermeneutical signals that must be studied and assessed for their proper proportionality and significance. The juxtaposing of late and early is not just a matter of the clever matching of kindred themes or catchwords or the tidying up of historical gaps and inconsistencies after the fact.

He we approach the heart of canonical reading, that is, that aspect of God’s word to Israel that continues to press for a hearing and addresses new generations with an old word, borne of a specific time and specific application and, without shedding that, moving forward through time to enclose new readers and new situations.

Christopher Seitz, Prophecy and Hermeneutics, 239, paragraphing and italics mine

Seitz makes a very important point about the canonical approach that I think distinguishes it from hard historical-grammatical approaches and fluffy reader-response orientations.

A canonical reading continues to press for a hearing and addresses new generations with an old word. In order for the old word to apply to us we do not need to vicariously inhabit the world of pre-exilic Israel awaiting an impending judgment, nor a Second Temple Judaism that may have some serious issues with ethnocentrism. This old word continues to press for a hearing right now where we’re at in the economy of salvation.

And it is, in fact, an old word. This is to say that it does have a determinant meaning. The author did mean something. The text does mean something. Our task is not creative, but exegetical. And the conviction that drives our exegesis situates “exegesis” within a larger framework of God’s revelation. Exegesis cannot be the mere decoding of texts shrouded by centuries of historical and cultural differences. Exegesis is the turning of our ears toward an old word that continues to press for a hearing.

Why is Hosea First? – Seitz and Canonical Thinking

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Seitz offers three reasons for why Hosea is the first of the Minor Prophets although it does not rank first chronologically.

  1. “Hosea introduces the them of YHWH’s patience and urges its centrality by clear intertextual links to the foundational account of Moses and God’s forbearance at Sinai following the golden calf incident (the names of Hosea’s children, ‘not my people’ and ‘no compassion,’ play on the dialogues between God and Moses in Exodus about whose people the murmuring Israelites are and on the compassionate and merciful formula from Exod. 33-34″ (234).
  2. “Second, Hosea ends with an exhortation to the reader, and in this sense it is similar to other reader-directed shaping such as we find at another beginning: Psalm 1 of the Psalter collection” (235).
  3. Third, this bit of canonical shaping is preceded by a lengthy call to repentance (14:1-7 [14:2-8 MT[) whose force does not take hold within the compass of Hosea as an individual book. It is a bit of final introduction from Hosea that sits now over the journey on which one is about to embark in the unfolding of the Minor Prophets as a whole” (235).

Christopher Seitz, Prophecy and Hermeneutics, numbering mine

Seitz: Canonical Reading as the Appropriate Historical Reading

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My more contentious point is that those who claim that their reading is more historically appropriate–a reading in which the individual prophets are isolated from one another, recast according to date, and placed in a reconstructed temporal context–are actually the ones who are not reading the prophets sufficiently historically, for final canonical form is also a piece of history, belonging to decisions made in the past about how an ancient prophetic witness is finally to be heard.

Christopher Seitz, Prophecy and Hermeneutics, 233

Seitz and the Turn from Man to Text

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Seitz begins in Lindbeck categories by highlighting the “experiential-expressive” readings that characterizes some historical-critical approaches. In this case it is George Adam Smith and his commentary on the Minor Prophets in the early 20th century. Smith is an easy example of theologians who really sought to get behind the text and live in the world of the biblical author. Such an approach ignores the canon and attempts to breathe in the “clear desert air” that the prophets themselves inhabited before what they said became “writings collected in a sacred book” (think Jowett).

Seitz notes,

“By focusing on historical retrieval of an author and his intentions, it is possible to lay bare a dimension of the Old Testament that, in spite of its rhetorical potential, cannot be reattached to the way the New hears the Old” (228).

In other words, you can do that if you want to but that’s not the way the apostles read the Hebrew Scriptures.

Seitz hopes to give us a fresh look at the Book of the Twelve. He writes,

My hope in so doing is to show that the turn from man to text, from recovered individual personality to the collective witness of the final-form presentation of the Twelve as a whole, need not rob the exposition of its rhetorical power nor its existential engagement with new generations of readers (230).

In other words, you don’t have to psycho-analyze the biblical authors in order to make their message “preach.” Preach the prophets as Holy Scripture.

Day 9: Authority and the Canon

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“…because Holy Scripture is the authoritative canon, holy reason finds there its norm. To say that Holy Scripture is the authoritative canon is to say that this determinate collection of writings, received and read as a unified God-given prophetic and apostolic testimony, legitimately claims the acknowledgement, assent and obedience of the Church and its theology. The authority of Scripture for holy reason is Scripture’s Spirit-bestowed capacity to quicken theology to truthful thought and speech. Truthful thought and speech follow the given order of reality. … the authority of Scripture is a matter for the Churh’s acknowledgement, not its ascription. Authority cannot be conferred on Scripture by the Church or by its theology, but only greeted as that which legitimately commands the activity of reason. As such, Scripture’s authority is not at all abstract or merely formal; it is a servant of the living voice of God as truth that enables the Church to live from and in the truth.

John Webster, Holiness, 19ff.

So Which Interpretation is Right?

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The canon is the ancient witness to what God has already accomplished and it is also the ongoing reminder of what He has yet to consummate. It is the covenant record of His past faithfulness and the unwavering promise of His faithfulness in that which is yet to come. What fits into this far exceeds the human conjectures of any interpretative community.

We must submit our (or any) interpretation of Scripture to the canon, that is, to the greater reality of what God is doing through Jesus Christ and by His Spirit.

Vanhoozer writes:

Dramatic fittingness with what God has done in Christ is the supreme criterion for truth, goodness, and beauty alike…

Christo-dramatic fittingness means canonical fittingness. We must think through the canon in order rightly to think about Jesus Christ. The standard of fittingness is specification of this “whole and complete” action. Sounds doctrine is distinguished from the dross of mere opinion only because the former accords with the commissioned testimony of the biblical authors and the latter does not.

Vanhoozer, Drama, 258

Vanhoozer on the Canon

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The canon is the abiding theological witness to God’s pattern of communicative action in Israel and in Jesus Christ. As theo-dramatic script, the canon is witness to what God has done. As covenant document, the canon is witness to the solemn agreement that binds God and God’s people together…

The canon, seen in light of its connection to the covenant, is much more than a theological slide rule or criterion for true propositions. It has a properly soteriological purpose as well. The notion of covenant document helps to put the canon into proper perspective, with regard to form and content alike. As to content, Scripture depicts the history of God’s covenantal relations to humanity, including those divine communicative acts—promises, warnings, commands, consolations—that witness to what God was doing in Christ. As to form, the canon is an authoritative and binding witness to the fact, and the terms, of covenant relationship. The canon is thus the instrument through which the Spirit of God ministers and administers the covenant today. The origin (and hence the authority) of the canonical Scriptures is thus far removed from that of human constitutions.

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Drama of Doctrine, 138ff.

We Don’t Want to ‘Stand in God’s Way’

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“If then God gave the same gift to them as he gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could stand in God’s way?””

(Acts 11:17 ESV)

 

The Holy Spirit has been given to Gentiles when we get here in Acts 11. Peter is retelling the event to his Jewish brethren. I cannot think of a more ‘hands-free’ response, or bigger understatement, than what Peter says here. Who was I that I could stand in God’s way? Or how can I hinder God? Peter doesn’t want to stand in God’s way. We don’t want to stand in God’s way. 

 

If we bring that sentence into our own world and make it the a mantra of the church, what would it look like? None of us wants to stand in “God’s way.” And to be sure, that is the real issue. What is “God’s way?” What action of His are we in danger of opposing? Could we plant our ‘inhibiting feet’ right in the middle of the divine course? Different groups on the interpretative spectrum will say different things, especially those who creatively speculate and let the community have the final say.

 

“God’s way” in Acts 11:17 is a loaded phrase. Literally, it is just God. We don’t want to oppose Him and Luke assumes that his readers know something about Him. Gentiles believing in Jesus is not some event that happens in a vacuum. It is not as if God gets spontaneous here and throws a little grace out on the ‘other guys.’ God is not like that. His way is not like that. Peter says what he says in the midst of a story. Remember God’s promise to Abraham, “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed”…

 

We too are in the midst of this great narrative of redemption that reaches back, culminates in the covenant love of Jesus on the cross, and then points us forward. We know God’s way, not by the conjectures of our own charitable imaginations, but by looking at the story. The story, the canon, our script. There God has the final say about Himself and His way. 

 

Who are we to look anywhere else if we don’t want to stand in God’s way?