Stephen Fowl and Theological Interpretation: Retrospect and Prospect

In 1998, when Stephen Fowl’s book Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation was first published, it came affixed with a blurb by Stanley Hauerwas. He wrote, “One cannot help but think this book will stand as the mark of a new beginning.” His language was apt to the moment. Engaging Scripture was indeed the mark of a new beginning.I want to reflect on the character of this new beginning: what it left behind, what it made possible, and where it might lead from here. All that I say in what follows is my own too-small payment of a debt to Stephen Fowl, to whom I owe gratitude for too many things to recount here. Anyone who knows Steve knows that his unassuming demeanor hides an expansive kindness and an impressive intellect. I have benefited from both, and I am very thankful.My paper is structured in three parts: past, present, and future. I will start with the past.In this first section I want to answer two questions: What was Fowl’s book a rejection of? And what did he propose instead?It seems to me that the object of Fowl’s rejection was threefold: rigidly historical-critical exegesis, rigidly determinate hermeneutics, and the curious marriage of the two in biblical theology. The first almost goes without saying: Christians cannot read the documents constituting the canonical Holy Scriptures, which they confess in the liturgy to be the living word of the living God to his people in the present tense, as if they were any other book. Interpreted the way scholars interpret Homer or Plato or Philo, the Scriptures will not facilitate fellowship with the God of Abraham; they will not effect union with Christ; they will block, rather than conduct, readers and hearers to the power of the Holy Spirit. They will, in short, fail in the purpose for which they were gathered: to bear witness to, and to mediate the presence of, the risen Lord who reigns and speaks from heaven to his beloved body and bride.But this is not the only problem, and in truth Fowl is less keen than I am to locate and remove this particular tumor. He has his sights set elsewhere. The rigidity of historical criticism in its ideological expression is matched by the rigidity of modernist hermeneutics, for which all texts contain a single determinate meaning and thus admit only a single determinate reading. Fowl’s dispatch of this view is a minor tour de force. He points out the theoretical problems embedded in it—for example, the excavationist imaginary whereby the heroic scholar drills down until the hard soil of the text releases its singular solid treasure. Regardless of theory, however, the problem is theological. Gentile Christians quite literally cannot read the Scriptures of Israel in this way. If they do, they will find themselves excluded from the house of Jacob. More to the point, the apostles could not and did not read this way either. Accordingly, they set the template and the church has followed their lead ever since. In the liturgy we return perpetually to Emmaus. In the presence of Christ in the breaking of the bread, the Spirit of the Lord opens our eyes to signs and wonders in the words of the prophets and apostles. Ordered by and to the Messiah, therefore, the potential significance and signifying reference of each and every jot and tittle of Torah is, in principle, infinite. The same goes for the rest of the canon.This is a scary proposition for the arbiters of Wissenschaft, and one way to understand the rise and appeal of biblical theology is to see it as a disciplinary bridging operation meant to allay such concerns. Here Fowl puts his finger not just on the pulse but on the very nerve of biblical theology. For two centuries and counting, Christian scholars in the West have labored under a profound and inhibiting anxiety, namely, whether reading the Bible qualifies as a proper science. This anxiety was, for Protestants, doubled by the urgent, even the existential, need to find the right tools to deliver the right interpretation of a purportedly perspicuous and self-interpreting book. Historical and literary methods thus seemed to kill two birds with one stone. They were, on one hand, respectable disciplines with a modern pedigree and canons of excellence. On the other hand, they promised a common, objective, and unbiased means by which reasonable readers could come to agreement about the meaning—that is, the one, original, authorial meaning—of the scriptural text. In this respect, historical criticism has always been wedded to the fortunes of liberalism, political as well as theological: first its optimism, then its chastening, then its collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.For a time biblical theology seemed a way to avoid this collapse, to retain the best of historical criticism in service to explicitly Christian beliefs and ends. As Fowl shows, this well-meaning goal left biblical theology between two stools. It was never critical enough for the critics or theological enough for the theologians. Invariably it proved question-begging in its theory and undercooked in its conclusions. In Fowl’s words, the best of biblical theology could deliver wonderful insights, but only ad hoc; the gifts, as it were, slipped through the cracks of the method. In Fowl’s conclusion, biblical theology “is systematically unable to serve the purposes Christians bring to the interpretation of Scripture,” not least because it “has worked diligently to exclude the theological convictions it needs to engage in order to advance substantive theological arguments.”1 Fowl proposes a better way: theological interpretation of Scripture.Fowl’s actual proposal is theoretically, hermeneutically, and theologically capacious. It is not directly dogmatic and could even be read as entirely formal. In a nutshell, he argues for what we might call a teleological bibliology: that is, an account of the nature and interpretation of Christian Scripture defined by its ends or teloi. And if the principal end of reading Scripture is communion with the Holy Trinity, then good Christian habits of reading will be those that tend toward that. These habits need not and perhaps cannot be specified in advance. Rather, they will be discovered as they arise organically in the life of the community whose book Scripture is—hence, Fowl’s proposal is ecclesial through and through. Skeptical scholars are welcome to read the Bible, but their reading is necessarily parasitic upon the Bible’s primary reading community: the church. It follows that Christian academic interpretation does its ancillary work best when it simultaneously draws upon and serves the church’s antecedent and contemporary habits of reading, which are already up and running and in the business of drawing hearers and readers of the Scriptures into ever more intimate life with the God and Father of Jesus Christ.As I say, Fowl leaves the hermeneutical details underspecified. He offers no master theory, either of the text or of its interpretation. He simply identifies the hermeneutical circle and invites all of us—scholars, pastors, and theologians alike—into it. This is one of the most attractive aspects of Fowl’s book and doubtless one of the reasons it has been so generative.Where did that leave us? All of a sudden the phrase “theological interpretation of Scripture” became an acronym (TIS), a rallying cry, a publishing craze, and even a kind of ramshackle movement. Commentary series were commissioned, a new journal was founded, feathers were ruffled, and a thousand think pieces by curmudgeonly historical critics were penned. To what end, though?From any honest vantage point, the achievements of TIS are a mixed bag. I want to draw out of that bag what are, in my view, the most pertinent successes and failures. And the successes were real. In 2010 Miroslav Volf wrote that the “return of both [biblical scholars and systematic theologians] to theological readings of the Bible . . . is the most significant theological development in the last two decades.”2 The point cannot be overstated. To see biblical scholars and theologians move together toward shared recognition of the ontology and teleology of Holy Scripture, and to seek to read it accordingly, is the first and, I hope, lasting fruit of TIS.If, however, there was ever any hope that TIS would produce a workable, detailed, or widely received hermeneutical method, then it was bound to be disappointed. Critics found much to lampoon here, whether at the level of theory or at the level of practice. And it is true that we learned, over the last 25 years, that some theologians are not very good readers of the biblical text. I would not categorize this lesson as revelatory, though it does no good to deny it. What is worth denying is its having any import, since poor readers we will always have with us, and they are no respecter of disciplines. What is more important to see is that the lack of a meta-method is a feature of TIS, not a bug.In this, Fowl was prescient. His seeming formalism was actually a principled pluralism. Fowl knew that the church has never commended, required, or sought one true hermeneutic to rule them all. Instead, bishops and monks, priests and nuns, professors and pastors, martyrs and missionaries have developed diverse habits of reading that reliably discover Christ in the Scriptures, show Christ forth in the liturgy, and display Christ in the lives of the baptized. Such habits rise and fall in usage and standing. Some disappear altogether, while others are retained, pruned, and watered in ways that bless the faithful and nurture the gospel. For this reason, Fowl and TIS wisely pitched a big tent—or rather, marked off a large and indefinite garden—in which true variety, a whole hermeneutical ecosystem full of plants and trees old and new, might be planted or replanted, put down roots, and flourish under the sun.We must admit that one of the chief shortcomings of TIS has been a triumphalist narrative arc, according to which the Enlightenment’s chickens were at last coming home to roost, the critics were reaping the whirlwind, and the church would hear God’s word for the first time in a very long time. That kind of talk is silly, and any of us who engage in it, myself included, need to dial back the volume down from eleven.One of the reasons why is that, for all the local changes effected by TIS, the discipline of biblical studies and its secular historicist bent seem more or less unchanged. My Christian colleagues in Old Testament and New Testament appear broadly to be doing their work in ways basically indistinguishable from two or four or seven decades ago. And on its own terms, that work is very impressive. It is not, however, work that would be recognizable to Saint Basil, or Saint Maximus, or Saint Bernard. And vice versa, the unfettered figuralism of the tradition remains, so far as I can see, opaque to the guild. At best, it is respected on historical or sociological grounds. At worst, it is mocked and scorned. In neither case is it seen as a living option, worthy of emulation, much less an authoritative pattern to whose yoke believers, at least, must submit. Why? Because, as Lewis Ayres and Khaled Anatolios have pointed out, on it the Nicene faith depends.3 Put it this way: If the Cappadocians were not exemplary and, indeed, unimpeachable interpreters of Scripture, Christians of all people are most to be pitied.Thankfully, they were, so we need not worry. But as long as there are Christian scholars who scoff at spiritual exegesis of the Song of Songs while reading it as a “how to” manual for evangelical marriage, we will remain in the wilderness, the Promised Land nowhere in sight.Let me end this section on a positive note, however. Fowl’s lack of a theologically thick doctrine of Scripture was of a piece with his modest approach to opening up space for fellow practitioners to read theologically. It also reflected his training in New Testament studies. In his later writing he went on to affirm the need for rooting both the ends and the interpretation of Scripture in the nature of Scripture, and the nature of Scripture, in turn, in the transcendent will, sovereign power, and providential action of God. One of the happy byproducts of TIS, then, has been the dedication of enormous attention and energy to the doctrine of Scripture. The firstfruits of this harvest have been, to put it mildly, bountiful. I am thinking of works by figures like John Webster, Robert Jenson, Kevin Vanhoozer, Ephraim Radner, Paul Griffiths, Katherine Sonderegger, Hans Boersma, Peter Leithart, Daniel Treier, Todd Billings, Frances Young, Matthew Levering, Darren Sarisky, and many more besides. May their tribe increase.As I think about the prospects for theological interpretation, four questions come to mind.(1) We are in the midst of a profound transformation of theological education. Institutions are shuttering. Seminaries are barely keeping the lights on. And former bastions of theological prestige are shifting curricula and faculty lines from theological methods to religious studies, intellectual history, ethnography, and theory. Moreover, traditional fields like New Testament are undergoing internal debates about the integrity of their discipline: for example, whether the tacitly Christian nature of the subject matter should be revised into a properly neutral approach. My question is simple: Where will TIS find itself after the dust settles? Will an exogenous shock finally push biblical studies into the arms of theology? How should we prepare?(2) I have so far left unspoken a name that looms large in TIS: Karl Barth. How stands his legacy today? And what does it mean for theological interpretation?4 If it were the case that Barth is a doorway and not a destination, then where does he lead? Put differently, what is the status of sola scriptura for TIS and how will practitioners diverge who differ in their answers? Magisterial Protestantism is in a bad way today. Both nationally and globally the energy, the numbers, and the money are either with evangelicals, biblicists, and Pentecostals or with Rome, Canterbury, and Constantinople. For myself, I do not see any promise in a middle path between them, and I am convinced that sacred tradition is the necessary vehicle and the authoritative matrix for Holy Scripture to be heard as what it is, the word of God. But what do others say?(3) Whither the literal sense? Kevin Vanhoozer has just published the capstone to his decades of work on this topic, and he makes a mighty attempt to clarify and delimit what it means for Christians to read ad litteram, arguing for the letter transfigured rather than an additional spiritual sense.5 Beneath his text I detect two lingering worries. On one hand, he means to protect the Scriptures’ referential rootedness and normative intelligibility in their original authorial and sociolinguistic contexts of production—lest they drift away, unmoored and thus inaccessible to mere Christian consensus. On the other hand, Vanhoozer takes for granted as theologically essential the historical facticity of all the events reported across the canon. Each of these positions is heavily contested, however, both in the tradition and in contemporary theology: the first by Ephraim Radner, for example, and the second by Paul DeHart.6 Can TIS find some measure of resolution to these questions? Or will they simply be perennial sources of hermeneutical disagreement?(4) How weird is TIS willing to be? It may not be evident from our offices, but it is a boom time for popular interest in the Bible. The interest for the most part is not in our books, sad to say. It is on the internet. It is on podcasts, YouTube channels, and Substack. It is in The Bible Project, The Symbolic World, Word on Fire, and The Bible in a Year.7 I have a friend who was raised in a devout evangelical household and went on to get a PhD in one of the social sciences at an Ivy League school. About a decade ago he happened upon the hours-long video lectures of an obscure Canadian psychologist outlining a Jungian reading of Genesis and Exodus. Here is what my friend said: Why didn’t anyone ever tell me that the Bible is interesting?So I will ask again: How weird are we willing to let our theological interpretation be? Will we truly let our guiding lights be Origen and Nyssa, Ambrose and the Damascene, Thomas and Bonaventure? Will we let our numerological freak flags fly? Or will we duly sanitize the spiritual sense, lest we appear too unscientific, too undisciplined, too pious? I have cast my own lot with the weirdos: with Radner on Leviticus and Sonderegger on Numbers and Griffiths on the Song.8 “Make the Bible interesting again” means “let the Bible be weird again.” But I fear such an approach will not win out. And I fear, as a result, that the contribution of TIS will pale next to the podcasts and the online platforms, rather than work in concert with them as a supportive if sometimes corrective scholarly patron.This may be the one area where Steve and I may disagree— if only because I do not know how wild his hermeneutic will allow him to get. My vote is for unbridled figural I hope he will