On The Theological Interpretation Of Scripture: The Indirect Identity Thesis, Reformed Orthodoxy, And Trinitarian Considerations

By Nathaniel Gray Sutanto

[Nathaniel Gray Sutanto is a PhD candidate in systematic theology at New College, University of Edinburgh.]

I. Introduction

The Theological Interpretation of Scripture (hereafter TIS) movement within the academy has received a wide range of responses from within the evangelical community, from suspicion to open curiosity to excited engagement. Such responses are appropriate, as the ideas that bind the movement as a whole are indeed concerns that evangelicals should be excited about: a growing discontent with the historical-critical paradigm, the rejuvenation of the use of Christian theology in biblical interpretation, and a renewed appreciation of pre-critical interpretative methods. Evangelicals have long echoed many of the deconstructive critiques lodged against the historical-critical paradigm by the advocates of TIS,[1] yet evangelicals have had a complex relationship with the wider academy since the rise of modernism. Thus, it is only expected that the traction that the movement is gaining in the academy would be a particular point of interest for evangelicals.[2] But what is it, exactly, that makes it so new, fresh, or unique within the academy? While many within evangelicalism have critically and appreciatively analyzed the movement, an analysis from the perspective of a Reformed orthodox tradition is still rare. I will thus offer one such attempt in this article.

For the purposes and scope of an article such as this, it is best to focus on one particular advocate of TIS as a representative of the whole. Other than the few shared characteristics described above, the movement remains notoriously elusive to the attempt of precisely defining its project, as its advocates often employ mutually exclusive approaches to hermeneutics and exegesis. Thus, an attempt at a critical yet appreciative analysis of the movement as a whole would simply be counter-productive. In agreement with a recent study, then, Francis Watson, currently research professor of biblical interpretation at the University of Durham, will serve well as a test-case to analyze major strands of the whole.[3]

Francis Watson’s published work is both comprehensive and demanding. Again, I will thus limit myself to the books and articles that most explicitly deal with the issue of theological hermeneutics, and even within those works I must be selective. I aim at analyzing some of the basic theological presuppositions underlying his project that are most interesting from the perspective of Reformed orthodoxy. Before a critical analysis is offered, then, some points of continuity between the two must be heartily acknowledged.

(1) An insistence that there is an organic connection between biblical studies and Christian theology. Watson argues that the academically endorsed separation between biblical studies and Christian theology decisively leads to a “systematic distortion of the subject matter of Christian theology.”[4] The study of the Bible cannot be abstracted from its canonical function within the church and its instrumentality as the text that mediates between humans and the reality of Jesus Christ. It is exceptional to have a NT scholar voice these convictions, and thus we can agree with Webster who commends Watson’s work for “its refusal to allow theological language to be relegated to mere background status and … its positive deployment of theology (particularly the doctrines of the Trinity and the church) in both describing and norming the activities of interpretation.”[5] This basic point leads naturally to the following one.

(2) A rejection of the historical-critical paradigm as the exclusively sanctioned means of biblical interpretation. For Watson, the text’s narrative whole and canonical unity as Christian Scripture is violated when one comes to the text assuming that it is merely a window to a more basic reality behind the text. Underlying such hermeneutical norms is a commitment against the Bible’s own universal claims concerning God and reality masquerading under the banner of “academic neutrality.” Thus, Watson argues for the rightful place of Christian theology within the academic guild of biblical interpretation, since any other form of interpretation is itself already committed to an agnostic or atheistic orientation.[6] Watson is also adamant that an exclusive prioritizing of the historical-critical paradigm only results in irresolvable interpretative conundrums.[7] This observation, for Watson, is a testimony to the paradigm’s inherent deficiency.

(3) An alternative focus on the final form of the text as an irreducible narrative whole. Such an approach not only breaks from the “vicious circles”[8] produced by the historical-critical paradigm, but also respects the reality of the whole canon as Christian Scripture. To understand the Gospels, for example, is to work within the reality of the text’s irreducible narrative structure and to reject the historicist claim that “historical reference and narrative form are incompatible.”[9] The Old and the New Testaments therefore are mutually dependent and qualitatively defined as such. A consistent witness to Christ grounds the unity of the canon, and thus to read the canon of Scripture well is to read it Christo-centrically. Only such a theologically conscious method can preserve the integrity of the canon’s function in the life and tradition of the church. Indeed, the “Christian faith requires a christo-centric reading of Christian Scripture.”[10]

(4) The insistence of the church as the primary context for biblical interpretation. Because of the character of the canon as Christian Scripture, its unique and primary context is ecclesiological. The text resists any attempt to characterize it as merely an ancient document written to an alien audience separated from the present ecclesial context by a chasm of historical distance. The Bible indeed has the present Christian community as its “primary point of reference,”[11] and one of the tasks of the church, therefore, is to communicate that truth to both its own community and the world. Indeed, it is commendable that Watson himself has attempted to make accessible to the world the Reformed doctrine of Scripture by communicating the same in the language provided by secular hermeneutical theory.[12]

The above broad convictions are essential to anyone who identifies himself with the Reformed tradition. With these continuities in place, however, some significant differences come to light. Watson, along with the TIS movement as a whole, would readily admit that the impetus for their project gains its inspiration from the work of Karl Barth. In the rest of this article I seek to substantiate the observation that the degree to which Reformed orthodoxy can embrace the movement as it stands is correlative to whether it can accept a particular form of Barth’s doctrine of Scripture. I move now to some critical reflections.

II. The Indirect Identity Thesis

For Watson, divine reality is necessarily mediated by an irreducible textuality, but the text cannot be identified with that reality for it is merely a human witness to it. Indeed, Watson argues that a doctrine of Scripture that acknowledges the text’s divine origins “is not necessarily incompatible with the results of modern scholarship, for the acknowledgement of the Bible’s divine origin was never intended to deny the corresponding reality of its human origin.”[13] Thus, the texts are filled with “imperfections, oddities, and contingencies,” and yet “they together constitute the inspired and normative testimony to a universally and ultimately significant history of divine self-disclosure.”[14] It would be naively biblicist, in Watson’s view, to attempt to defend the text against historical or theological criticism. These convictions reflect the presupposition that any inclusion of human authorship in Scripture implies its fallibility, and thus that any attempt at a defense of an inerrant view of Scripture would violate the inherent humanity of the text.[15]

The humanity of the text and the “inconsistencies” and “imperfections” that come with it, however, can still be preserved as authoritative because it witnesses to a reality different from our own. The text’s genre is that which Barth refers to as “saga,” and genuinely does refer to a divine-human history, though this history remains distinct from our history. The Word made flesh is the epitome of God’s revelation, yet this “fleshly existence occurred in our own world but at a time and place that is not our own.”[16] As such, whether or not the text refers to a real historical event is irrelevant to the ineffable realism of the history of God. Thus, the one who believes in the text can remain undisturbed when he finds its claims to be inconsistent with the conclusions of historical criticism. Watson is worth quoting at length here, as he defends intratextual realism:

The texts may or may not render faithful the details of empirical history; but they do render faithfully the history of the relation of God and humankind, and it is in the light of this function that they must be interpreted. Barth thus postulates an ‘intratextual realism’ in which one regards the text in its final form as the irreducible witness to a divine-human history which occurs prior to and beyond the text, but which can only be known in its textual mediation. The labours of conservative apologists to determine the ‘historicity’ of the biblical narratives are thus largely beside the point and so too are the labours of historical skeptics to find ‘inauthenticity’ and ‘secondariness’ at every turn.[17]

This theological maneuver is simply a repetition of Barth’s doctrine of Scripture. Call this the indirect identity thesis. Such a theological portrayal renders the Bible vulnerable to the work of the historical-critical paradigm yet supposedly preserves its status as the unique means by which God continually speaks to his church. Indeed, God reveals himself in history and in the Bible, yet never becomes a predicate of history—the divine-human history is objectively real, yet inaccessible to cognition and empirical investigation. Barth’s construction, following the Kantian paradigm mediated by Wilhelm Hermann and the Marburg school, is at odds with the traditional Reformed account which identifies both the form and content of the Bible with the Word of God.[18] For Hermann, and Barth after him, God’s reality was one that is impenetrable, resisting all attempts from both avenues of science and history to uncover its manifestation. This reality, if disclosed, is a divine encounter, and is a reality “more real than the reality known by any science.”[19] Thus religion finds its justification in the experience of the encounter with that divine reality that God alone initiates. What Hermann did, in effect, was to undermine “the Neo-Kantian treatment of religion from within.”[20]

There is no need to repeat what others have done in noticing where the above construal differs from traditional accounts of Scripture.[21] It is enough simply to state that Watson subscribes to this basic Barthian model. Could it be that the recovery of TIS from within the academy is an attempt at transplanting pre-critical theological convictions into a supposedly legitimate Kantian milieu? One wonders if this is the appropriate option to choose as a means to preserve the authoritative and theological character of Scripture.

The indirect identity thesis allows for stark consequences, and, as we shall see, Watson develops it further than Barth.[22] The implications are, as alluded to above, two-fold. First, one may drive a wedge between the history-behind-the text and the text’s witness, and thus there is an apparent disjunction between the meaning of the original sense and a “developed” sense of the text; all this reflects a deficient view of history that undermines its character as the canvas of God’s providential plan. Second, since the indirect identity thesis makes a distinction between the Bible and divine revelation, it becomes imperative to criticize the Bible from theological grounds when the two seem to contradict; thus, we are left with a definition of the “gospel” that is filled in not by Scripture but by the standards of the world. The “theological” in the term “theological interpretation of Scripture” is thus incongruent with the way the Reformed tradition would understand it. I will take up the first implication in analysis and evaluation in the following section.

III. Doctrine Of Scripture: The Trinity, History, And Providence

There are at least three assumptions behind the indirect identity thesis that Reformed orthodoxy rejects. First, there is the claim that the binding of God by way of covenant to his own word violates his sovereign freedom. Second, there is the charge that a defense of scriptural inerrancy betrays rationalistic assumptions. Finally, there is the notion that human involvement in the production of the biblical text entails that errors, whether theological or historical, will be present.

Herman Bavinck argues that the Scriptures are the product of the Spirit of God who works through its human authors to guarantee both its form and content, such that we cannot distinguish sharply between its divine and human elements. The God who is free chooses to bind himself in divine condescension to his covenantal word in Scripture, which ensures that its content is without blemish. Yet it would be a misunderstanding to construe this doctrine of inspiration in terms of mechanistic dictation. Instead, the Spirit works through providential means to guarantee every thought written down without compromising the agency of the authors involved.

The activity of the Holy Spirit, in the writing process, after all, consisted in the fact that, having prepared the human consciousness of the authors in various ways (by birth, upbringing, natural gifts, research, memory, reflection, experience of life, revelation, etc.), he now, in and through the writing process itself, made those thoughts and words, that language and style, rise to the surface of that consciousness, which could best interpret the divine ideas for persons of all sorts of rank and class, from every nation and age.[23]

This organic view of inspiration neither entails nor demands a rationalistic view of absolute precision, yet it guarantees a true rendering not just “of a few religious and moral pronouncements but equally of facts and deeds.”[24] Bavinck’s understanding of the Spirit of God as embodying Truth motivates this conclusion. The proper analogue for this doctrine of Scripture is the divine and human natures of Christ, for “as the human in Christ, however weak and lowly, nevertheless remained free from sin, so also Scripture was conceived without defect. Entirely and in all its parts human, but also likewise divine.”[25] As such, Bavinck’s understanding of the Scriptures as “without defect” whatsoever comes from properly material (doctrinal) concerns about the character of God, providence, the Spirit, and Christology. Contrary to Watson (and Barth) there is a proper way of respecting the integrity of the Bible’s human origins without at all having to distance it from its divinity, much in the same way that Nicene Christology can respect the integrity of Christ’s human nature while maintaining it to be without sin.

However, it seems difficult to hold to the above view of Scripture if one subscribes to the Kantian paradigm underneath Barth’s account of the Bible. This paradigm limits knowledge to the phenomenal realm and denies that knowledge of God can be gleaned through history. On these grounds, one way to preserve some form of the authority of the Bible is to make it refer to a suprahistorical noumenal realm that remains cognitively inaccessible to man. Such a move might seem like a valid theological evasion of the historical-critical paradigm, but it fails to do what it seeks to do, namely, to uphold the uniqueness of the Bible as the witness to the reality of God. God is the Lord over history; thus, history reveals his plan and will never contradict his Word. Instead of trying to subvert Kantianism from within its grounds, rejecting its substance as incompatible with the basic tenets of Christian theism seems a more viable option. This, again, is where Bavinck leads us.

Kantianism, however, is as untenable in theology as it is in philosophy. We have to make a choice: either the religious person thus interprets nature and history correctly on good grounds, and then there is indeed a revelation of God; or this religious interpretation is without grounds and in that case is pure illusion and a product of the poetic imagination. Holy Scripture, however, teaches us that God very definitely, consciously, and intentionally reveals himself in nature and history, in the heart and conscience of human beings, and adds to this that when people do not acknowledge and understand this revelation, this is due to the darkening of their mind and therefore renders them inexcusable. Hence the conscious, voluntary, acting agent of this general revelation is God alone, the God who is the creator, maintainer, and ruler of all things; and in the light of Scripture we know it is the Father who by his Word and Spirit also reveals himself in the works of nature and history.[26]

Hans Madueme registers the same concerns against the TIS movement in general and Karl Barth in particular. Though Barth’s explicit motivations are theological, his philosophical assumptions remain operative throughout. Madueme argues that “Barth’s Kantian assumptions led him wrongly to abstract [God’s sovereign freedom] from God’s bond to the word of Scripture as the words of his covenant.… Barth did assume Kant’s epistemological ground rules, and therefore his Scripture principle remains functionally Kantian—and that is the problem.”[27] This leads to a faulty understanding of history, where “he denies any knowledge of God through historical means.”[28] By contrast, instead of construing historical investigation as a hindrance, Christian doctrine “justifies and even demands a much more robust historical and cognitively accessible rendering of divine self-disclosure than Barth gives us.”[29]

Indeed, the naturalistic and polyphonic account of history is not the only act in town. Serious material concerns further motivate this consideration. The Father is the one who controls all of history for the pre-eminence of the Son (Eph 1:11; Col 1:15–17), the Son is the Logos through whom all men receive knowledge and truth (John 1:1–4; Col 2:3–8), and the Spirit testifies to that truth (John 16:14–16). The three Persons work together in complete harmony and unity, as the three Persons coinhere in one another. Thus, to argue that the Spirit-inspired Bible might contain something antithetical to history, which the Father arranges for the pre-eminence of the Son, is to argue for a basic disagreement within the Trinitarian economy. The Father orders history, the Son’s Word interprets that history, and the Spirit ensures the reliable communication of the same to his creatures. Events in history, of course, are diverse and particular, but there is a basic unity that coinheres in all of them as the whole reflects the “comprehensive plan of God.”[30] It follows from this that a robust Trinitarian doctrine of Scripture (and providence) demands, as part of the process of exegesis, paying attention to the details of the textually mediated history behind the text without eclipsing the narrative form of the text.

This has further implications. From the Reformed orthodox perspective, the Bible is both witness to God and the Word of God. The Sovereign God freely ties himself to his Word. Thus, from that perspective, though we may agree that some of the findings of the historical-critical paradigm are helpful for the Christian exegete, we must maintain that what the text says about itself and any other event is the standard by which we judge all other claims to reality. In other words, we ought to refuse the attempt to preserve the Bible from the historical critic by admitting that the historical critic’s claims are valid and that the Bible refers to a different kind of history. To do so would be much like a king who, seeing that the enemy has taken over the first floor of the castle, instead of fighting to win back the area says to his army that they are better off on the second floor anyway, and retreats, leaving ground to the enemy. No, Reformed orthodoxy insists that the Bible’s content is itself the standard by which we ought to judge our empirical findings.[31] The Bible’s divine origin grants it this unique status. Richard B. Gaffin’s words are representative of this point:

The Bible is not a proper object of the historical-critical method. Certainly a sound and penetrating understanding of Scripture ought to take account of its historical conditioning, of both the biblical documents and their subject matter, and do so in a careful, methodologically reflective and responsible fashion. However, the Bible is not properly assessed by human reason understood as autonomous, nor are its truth claims subject to Sachkritik. The divine authorship and consequent authority of Scripture, on the one hand, and the historical-critical method, with its commitment to autonomy, on the other, exclude each other.[32]

This is what the Reformed tradition means when it claims that Scripture is the principium cognoscendi for all of life. So, “Barth’s post-critical, actualistic doctrine of Scripture departs from the Reformed tradition, not least because he cannot affirm Scripture as the principium cognoscendi in anything like the same way.”[33] A Barthian approval of both the high authority of Scripture and criticisms of it is to “to have Warfield’s cake and eat it too.”[34] This seems to be what Watson is attempting, in his adoption of the Barthian paradigm along with its philosophical underpinnings.

IV. The Theology In The “Theological”: The Spirit, Principia, The World, And The “Biblicism” Of Barth

Because of the indirect identity thesis, using the text as a means of theological construction does not thus mean, for Watson, to use it as an authority and norm for constructive theological work. Rather, consistent in Watson’s work is the view that one ought to use the text in the interest of corresponding with, or constructively contributing to, contemporary social, political, and philosophical concerns. Thus, the world can positively shape the way in which the Bible is to be read. There are, of course, many good things to heed from this insight. The church finds its context within the world, Watson reminds us, and thus it must attempt to communicate clearly to that world, while learning that the world can provide much of the conceptual resources needed for the church to do its task well. It would be a fault, for Watson, to follow Frei in his emphasis on the narrative within the text at the cost of the text’s bearings on extra-textual realities. On these things the proponent of Reformed orthodoxy can heartily agree. Other considerations, however, may render that agreement thin.

For Watson, the world may reflect the gospel over and against the text. Correlative with this assertion is the claim that—divinely initiated as it might be—the canon’s status as canon is a decision imparted to the body of texts by the community of the church. In Watson’s definition, “the genre of the biblical texts is that of ‘holy scripture’: that is to say, these texts function in a peculiar way in the life of a determinate community or set of interrelated communities.”[35] Thus, unlike the Reformed tradition, the biblical text’s function in theological construction is not that of principium. For Watson, Christian doctrine “is a communally acknowledged norm, classically defined at some point in the past in a form that continues to shape the present,” whereas “a ‘theology’ is an individual proposal for the future development of doctrine.… A ‘theology of Scripture’ would take note of whatever formulations from the past make up the ‘doctrine of Scripture,’ elaborating some of them and downplaying others. It would investigate the connections between this area of Christian doctrine and respond to contemporary challenges.”[36] The absence of the necessity of scriptural exegesis as foundational in his proposed definitions is intentional, for Watson argues that “[a] ‘scriptural doctrine of Scripture’ is not forthcoming, and the classic Reformed doctrine need not be understood as a mere transcript of the claims of Scripture itself.”[37] Watson fears that understanding it as such will risk reducing doctrine to exegesis, as he understands that the doctrine of Scripture “is the product of the sixteenth century.”[38] Moreover, through an intriguing appropriation of John Owen’s theology of the Spirit Watson argues that the secular world can be the means by which God discloses his will over the text.[39] To be a “theological” interpreter, in part, is thus to read the Bible with an eye to contributing to contemporary socio-political concerns with the gospel.

There is much to commend in Watson’s concerns. The church does play a significant role in the propagation of doctrinal standards as an abiding communal norm. Theology does indeed genuinely develop as more thinkers seek to further critique, elaborate on, or clarify past theological constructions. Neither doctrine nor theology can be reduced to mere exegesis.

However, these convictions seem to be one-sided. By arguing that the Spirit can function in the world in a way that contradicts the text would be, from a Reformed perspective, equivalent to arguing that the Spirit may contradict himself. Indeed, the Spirit does work in the world, and we may learn from the world, where people live under common grace in the image of God. Yet the way in which we can discern the Spirit’s work in the world is through the Word he authored. The Spirit is the teacher of truth (John 16) and thus his task is to bring us to his Word, and the Father providentially ensures that his Word accomplishes his purposes, even when it causes confusion (Isa 6:9–10; 55:11). Again, material Trinitarian concerns thus forbid us to pit the Spirit against the Word that is the text of Scripture.

Bavinck teaches us the same: “We literally know nothing of the revelations of God in the time of Israel and in Christ except from Holy Scripture. There is no other primary principle. With the fall of Holy Scripture, therefore, all of revelation falls as well, as does the person of Christ.… For us, for the church of all ages, revelation exists only in the form of Holy Scripture.”[40] It follows that there is, for Bavinck, a direct identity between Scripture and God’s special revelation, and so “the Holy Spirit takes everything from Christ adding nothing new to revelation.”[41] It is inappropriate, therefore, to judge the Word from any external criteria or to argue that there is a gospel distinct from the text; systematic theology gains credibility only when it submits to the written Word. For Bavinck, the theologian and exegete speak to the extent that God speaks, and must be content to be silent where God remains silent.

What cannot be missed is that all of this is rooted, again, in an assumed doctrine of Scripture. For the Reformed, the text of Scripture is identified with the Word of God and thus its authority is equally distributed to both its form and content, as understood within a salvation-historical scheme that is inherent in the text itself. It is no surprise that the indirect identity thesis would lead to the view that the world might stand over the text as that which is finally authoritative. For Watson, the biblical text is a witness to a liberating gospel and cannot be identified with it as such. The text communicates to different communal contexts two antithetical voices of law and gospel, and thus the authority of the canon is never equally distributed.[42] One must reject the law and embrace the gospel, and the way in which the reader discerns which part of the biblical witness communicates an oppressive law rather than the gospel depends ultimately upon the reader’s response in his context. In Watson’s words,

Whether a text is experienced as contrary to the Gospel is determined not only by its objective content but also by the way it is understood in the community to which one belongs. The recognition of a text as oppressive does not proceed from a contextless encounter between a hypersensitive reader and a pure uninterpreted text, but from the contemporary interpretive context within which the reading takes place.[43]

So, the indirect identity thesis justifies content-criticism of texts that are perceived as oppressive. The theological interpreter is asked to reject these texts because they could be potentially used as a means to tyrannize “the other,” or because these texts are simply inherently deficient. In sum, the “authority of the gospel is greater than the authority of the text,”[44] and when the text contradicts the liberating gospel, the reader must resist it. It is thus the task of the theological interpreter to deploy these categories of law and gospel in order to detect possibly deficient texts.

Part of the purpose of interpretation, therefore, is to develop an ability to discern distorted communication of the word of God from undistorted commmunication. The way to do this, for Watson, is to engage in a dialogical process of open interaction with others. He argues that “criteria, deriving both from the revelation and the determinate social context of its reception, would naturally be deployed within the dialogical process for distinguishing undistorted from distorted communication of the word of God, and insofar as these criteria were correctly applied reception of the revelation or word of God would have occurred within the dialogue.”[45] A logocentric process of communication that is monological in nature will distort the process of discernment, and upon this privileging of the dialogical Watson argues he has a good basis to reject “oppressive” texts (such as 1 Cor 14:33b–35).[46] God’s speech, in this way, may be found not in the text but in the world.[47]

But, as mentioned above, what remains most surprising is Watson’s appropriation of John Owen’s treatise on the Holy Spirit to vindicate his world-oriented conclusions. According to Watson, though Owen’s work comes from a tradition “not normally noted for its ‘liberal’ openness to the world,”[48] Owen’s work remains valuable to his project because it recognizes the Spirit as the cause of every manifestation of positive contribution made by the world at large. Noting also Owen’s example and emphasis that in Isaiah, Cyrus, a pagan king, was the locus of pneumatic activity, Watson infers that the world could be a source of truth that might inform the church concerning the way in which Scripture is to be read. In Watson’s words: “[The] disclosures of goodness, justice and truth originating outside the community to impinge upon the interpretation of the sacred texts” might lead to “critical reappraisal or outright rejection”[49] of certain doctrines that are taught in Scripture or believed by the church. Watson appeals to John 16:13, and argues that it is the Spirit, after all, who is supposed to guide the church into all truth.

A closer reading, however, of Owen’s work and thought as a whole reveals how alien this idea is to Owen’s conception of the Holy Spirit and his work. First, it is clear throughout his discourse on the Spirit that one of the purposes for which he wrote the treatise was to establish that the Spirit’s work is to be perceived from the voice of Scripture alone and that the union between the two cannot be severed. Owen’s work is partially a polemic against those who argue that the Spirit could teach things contrary to his Word, for the Spirit is, according to Owen, the one through whom “we are enabled to perform that obedience to God which is required in Scripture, in the way and manner wherein it is required.”[50] Owen realizes that there are those who claim to have revelations from the Spirit that are contrary to Scripture, and these claims, insofar as they are contrary to the Word, “or additional to it … are all universally to be rejected.”[51]

For Owen, the work of the Spirit is mediated in and through the Word. Specifically, the Word of God as inclusive of both law and gospel is the Word that the Spirit administers. When the Spirit works in the believer to prepare him for regeneration, Owen argues, the Spirit causes in the person “a disquieting sense of guilt with respect to the law, threatenings and judgments of God.”[52] Far from characterizing the Spirit as the one through whom we discern the parts of Scripture that are oppressive, law-like, and morally objectionable, the Spirit uses the “word of God, as contained in the Scripture, comprising the law and gospel; for by this we are commanded, pressed, and persuaded to turn and live to God.”[53] Contrary to Watson’s use of John 16, Owen comments on the same passage and argues that the Spirit communicates truths that are not “different from what Christ himself had declared.”[54] These truths that Christ declared were entrusted to the apostles: “He showed the Apostles his truth by immediate revelation, enabling them infallibly to receive, understand, and declare the whole counsel of God; and he still continues to show to all believers the truth of Christ, by his word, as written and preached; instructing us in it, and enlightening our minds spiritually and savingly to understand the mind of God in it.”[55] There is thus no conflict, in Owen’s mind, between the words of Christ and the words of Paul or any of the other apostles.

Owen also maintains a robust doctrine of inspiration, arguing that it is the Spirit himself who authors Holy Scripture through the hands of men. For Owen, the Spirit works through these men without violating their personhood, and he does not mechanically dictate to them the words that are to be written down. Instead, for Owen, the human authors of Scripture “used their own abilities in the choice of words, but the Holy Spirit, who is more intimate to the minds and skills of men than they are themselves, so guided them, that the words they fixed on were as directly and certainly from him, as if they had been spoken to them by an audible voice.… Every aspect and iota of the law is under the care of God (Matt. 5).”[56] Therefore, to argue that the Spirit can communicate something contrary to the law is to argue that the Spirit may contradict himself.

Certainly, of course, Owen did argue that the Spirit works in the world and in the personhood of sinful men, equipping them with virtues, skills, talents, and abilities. In that sense, the church ought to learn and cooperate with nonbelievers for the common good as it awaits the final eschatological judgment where believer and non-believer will no longer share a common land. Owen, in teaching these truths, was merely expounding the relation of the Holy Spirit’s work to the traditional Reformed doctrine of common grace. Owen’s aim in his exposition is not to make the point that the world therefore has insights to inform the church regarding which parts of Scripture are to be rejected. The good gifts that God bestows upon men in common grace, through his Spirit, are non-saving and thus non-regenerative graces; and Owen is emphatic that the unregenerate mind could not submit to the Word of God were it not for the Spirit’s work to cause men to lay aside their autonomy in submission to the Word of Holy Scripture.[57] It makes no sense, then, to argue that Owen thinks it proper to turn to the minds of the unregenerate in order to correct the Bible.

In short, the Spirit works in union with the Word, and the efficacy of the Word on the sinner is dependent upon the Spirit. Owen’s terse comment is, “He that would utterly separate the Spirit from the word had as good burn his Bible.”[58] Watson can, of course, argue his position all the same, but he cannot claim Owen as his ally on this point. With the indirect identity thesis in place it is no stretch for Watson to feel free to locate manifestations of revelation outside Scripture. Such a misreading of Owen, however, seems to ignore the whole impetus behind Owen’s concerns.

Watson still desires to maintain a high view of the authority of Scripture as consistent with his claim that the world can potentially provide one with proper grounds to reject portions of the Bible’s content by an appeal to the Bible’s own prescriptions. In a response to a review of his book, Watson argues that making use of a law/gospel dialectic that is itself theologically and biblically grounded can make sense of what he takes to be “sub-Christian elements in Old and New Testament Scripture.”[59] Watson quotes Ps 137:8–9 disapprovingly to argue that accepting a wholesale “biblicist” view of canonical authority would lead to the absurd conclusion that such a violent text would remain normative for the believer today.[60] Rather than understanding the Bible through the lens of progressive revelation in redemptive-history as a way to preserve the authority of the whole while recognizing that the New Covenant is that which is operative for the believer’s life in the present context,[61] Watson instead maintains that the only option to advocating for a naive biblical literalism is to argue that the canon grants us warrant to engage in criticism of its oppressive elements.[62]

In undertaking content-criticism of the biblical texts, Watson does see himself as straying away from Karl Barth’s “biblicism,” despite his acknowledged dependence on the revered theologian. Notice, however, that nothing in Barth’s system prevents others like Watson from taking it in this direction. Rather, it might even be argued that Watson’s development is but a natural implication of what is inherent within the indirect identity thesis. Watson criticizes Barth for reinforcing the “conservative, biblicistic tendency to polarize submission to the authority of scripture and an allegedly arrogant refusal of that submission engendered by loyalty to one or other of the passing trends of the modern world.”[63] What Watson perhaps fails to see is that adopting the indirect identity thesis will inevitably lead to the subordination of the text to subjective preferences and a subjective “gospel,” allowing the interpreter to “pick and choose” which text should have perlocutionary relevance for the contemporary reader. How shall we define what the gospel is without the text, and how else would we prevent it from becoming one-dimensional? In other words, without identifying the canonical Scripture unequivocally with the Word of God (while appreciating an appropriate distinction between the Bible and the Logos), we inevitably read into it what we want to read, constructing a theological program of our own desires while using the text for our own agendas in order to look more palatable to the modern world.

Oppression is certainly to be avoided, and the gospel does create motivations to liberate others from suffering. But it would be a mistake to reduce the whole of what the gospel is about to these concerns. The Reformed tradition’s emphasis on the Scriptures as the Word of God entails that the whole of the Word (in its redemptive-historical form) must be our principium cognoscendi for all of life and especially for theological construction. Knowledge of God is inaccessible apart from God’s self-disclosure, and he has done so and continues to do so definitively in the Spirit-compiled canon of Scripture. If the Scriptures do not function as our principium then something else will, and most often it will be the false standards of reason and morality as projected by finite sinners. The theological interpreter of Scripture must first submit to the voice of God in the text on its own terms. He understands that whatever problems the reader might have with the text expose deficiencies with the reader/sinner and never with the text. Only when the theological interpreter engages in this act of humble receptivity can he then communicate that Word to the “passing trends of the modern world,” as unfashionable as Watson might make such submission sound. Theology is thus not a communally acknowledged norm but a radically non-speculative explication of the system of truth in Scripture, deduced from it out of good and necessary consequence, in response to a fallen world. Thus the perennial question comes back to this movement—when one speaks about a theological interpretation of Scripture, which theology? What are the defining parameters of the rule of faith, for TIS? For the Reformed, that theology can only be found in God’s definitive, special, revelatory word.

The Reformed perspective, therefore, views that Watson, by arguing that a “theological” interpretation is that which takes its cue from the socio-political concerns of the world, demonstrates that his theological interpretation is insufficiently theological. His functional principium is a “gospel” defined apart from God’s own self-disclosure, which is definitively found in Scripture, and thus he co-mingles God’s speech with that of the world.

V. Conclusion

It seems that the uniqueness of TIS depends upon the assumption of the validity of Kant’s turn in philosophical history along with its attendant ideological implications.[64] Perhaps the TIS movement discovered the insights of the pre-modern and pre-critical theologians regarding biblical interpretation and sought to recover them and transplant them into the modern, post-Kantian (hence post-liberal) milieu while at the same time assuming the legitimacy of the latter. Christopher Seitz has argued that the canonical approach to hermeneutics really is a “child of its own age,”[65] and I believe the same can be said about much of the TIS movement as a whole.[66] Kant’s influence on modern theological thought is apparent and often embraced. The result is the acceptance of the indirect identity thesis as the only way Scripture could be secured as retaining some form of theological significance. Those in the Reformed tradition, however, must simply refuse to accept the substance of the Kantian turn and the indirect identity thesis that it produced. The acceptance of the thesis, as I hope to have shown, is problematic, allowing the projection of sinful man’s desires onto the biblical text.

TIS has helpful reminders for the Reformed tradition, of course. Historical reconstructions aimed solely at using the text to uncover what is behind the text could, indeed, distract us from the true subject matter of Scripture in its narratival form, and the unity of the whole canon must be respected, freeing the Christian exegete to move from one text to another seamlessly because of his convictions concerning the divine authorship of the whole and final form.[67] In these ways one should learn from the movement’s sound emphases. However, in my view, the orthodox Reformed understanding of Scripture is the appropriate soil from which these sound emphases along with a proper theological interpretation may find their organic home.[68]

Notes

1. Charlie Trimm shares the same observation in “Evangelicals, Theology, and Biblical Interpretation: Reflections on the Theological Interpretation of Scripture,” BBR 20 (2010): 313.
2. Ibid., 330. See also Daniel Treier, Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Recovering a Christian Practice (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 20-25. In my view, the evangelical reaction to TIS, interestingly, is analogous to its initial reactions to Karl Barth.
3. See Edward Klink III and Darian Lockett, Understanding Biblical Theology: A Comparison of Theory and Practice (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), esp. chs. 9 and 10.
4. Francis Watson, Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 27.
5. John Webster, Word and Church: Essays in Christian Dogmatics (New York: T&T Clark, 2001), 51-52.
6. Francis Watson, “Bible, Theology and the University: A Response to Philip Davies,” JSOT 71 (1996): 3-16.
7. Francis Watson, Text, Church and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 46-59.
8. Ibid., 58.
9. Watson, Text and Truth, 9.
10. Ibid., 185.
11. Watson, Text, Church and World, 6.
12. Francis Watson, “Hermeneutics and the Doctrine of Scripture: Why They Need Each Other,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 12 (2010): 118-43.
13. Watson, “Hermeneutics and the Doctrine of Scripture,” 124, emphasis mine.
14. Watson, “Bible, Theology and the University,” 13.
15. A robust doctrine of inerrancy is expressed by the formulations of Kuyper and Bavinck. See Richard B. Gaffin Jr., God’s Word in Servant Form: Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck on the Doctrine of Scripture (Jackson, MS: Reformed Academic Press, 2008).
16. Watson, Text and Truth, 1.
17. Watson, Text, Church and World, 230.
18. Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909-1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 466. See also Colin Grant, “Why Should Theology Be Unnatural?” Modern Theology 23 (2007): 91-106.
19. McCormack, Karl Barth, 59.
20. Ibid., 60.
21. For a relatively recent account, see Mark Thompson, “Barth’s Doctrine of Scripture,” in Engaging with Barth: Contemporary Evangelical Critiques, ed. David Gibson and Daniel Strange (New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 168-97.
22. Vern S. Poythress, review of Text, Church and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective, by Francis Watson, WTJ 57 (1995): 476. I share many of the same concerns voiced by Poythress in his review.
23. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 1:438.
24. Ibid., 1:594-95.
25. Ibid., 1:435.
26. Ibid., 1:340.
27. Hans Madueme, “Theological Interpretation after Barth,” Journal of Theological Interpretation 3 (2009): 152.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Vern S. Poythress, God-Centered Biblical Interpretation (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1999), 147.
31. Validating the claims of historical-criticism as a means to uncover the meaning of the text has also led Watson to argue that the OT is only indirectly Christian Scripture. This leads to the affirmation of a dichotomy between the “original” sense of the OT and its “developed” sense in the canonical context. See Christopher Seitz’s penetrating critiques in The Character of Christian Scripture: The Significance of a Two-Testament Bible, STI (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 143-45, 153. See also Francis Watson, Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith (New York: T&T Clark, 2004), 21, 38-39.
32. Richard B. Gaffin Jr., “The Redemptive Historical Response,” in Biblical Hermeneutics: Five Views, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Beth M. Stovell (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012), 180, emphasis mine.
33. Madueme, “Theological Interpretation,”154.
34. Ibid., 151-52.
35. Watson, Text, Church and World, 227, emphasis mine.
36. Watson, “Hermeneutics and the Doctrine of Scripture,” 122-23, emphasis mine.
37. Ibid., 125.
38. Ibid., 126. Though the specific articulation of the Reformed doctrine of Scripture did not exist prior to the sixteenth century, one must maintain that the material for that articulation is already embedded in the scriptural claims themselves.
39. Watson, Text, Church and World, 236-40.
40. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 1:382, emphasis mine. As we have seen above, this statement does not compromise Bavinck’s insistence on the reality of general revelation as being found in nature and history.
41. Ibid., 1:383.
42. The use of the law-gospel dialectic as a criterion to “discern” the Christian voices from the sub-Christian ones in the canon, is, of course, questionably arbitrary. Why not use the Johannine dialectic of light and dark? Why does one set of texts constitute the “gospel” and not others?
43. Watson, Text, Church and World, 235, emphasis mine.
44. Ibid., 234.
45. Ibid., 116.
46. Ibid., 116-17.
47. The success of Watson’s use of Owen also seems to depend upon the underplaying of biblical texts that testify to the world’s deceptive elements (e.g., 1 John).
48. Watson, Text, Church and World, 237.
49. Ibid., 240.
50. John Owen, The Holy Spirit: His Gifts and Power (Glasgow: Christian Heritage, 2004), 35.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 166.
53. Ibid., 207, emphasis mine.
54. Ibid., 137.
55. Ibid., emphasis mine.
56. Ibid., 103.
57. See ibid., 173-203 and 275-82.
58. Ibid., 145.
59. Watson, “A Response to John Riches,” BibInt 6 (1998): 240.
60. Ibid. Watson further develops his rationale for rejecting the perlocutionary relevance of the psalm for contemporary Christian living in Text and Truth, 119-22, albeit in a milder fashion. See the next footnote for a plausible response.
61. From such a framework, of course, Ps 137:8-9 is still instructive for the believer today, and remains a text fruitful for usage in theological construction. Such a psalm tells us about the wrath of God and the dire consequences of sin that all believers deserve yet that is ultimately borne by Christ who was dashed against a cross. Thus Ps 137:8-9 is not to be dismissed, but ought to be incorporated into our theological understanding while realizing that God’s revelatory and redemptive purposes have progressed since the writing of the OT as a whole. Extending the logic of Rom 6-7 on the goodness of the law, it seems to me that the perlocutionary force and fecundity of these “tough” OT texts are not abrogated by Christ, but fulfilled by him such that relating these passages to the christological center means showing how even texts like these point us to Christ. The Bible is the record of God’s revelatory and redemptive purposes throughout history and God’s instrumental means of continual speech to his church today. However, since Watson has an understanding of the gospel centered on liberation rather than a gracious offer to sinful rebels, it is hard to see how such a text could fit into his system. A rejection of certain biblical texts will inevitably lead to a one-dimensional view of the gospel, and, worse, a one-dimensional view of God.
62. “A literalistic hermeneutic assumes an exact correspondence between what is said and what is meant, and this results in erroneous beliefs about God and conflict within the Christian community. It fails to distinguish between the letter of the text and its deeper, spiritual meaning; it does not recognize that, in the gospels as well as in the OT, literal falsehood may nevertheless point towards theological truth. One unfortunate effect of this narrow-mindedness is to damage the credibility of the church’s proclamation among educated non-Christians” (Francis Watson, “The Scope of Hermeneutics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin Gunton [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 70, emphasis mine). This is certainly a false dichotomy, in my view.
63. Watson, Text, Church and World, 231. Walter Moberly, another proponent of TIS who acknowledges his dependence on Barth, echoes the same critique of Barth’s rhetoric, pointing to “morally problematic” OT texts (Walter Moberly, “What Is Theological Interpretation of Scripture?,” Journal of Theological Interpretation 3 [2009]: 170-72).
64. Madueme notes, “Wolterstorff suggests that the main difference between the analytic and the continental traditions of philosophy is that the former refused to take the Kantian turn in epistemology” (“Theological Interpretation,” 152n8). Cf. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Is It Possible or Desirable for Theologians to Recover from Kant?,” Modern Theology 14 (1998): 1-18.
65. Seitz, Character of Christian Scripture, 27.
66. See Daniel Treier, introduction to Introducing the Theological Interpretation of Scripture, 11-36.
67. Since the Persons of the Trinity coinhere in each other, truth bears this same characteristic. This fact enables the interpreter to move seamlessly from one text to another, as the truths of any particular text can be connected to truths in any other text in Scripture. Each truth coinheres and inter-penetrates other truths. This Trinitarian understanding of truth empowers a proper kind of theological creativity that advocates of TIS endorse. See Poythress, God-Centered Biblical Interpretation, chs. 5 and 6. In my view, Poythress offers a much more orthodox and satisfying way to engage in a theological interpretation of Scripture. For another recent attempt from an orthodox Reformed perspective, see Scott Swain, Trinity, Revelation and Reading: A Theological Introduction to the Bible and Its Interpretation (New York: T&T Clark International, 2011).
68. For a recent example of this view, see Vern S. Poythress, “Dispensing with Merely Human Meaning: Gains and Losses from Focusing on the Human Author, Illustrated by Zephaniah 1:2-3, ” JETS 57 (2014): 481-99.