Clearing a lot of junk off my computer desktop to start the new academic year.
The theme of Wycliffe’s colloquium on Theology & Scripture this past spring was … Theology & Scripture. We decided this year’s iteration should be an in-house event, in which faculty across disciplines could hold forth on how they hold together the two terms. In my brief (not brief enough) talk I proposed four theses, arguing that the theological interpretation of Scripture is:
- A Tautology
- Literal-figural
- Ecclesial
- Metaphysical
It’s a tautology, because if it’s Scripture (rather than, say, a random collection of ancient near easter texts) it’s inherently theological: divine discourse, the Word of God.
It’s literal-figural, because these are simply two aspects of a common practice—call it “Christian reading.” Though on second thought, maybe literal-spiritual would be better. Whatever you call it, the more-than-literal aspect arises naturally and organically from the literal. The literal keeps us close to the text (and to the history “behind the text “when that’s relevant—a crucial caveat). The more-than-literal names the way our world is drawn into the text, or illuminated by the text, or however you want to put it.
It’s ecclesial, because Scripture and the church are correlative. Scripture is “the Word of God for the people of God,” to use Todd Billings’s apt phrase.
It’s metaphysical, because if the Bible is the Word of God you immediately find yourself in the ballpark of making reality-claims. What that looks like, of course, is contested. I’m definitely not saying you have to sign off on Plato, Aristotle, Whitehead, or whomever before you can read faithfully. But in general, divine speech can’t be separated from the question of “what is the world or the universe like in the broadest sense?”
