Pulp Fiction Hermeneutics: Jules and Vincent

Spoiler alert.

In some circles, it seems the point of biblical interpretation is to control the field of possible interpretations. Some do it by providing "rules" for sound exegesis, though that's going out of fashion. At the moment I'm more concerned by people who suppose that claims concerning the Bible's inspiration, even divine authorship, will guarantee sound interpretive results.

Even the highest views of biblical inspiration don't solve the question of interpretation. If we just looked at the Christian bodies who confess such views, we'll see how frequently they dispute with one another. I don't think that kind of resolution deserves serious reflection.

What I want is a way of talking about interpretive diversity while recognizing that some interpretations are more persuasive than others. I take a clue from two of my favorite fictional characters Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction.

Jules and Vincent are hit men who work together. Near the beginning of the movie they execute a small group of aspiring drug dealers who have fallen out with their boss. Jules quotes a chilling passage from Ezekiel, and the room is cleared of victims. Unbeknownst to Jules and Vincent, however, there's one more kid hiding in the bathroom. The young man jumps out and yells, "Die! Die! Die! Die! Die!" while he empties his pistol directly at the faces of Jules and Vincent.

At this point we don't see the two hit men. We watch the boy's face fall into dejection, just before the bullets blow him out of the frame.... Fade to black before the next scene.

What just happened? The film takes a long time returning to the question, returning to the earlier scene just after the young man fires at Jules and Vincent. Now we see the two hit men, who coolly dispatch their assailant with a hail of bullets.

Here's how the script reads at this point.

Jules, obviously shaken, sits down in a chair. Vincent, after a moment of respect, shrugs it off. Then heads toward Marvin in the corner....

JULES (to himself): We should be fuckin' dead right now. (pause) Did you see that gun he fired at us? It was bigger than him.

VINCENT: .357.

JULES: We should be fuckin' dead!

VINCENT: Yeah, we were lucky.

Jules rises, moving toward Vincent.

JULES: That shit wasn't luck. That shit was somethin' else.

Vincent prepares to leave.

VINCENT: Yeah, maybe.

JULES: That was...divine intervention.

Hours later, Jules and Vincent schlep into a coffee shop. As always, their brilliant dialogue wins the moment. It returns to the same debate. While Vincent blows off the notion that they'd experienced anything but luck, Jules reflects on the miracle's significance:

It could be God stopped the bullets, he changed Coke into Pepsi, he found my fuckin' car keys. You don't judge shit like this based on merit. Whether or not what we experienced was an according-to-Hoyle miracle is insignificant. What is significant is I felt God's touch, God got involved.

Jules resolves to quit his gangster activities, while Vincent goes his own way. The outcome? (Spoiler, spoiler, spoiler.) It has everything to do with how their lives turn out.

I'd suggest the miracle has something to teach us about biblical interpretation. There's a "text." There's no doubt what happened. Vincent and Jules would agree on the basic events they experienced together. But agreeing on the words on the page does not resolve the matter of what those words mean. How we perceive them requires interpretive choices -- and those choices are the products of temperament, experiences, and socialization. No matter what we say to "bind" the meaning of that text, interpretation eludes our control.

Reading Hebrews Theologically

I just submitted a review of the anthology, The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology (Eerdmans, 2009). The chapters started out as papers at the 2006 St. Andrews Conference on Scripture and Theology, the second in a series of such events. The first (2003) involved the Gospel of John, and a third (2009) Genesis.

What's special about this book -- and these conferences -- is that it puts biblical scholars in direct conversation with doctrinal theologians. I've heard, from one of the book's editors, that the conversations were sometimes contentious. But the main thing is, this book testifies to the range of ways we might engage the Bible theologically.

I like to think of it as a spectrum.

• On one end, usually inhabited by biblical scholars, we have the inductive-thematic approach. Here we look at Hebrews with a specific question in mind (the trick is how to identify the right questions), and we sift through Hebrews for passages that relate specifically to that question. A little mixture of historical- and rhetorical-critical analysis might help, too, but basically the approach amounts to gathering the passages, interpreting them, and weighing the evidence. Richard Bauckham's essay on christology provides an example of an excellent scholar doing this sort of work.
• Theologians might be more comfortable at the other end of the spectrum, with its more tradition-sensitive approach. Here you begin with the "rule of faith" or a doctrinal tradition, bring it to Hebrews, and see how that theological tradition enlightens the text. Bruce McCormack's essay works through key figures in Reformed christology to ask how the death of God's Son relates to God's eternal and unchanging being in Hebrews. Brilliant stuff.

Conflict. Inductive-thematic people are gonna look at the tradition-sensitive ones and say, "You don't even listen to the text; you just impose your doctrine on it. The text has no autonomy with you." In reply, the tradition-sensitive folk will say, "You're so naive, you don't realize that interpretation without presuppositions is impossible. That's why your interpretations don't speak to the life of the church."

But here's the thing. You can't find a "pure" example of either approach in this volume. Both ends of the spectrum, the open-ended curiosity and the tradition-grounded engagement, are necessary for any enlightening interpretation of the Bible. Some of the essays in the volume (John Polkinghorne's, for example), work both ways -- and with insight. That's why I recommend this book -- it demonstrates the variety of approaches to theological interpretation, but it doesn't provide a too-easy answer to our questions.

Stephen Fowl's Theological Interpretation of Scripture, #4 on Hermeneutics

For such a short book, Steven Fowl’s Theological Interpretation of Scripture covers lots of significant – and sophisticated – territory. That’s one sign of a very good book. My earlier posts have emphasized Fowl’s account of contemporary biblical scholarship, particularly historical criticism, and its relationship to theological interpretation. In this post we’ll focus on questions of how theological interpreters find meaning in scriptural texts.

Negotiating some notoriously difficult problems, Fowl offers some terrific insights. For example, Fowl rejects the attempt to propose a grand Theory (capital T) of textual meaning. Instead, he offers a more pragmatic (and I think, reasonable) approach: rather than specifying what a text “means,” we should instead clarify what kind of meaning we’re pursuing. In his words, “what our specific interpretive aims are in particular cases” (42). And on the question of authorial intent, Fowl wisely notes that we can never know an author’s intent, which is a psychological state now lost to us. But we may advance reasonable guesses concerning an author’s “communicative intention” (46-47). Nevertheless, even that goal falls short of a “primary or determinative consideration” for theological interpretation. Sometimes texts speak to us beyond the designs envisioned by their authors, and that can be a very good – and Spirit driven – thing.

Unfortunately, this brings us to the question of how the “Old Testament” speaks to us today. Again, Fowl falls upon the notion that God is the ultimate author of Scripture. As I’ve suggested, this idea explains nothing and presents more problems than it solves. That’s the case with finding Christian meaning in the Scriptures of Israel, which are now our Scriptures as well. Obviously (I agree with Fowl here) Christians will find Christian meaning in the “Old Testament.” We and they always have.

But that’s a very different argument than saying God secretly embedded Jesus messages in, say, Isaiah, for Christians to discover later. That argument suggests at least two problematic implications. First, it’s problematic to assume that Isaiah did not speak fully and adequately to the people of Israel. And second, it portrays Israel – and Jews to this day – as people who didn’t fully “get” the message of their own Scriptures. Like so many attempts to avoid anti-Jewish sentiments, this approach just moves the problem down the line. It doesn’t solve the problem of anti-Jewish interpretation.

Finally, Fowl proposes practices and habits of theological interpretation. I’ll commend the first and third with minimal comment. Like other advocates of the “theological interpretation” movement, Fowl turns to pre-modern interpretation for insight. Fowl does not call for an uncritical appropriation of pre-modern readings but for engagement with the broad sweep of the church. Absolutely! I might add that Fowl should also consider contemporary interpretation on a global scale, which is absent from his book. Believing that much conflict occurs because Christians interpret the Bible without regard for one another, Fowl also seeks to locate interpretation in the context of ecclesial practices. Amen.

Fowl’s second proposal may find more controversy, though I’m largely sympathetic to it. Fowl recommends “figural interpretation.” I may quibble with how Fowl defines “literal” interpretation, but I think Fowl is onto something important. We scholars often ridicule and reject interpretations that use the Bible as a springboard – or a pretext – for some bizarre contemporary application. We may deride seeing the parable of the Good Samaritan as a story about the journey of the soul from condemnation to salvation. However, all interpretation that finds contemporary relevance in ancient scriptures requires a leap of the imagination, some sort of figural reasoning. The point, I think, is to be honest about how we’re doing it, to engage in such interpretation in conversation with one another and the trajectories of the church, and to participate in practices of critical discernment. I’m grateful to Fowl for making me think about figural interpretation more thoroughly and for many other insights.

Stephen Fowl's Theological Interpretation of Scripture, 3: more on historical criticism

This is the third reflection on Stephen Fowl's important little book, Theological Interpretation of Scripture -- the second on his discussion of historical criticism. My most recent reflection engaged the question of how historical criticism related to theological interpretation. This one addresses three concerns Fowl raises with respect to historical criticism.

First, Fowl maintains that the ethos of historical criticism leads to "the policing of the scholar's confessional stance" (19). Fowl raises a significant point. Many of us recall being told to distinguish between "exegesis" and "eisegesis," to resist imposing our theological presuppositions upon the biblical text. Those of us who considered literary theory, cultural studies, and hermeneutics (in the context of philosophy) learned how to question that objectivist approach; we learned that one's convictions and presuppositions are necessary not only for interpretation but for learning as well.

During the 90s in particular, many of us included confessional pieces in our scholarly work: "As a white male heterosexual from a professional class Southern revivalist background...." Such disclosure performed a valuable function, but it also had a tendency to reduce interpretation to nature and nurture. Fowl might add, we tended to emphasize demographics over faith traditions.

Thus, many of us would regard Fowl's criticism with sympathy. Indeed, theological interpretation could open its doors to acknowledge that questions of ethnicity, gender, privilege, and sexuality are as much theological concerns as are identities such as Reformed, Lutheran, or Orthodox.

At the same time, I want to hold on to an aspect of that historical critical self-policing. Impossible as objectivity is, its aim was not to eliminate theology but to clear space for conversation and imagination. In other words, the ability to withhold judgment is a hermeneutical virtue, as is the capacity to see beyond one's own frame of reference. In place of objectivity, historical criticism does allow for self-criticism and an openness to dialogue. Fowl does not acknowledge this potential, and that concerns me. How do we learn if we don't combine a chastened objectivity with a passionate engagement?

Second, Fowl maintains that historical criticism tends to elevate the historical reliability of texts above their theological significance. (That's how I understand his discussion on p. 20.) Indeed, such a problem has occurred, but I might add this: after centuries of historical analysis, it's religious conservatives who tend to be preoccupied with historical reliability. The rest of us have largely moved on.

In my view, historical questions open up lots of room for theological reflection. Our historical judgments can never determine theological truth, but they surely can enlighten theological conversation.

To take one prominent example, many interpreters of Paul are now convinced that "justification by faith" was not the core of Paul's gospel. Paul's gospel, we think, was a story: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. This story presupposes other stories about the God of Israel and the life of Jesus, and it creates the possibility for the church.

Yet Galatians and Romans, in particular, argue for justification by faith. And the Reformation traditions have built not only theologies but pieties upon Paul's brilliant insight. People's faith experiences now reflect the model. Are we to ditch justification by faith because of a historical insight?

Well, no. A historical approach to Paul suggests that "justification by faith" emerged as a pastoral response to conflict. When Paul addresses the question of Gentiles in the churches, he argues from justification by faith. In other words, Paul applies his gospel to the circumstances of his churches, leading to a profound theological truth. Isn't it wonderful how conflict often generates revelation? And isn't this a theological interpretation based on historical analysis?

One might add at this point that John Calvin himself was an excellent theological interpreter of Scripture who used all the tools of historical criticism at his disposal. While Calvin predated source, form, and redaction criticism, his commentaries are filled with discussions of text criticism, philological investigations, and assessments of Paul's circumstances and motives -- all aimed toward pastoral interpretation for the people of God.

Third, Fowl maintains that historical approaches led to the biblical theology movement. That movement, according to Fowl, began to systematically catalogue the diverse theological points of view of ancient Israel and the church. It emphasized historical developments and diversity at the expense of a larger, more unified view. The movement rarely developed insights that fostered love of God and love of neighbor.

The biblical theology movement has been open to many criticisms, often from within and beginning very long ago. However, I would defend one key insight of the movement. Fowl and other proponents of "theological interpretation of Scripture" tend to emphasize the unity of Scripture, whereas the biblical theology movement often underscored the Bible's theological diversity.

In my view, the church at its best has held both emphases in tension. Tatian's Diatessaron sought to boil down the Gospels to one coherent story. But churches all over the Mediterranean celebrated four diverse Gospels. These people were not naive; they fully knew that the Gospels represented diverse, sometimes conflicting, points of view -- and they treasured that diversity above a false and imposed unity.

When I teach my introductory course, "Jesus and the Gospels," a basic learning goal is for students to appreciate the distinctive voice of each of the Gospels. Yes, that goal complicates naive faith. But for those who have ears to hear, such sensitivity plays the Gospels in stereo and enriches the spirit.

With respect to historical criticism and biblical theology, Fowl raises significant issues that merit discussion. In general, however, he understates the contributions of historical approaches to theological interpretation.

Coming Soon: Stephen E. Fowl on Theological Interpretation of Scripture

We're near the end of our series on neglected passages, and I'd like to invite readers to check out an important new book: Stephen E. Fowl, Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Cascade, 2009). Checking in at just 75 pages, plus back matter, and $13.00, this little book would be great for discussion groups, pastors, and seminarians. The folks at Cascade/Wipf & Stock were kind enough to forward a review copy, and I'll be engaging it chapter by chapter over the coming weeks. So if you'd like to read along, please do so!

I'm only a little way into the book, but here's my hunch. My overall disposition toward Fowl's work is overwhelmingly positive, but my replies will emphasize points of divergence, critique, and refinement -- all aimed toward expanding the category of theological interpretation and inviting others to participate.

Beyond Fowl's book, I've also committed to review BibleWorks 8.0 (at a basic user level, not a technical level) and N. T. Wright's Justification.

Continuing the Conversation: Why Read the Bible at All?

Continuing the conversation about theological interpretation, Christopher Spinks commented on my most recent entry, "toward what end(s) are these people of faith engaging scripture?" and "why do they feel the need to engage this particular set of texts and not another?" Two different questions, but good ones.

Oddly enough, I'm speaking on this very topic Monday night in Lancaster's Theology on Tap series at Annie Bailey's pub. Some quick thoughts, beginning with the second question, why this Bible?

My basic reply is pragmatic. We turn to the Bible because it is our book. When I read David Tracy's The Analogical Imagination, gosh, 15 years ago, I didn't like his concept of the Bible as a "classic." I wanted to be able to say that something inheres in the Bible that makes it special. However, I can't find a meaningful way to articulate that. (More on that below.) So I return to a more pragmatic understanding.

The Bible is our book because we continue to practice the reading and interpretation of it. We continue to invite scripture to shape our imaginations and conversations. But we do not -- and have never -- given the Bible the final or only word. One might add something else, but this claim has some problems: The Bible provides our primary witness to the story of God and our people. That's sort of true, but spelling out the qualifications would take more time than I can give. Anyway, this understanding of the Bible as our book implies some responses to the first question, "to what end" we read it.

• We read it because it connects us with the church through the ages and around the world.
• We read it in search of the transforming power of God, because the church frequently testifies to the power of God at work on our reading of scripture.
• We read it to find inspiration, transformation, challenge, and comfort.
• We read it to shape our imaginations and our questions -- that is, to shape us.

None of those claims can avoid challenge. On occasion the Bible has been used to great harm. It hasn't even taken a lot of effort to turn the Bible toward the legitimation of slavery, apartheid, misogyny, and heterosexism. Thank God, a neat thing happens: even in those painful conversations the Bible challenges the Bible, and in the long run things work out. (Here I'm influenced by cultural studies on African American biblical hermeneutics -- see essays by Clarice J. Martin and Allen Dwight Callahan in Semeia 83/84, Slavery in Text and Interpretation, ed. Callahan, Richard A. Horsley, and Abraham Smith.)

I would argue that this pragmatic understanding is grounded in history. We got the Bible because people went to great pains to copy it. As Jewish and Christian literature multiplied, we find Christian leaders saying, "Here's what we'll read in church (and not the other stuff)." That's essentially what Luther is doing in translating the Bible. He includes James and Hebrews, but he notes his major problems with both. On James, he describes the problem in precisely a pragmatic vein: It's okay to read it, even if Luther could do without it. In other words, we do in fact read the Bible because our ancestors have read it.

I also made a negative claim, that I can't make sense of saying meaning, inspiration, or authority inheres to the Bible. What about that?

• The church, ecumenically considered, does not have a single Bible. For most NT authors, the Bible was Greek versions of Jewish scriptures, not the Old Testament we have today. For the author of Jude, the Bible included the Book of Enoch. For the Ethiopic church, Enoch remains in the canon. What Bible are we talking about, and how do we defend the definition? (Quick footnote: Of course we Protestants read scripture in the context of the whole. I'm simply saying that whole isn't "natural" or inherent.)
• To ascribe inherent value to the Bible implies something about the status of biblical books in relation to other books. I have no desire to change the canon of my church. However, I defy anyone to explain how the epistle of Jude offers more wisdom than, say, 4 Ezra.
  
• Many, many persons have lived exemplary Christian lives without ever reading the Bible -- or hearing it in any level of detail. Obviously, the Bible is a huge part of the context, but the authority for their Christian lives did not reside in the Bible.
• I avoid attributing properties to the Bible because believing the "right things" about the Bible has never guaranteed healthy interpretation. In fact, I'm not sure there's any evidence that such belief would foster healthy interpretation.
  
• The main reason I don't believe authority inheres in the Bible is spelled out in my recent entries. The Bible doesn't speak with a unified voice, nor can we assume that taking the Bible as a whole will result in a coherent voice. If we're honest about the Bible, we know that there are dimensions of it (notice, I didn't say "parts") that we privilege and others that we don't. (This is not to say that we have any business skipping by dimensions of scripture -- or parts of it, for that matter. I'm committed to engaging the whole of scripture.) Such decisions are not -- and cannot -- be traced to some inherent pattern we find in the Bible. They are instead the product of communal discernment, usually informal discernment, over a long period of time.

One sometimes hears the dramatic story of a hotel room conversion. On the brink of despair, sometimes suicide, a person opens the nightstand and pulls out their Gideon Bible. Upon reading it, God's love breaks through to them and they find salvation.

I don't doubt the storyline, but let's think about that critically. What drives someone to open the Bible? There's already a context of a faith community that has somehow implanted the thought that the Bible might contain answers. If they open the drawer to find a Dear Abby anthology, or even the Gita or the Qu'ran, the story would work differently, yes? And what about that Bible? Are we to think they just randomly open to, say, Hosea and the love of God broke through to them? Mark? But wait a minute. Gideon Bibles always come with packaging. There's a guide to how to read the Bible there, complete with recommended verses (and page numbers? I'm not sure). In other words, we don't have the Bible speaking on its own to a lone individual; we have communities of faith and conventions of interpretation surrounding this event. That's how the Bible comes to life.

One final thought. The things I'm saying are not the result of modernist historical criticism, nor of postmodern linguistics. I'm a product of both, of course. However, these concerns go at least as far back as Augustine and Origen. Early Christians knew the Bible was messy; for that matter, neither Augustine nor Origen had a fixed canon that matches ours. That is why they developed principles of interpretation to guide communities in their reading of scripture, including allegorical exegesis and the law of love. Scripture comes to life when we read it in the context of walking the path of faith along with our brothers and sisters.

More on Theological Interpretation

Christopher Spinks has been kind enough to respond to the blog post on "Theological Interpretation of Scripture." Replying to another blogger, Seth Heringer, Christopher rightly denies that theological interpretation is an academic discipline and that professional biblical scholars should rule the day in biblical interpretation.

Christopher then turns to my blog, where I wrote, "I’m not convinced the [theological interpretation] movement has fully faced the complications implied in the questions it is asking," and he asks what questions do I have in mind. Well, a few -- if he'll indulge me in a few generalizations. I'm not active in the movement, and I don't know the range of works he does. I'll really stick with one question, answered in multiple ways in the theological interpretation movement. These answers stand in complementary, not competitive, relationship to one another.

The question: "What kind of book is the Bible?"

Several folks in the movement recommend we should read scripture primarily as story. While I'm sympathetic to that point of view, strongly so, this model opens the path for all sorts of questions. Scot McKnight, for example, tells us what the story is in The Blue Parkeet. But surely the Bible resists such reduction and essentializing. The Bible tells many stories, woven into and against one another. While I'm willing to talk about how all the stories relate to a big story, I would insist that we'll never arrive at consensus on what that one story is. Well, creation and redemption, perhaps. But that's not the whole of scripture by any means. So the question, "What kind of book is the Bible?" opens the way to lots of questions, not a single answer.

Another item. Christopher refers to the Bible as "divine discourse." I have to admit, I have no earthly idea what that means. Does it mean God is the ultimate source of the Bible? God is the ultimate source of everything. Does it mean God spoke directly through the authors? Well, I don't buy that. What does it mean? May I suggest that this answer to the "What kind of book" question tends to locate the Bible's significance in the past?

I'm fully aware that's not what Christopher means. He clearly believes God continues to speak through scripture. But would it not be better not to link the "divine" bit to the text but to the process to which the church testifies down the ages? Isn't "Bible" here shorthand for something wonderful that happens when people read the Bible? And if that's what it means, what about the awful things that also happen when people read the Bible? More questions from the one question.

Finally, several theological interpretation authors claim that God is the Bible's subject matter. Another essentialist reduction of the question, "What kind of book is the Bible?" Again, are we talking about the text of the Bible, its authors, or our tradition and practice of reading it? If we mean either of the first two, the claim that the Bible is "about" God falls flat in front of the evidence. Often it is about God; often it's about politics, ethnicity, sex, and so forth. We might step back and say the Bible situates all those things in the context of God, but one might as easily reply that the Bible also appeals to God as a pretext for some of those conversations. And if we mean that God is the subject of our reading of the Bible -- that is, that we read the Bible in search for God -- then, no, I don't accept that. I dearly expect to encounter God in the practice of reading scripture. But that's not the only question I have. It's not helpful to prescribe reading in that way.

The gist of my overall reply is to say this. Our generalizations about the Bible emerge from our desire to find some essential essence for the Bible. I often share that desire; sometimes I don't. Therefore, I resist any attempt to define the Bible's essence in the process of defining theological interpretation. I prefer a more open, more pragmatic, approach, as spelled out earlier: theological interpretation of the Bible happens when people of faith engage scripture in the praxis of living the life of faith and in the context of the broader historical and global church.

And I fully apologize for referring to Christopher by the surname Sparks.

"Theological Interpretation of Scripture"

Last week I posted concerning the emerging evangelical conversation about the Bible. In a conversation on another venue, an esteemed friend mentioned an influential movement with which I have only entry-level familiarity. It goes under the label, "Theological Interpretation of Scripture." This conversation has succeeded in doing some of the things I'm hoping to do in reaching out to evangelicals on this blog. ("Come on in. The water's fine.") That is, it's brought mainline and evangelical interpreters into constructive conversation with one another.

The "Theological Interpretation" movement isn't monolithic; on the other hand, as an outsider I do identify key figures, standard works, and perhaps some common commitments. (See Christopher Spinks' essay, which offers beginning bibliography.) At the same time, I'm not convinced the movement has fully faced the complications implied in the questions it is asking. Consider two standard formulations for "theological interpretation."

• Kevin J. Vanhoozer: "The theological interpretation of the Bible is characterized by a governing interest in God, the word and works of God, and by a governing intention to engage in what we might call 'theological criticism.'" ("Introduction," Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible [ed. Vanhoozer, et al., 22)
• The Scripture Project enumerates nine theses on interpretation, which include, "Scripture truthfully tells the story of God's action of creating, judging, and saving the world," and "The four canonical Gospels narrate the truth about Jesus." (Ellen F. Davis, and Richard B. Hays, eds., The Art of Reading Scripture, 1, 3)

I can fully embrace that first quote. It concerns what kind of activity theological interpretation presupposes. In my view, theological interpretation of the Bible happens when people of faith engage scripture in the praxis of living the life of faith and in the context of the broader historical and global church.

The second quotes, those two theses, I cannot embrace. They concern the kinds of conclusions theological interpretation may advocate. I'm sure there's a philosophical sense in which one could make those two theses seem meaningful, but let's be real. On an ordinary reading, those theses rule out the possibility that the Bible itself might present problems to us. Sometimes the God of the Bible saves through genocide, and Luke himself tells us he was trying to improve on earlier Jesus stories -- like, say, Mark (Luke 1:1-4). I cannot discern how these theses help us sort through God's command to slaughter the Amalekites and their cattle or how to respond to the diverse testimony of the four Gospels.

I mentioned engaging this conversation in another venue. In response to Sparks' essay, referenced above, I wrote, "Whatever generalizations we make regarding the Bible as scripture must stand up to reading the Bible as a whole and in its particulars, I think." Those particulars included things like genocide as a model of divine deliverance and the legitimation of slavery.

One colleague, to whose work I refer frequently, suggested that perhaps I was stuck in the archaic pattern that moves too quickly from "interpretation" to "application." According to him, "theological interpretation" has moved beyond that pattern. Another participant mentioned the essay on slavery in the Dictionary of Theological Interpretation of the Bible. There William J. Webb finds a "redemptive movement" in biblical discussions of slavery. Apparently, the biblical texts are relatively progressive in their own contexts. The biblical witnesses were not "redemptive in any absolute sense" but rather set a "clear direction" that would have served the church well in its later slavery debates.

This is inadequate. On a spectrum of ancient opinion, yes, the Bible comes off well to the progressive end on slavery. Others, including some pagans and some second century Christians, held even more egalitarian views. But that's beside the point. A good healthy dose of historical analysis shows that the Bible itself speaks with diverse voices on the question. Paul may well have opposed slavery with all the power available to him (I don't have space here to spell out that argument), but people writing in Paul's name aggressively tamed Paul's liberatory push. Thus, Ephesians, Colossians, and 1 Timothy put slaves back in their (relatively less abusive) places. How, I ask, does Webb's discussion, which ignores the standard issue of authorship and diversity within Scripture, help us negotiate such diversity?

I believe I have offered a different model for theological engagement of the slavery question, one that does not "jump" from interpretation to application, in Sinners. There I engage 1 Peter, which exhorts slaves to endure abuse. Historical and rhetorical analysis come into play here, as I argue that the structure of 1 Peter surrounds socially conservative social teachings with concern regarding persecution. I do not draw a conclusion on the matter, but I suggest that 1 Peter raises significant questions for contemporary disciples. In a context marked by alienation and persecution, I suggest, 1 Peter offers its audience two ways of relating to the world. On the one hand, they are a holy nation, a royal priesthood, called to distinctive discipleship in a hostile world. On the other hand, they are to avoid persecution by living within standard social norms. All Christian communities face this challenge of balancing distinctiveness with cultural "respectability." This is merely a suggestion, but it models what I believe theological interpretation should be about, bringing the life of faith into conversation with scripture (141-44). That can be a messy process.

Joel B. Green's recent book Seized by Truth: Reading the Bible as Scripture, suggests that terms like "infallibility" and "inerrancy" have not served the church [originally, "evangelicals"] well. They reduce scripture to propositions, but they do not guarantee the kinds of interpretations that represent faithful engagement (146-48). Proper reading of scripture, Green argues, takes form in lives shaped by the Bible rather than in rigidly "correct" conclusions regarding it (see also his argument from Luke and Acts, pp. 42-50). But like McKnight and Dunn, Green entirely avoids the Bible's "problem" dimensions. Thus, I'm not convinced that what he says about the Bible in general will bear the weight of the Bible's particulars.

This is why I'm reaching out to my evangelical sisters and brothers. Let's not generalize about the Bible and its subject matter, thus boxing us in to those dimensions of scripture that fit the model. Instead, let's commit to read the Bible with curiosity, passion, and faith -- the whole Bible -- trusting the Spirit and the community of faith to guide us through.