Reading as Creatures: A Response to Stephen Fowl

I want to begin by expressing my thanks to Stephen Fowl for writing a book that has had considerable influence on how I approach my work as a biblical scholar and theological educator.1 His insistence that Christian interpretation ought to be marked by Christian virtue and charity, and that Christians ought to concern themselves with forming virtuous and charitable readers in Christian community is a challenge that I have incorporated into my rhythm of prayer and preparation for the start of each academic year, and one that I also include in my yearly induction lecture to incoming undergraduate students as they undertake the academic study of theology. What I offer here I hope will foster further dialogue for how we might continue to hone his important work twenty-five years on. In the conclusion of his book, Fowl writes “To the extent I am doing anything new, I am offering a call to Christians, and Christian biblical scholars in particular, to begin to reflect differently on the contexts in which biblical interpretation takes place and on the particular interests that should be constitutive of Christian scriptural interpretation.”2 Fowl also is concerned to show the connections between scriptural interpretation, doctrine, praxis, and “Christians’ abilities to form and sustain a certain type of common life.”3Early reviews of Engaging Scripture, which were predominantly written by biblical scholars but published in journals in theology, showed varying degrees of resistance to Fowl’s call. While on the one hand biblical scholars praised Fowl’s commitment to reading the Bible as Christian Scripture and fostering greater biblical literacy in the church, a few of the reviews betrayed an attitude among some biblical scholars that self-identified theologians like Fowl ought to “stay in their lane.”4 Mark Hamilton writes that Fowl’s “book proves once again that theologians have not yet digested the implications of two centuries of biblical scholarship.”5 Schuyler Brown charges, “Apart from a critique of deconstruction, F. shows little awareness of the influence of modern literary criticism on biblical interpretation.”6 I point this out not because I agree with Hamilton or Brown—I emphatically do not—but instead to highlight how, unfortunately, there has been an all-too-common sentiment among Western biblical scholars (even Christian biblical scholars) that reading the Bible (or writing about how one should read the Bible) is perhaps best left to the “professionals” in biblical studies. For Christian biblical scholars, this attitude is particularly dangerous since, as Fowl argues, the aims of Christian interpretation are to enable faithful worship of God and faithful common life among Christian believers—and therefore this task must be owned by the church as a whole rather than by a few academic specialists. As Fowl also points out,7 some biblical scholarship surely furthers these aims, but in an ad hoc way—and in order to do so, even helpful biblical scholarship must be brought into conversation with contemporary contexts of faith and praxis. In short, Christian biblical scholars must offer their gifts and skills alongside the gifts and skills of theologians, and of other teachers, pastors, artists, prayer warriors, prophets, encouragers, and so forth, in order to discern the work of the Spirit faithfully in their own time and context. As a Christian biblical scholar, I want to take seriously Fowl’s dual emphasis on reading Scripture to enable right worship and facilitate a flourishing Christian common life, and his call to biblical scholars to reflect on the context of their interpretation and the necessary connections between interpretation, the character of the interpreter, and the praxis of the community. To that end, I want to offer here some reflection about Fowl’s chapters on virtuous interpreters and the work of the Spirit and ask whether Fowl’s account of the virtuous interpreter might be meaningfully supplemented by attending to the interpreter as “creature.” I will do this in dialogue with a reading of Rom 8, which, I hope, models the same sort of insightful Scriptural conversation that marks Stephen Fowl’s own work in Engaging Scripture. In his chapter on virtuous interpreters and communities, Fowl focuses primarily on the role that repentance and forgiveness must play in the interpretation of Scripture. In conjunction with this, Fowl is at pains to recognize where the interpretation of Scripture has gone wrong and where Scripture has been used to justify oppression, injustice, and evil. I take him to be directing his call to repentance in particular to interpreters who assume a position of self-justifying lordship over the text, and thus over others, and thereby weaponize the Bible in service of insidious ends. Because, Fowl argues, the Bible can be used wrongly and harmfully, the virtuous interpretive community must assume a posture of humility, repentance, and forgiveness in order to create space for correction from others (in charity) and guard against the abusive use of Scripture.8However, I worry that although Fowl intends to call those who engage in abusive interpretations of Scripture to repentance, repentance and forgiveness are often demanded of groups of interpreters within Christian communities that have themselves been the objects of abusive interpretation. Women, for example, are often asked to repent of their sinful readings of Scripture if they advocate for justice for women in terms of equal representation, or serving in church leadership, and so forth.9 Slaves, too, were victimized by proslavery readings of Scripture calling for their repentance from sin and obedience to their masters,10 and more examples could be added.11 Now, I hasten to add that Fowl’s point is to call the whole Christian community to a posture of repentance and forgiveness, and this should rightly include those who use Scripture to oppress.12 However, I again worry that groups who are on the receiving end of abusive uses of Scripture have so internalized a sense of their own inadequacy and wrongness that, for these groups, Fowl’s practices of repentance and forgiveness must be carefully contextualized if they are to be practices that do not further contribute to their victimization.13As I have reflected on how one might hold the importance Fowl places on the character of the interpreters (in community) together with a concern not to reify the power differentials and cycles of abuse that are sometimes perpetuated through false practices of repentance and forgiveness, I wonder if one possible way forward might be to ground the cultivation of virtue relationally and positively.14In Rom 8, Paul speaks of believers as those who “live according to the Spirit” and have the “mind of the Spirit.” He also speaks of believers as those who—through the Spirit—groan in solidarity with creation as they await the redemption of their bodies (8:23). Paul speaks too of the Spirit interceding for believers because the Spirit knows the mind of God, and he speaks of Christ as the model and pattern of the believers’ redemption, a redemption that God has promised to carry to completion through Christ (8:29). Notably then, throughout Rom 8 one of the marks of the life of the believers is a sense of their own creatureliness, which is present in their co-suffering and co-glorification with Christ (8:17), their cries for redemption (8:23), and their prayers with the Spirit (8:26–27). Furthermore, in Rom 8 the creatureliness of believers is irreducibly relational—those with the mind of the Spirit are children of God through adoption, and by the Spirit they rightly perceive their relationship with God (whom through the Spirit they, like Jesus, call upon as “Abba, Father”) and one another (8:29). Sensing too the brokenness and bondage of creation, those with the Spirit groan in relational solidarity with all of creation as they long for the redemption of their bodies. According to Rom 8, an awareness of one’s own creatureliness is a feature, not a flaw or a shortfall, of life in the Spirit. Indeed, Rom 8 is a striking picture of Fowl’s apt observation that “The singularity of God’s word . . . indicates that all things [that is to say, all “creatures”] are capable of being viewed and spoken of in relation to the Word.”15If we were to expand Fowl’s interpretive virtue to include the cultivation of sense of our own creatureliness, this practice might provide a positive grounding for a greater attentiveness toward God and God’s self-revelation in Scripture. A sense of our own creatureliness ought also to foster an awareness of our contingency as interpreters, which in turn would provide a positive grounding for solidarity and empathy between Christian communities. In his account of virtuous interpreters, Fowl is rightly concerned to address the posture of the Christian reader toward the task of interpretation.16 The bookends of Rom 8 (8:1–4 and 8:31–39) push us to address an even more fundamental subject: the believer’s posture toward God, which I would argue necessarily begins by attending to the primacy of God’s self-revelation and divine action. According to Rom 8, God sent his Son in the weakness of the flesh of sin to condemn sin in the flesh (v. 3). God did not spare his Son but gave him up for us all (v. 32). God searches the heart, and the Spirit intercedes for the saints (v. 27). Christ died, was raised, and intercedes for us (v. 34). And most potently, nothing in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus (v. 39). In Rom 8, Paul is adamant that God is unremittingly for us and working for the eschatological good of his creation (8:21–29). God has already revealed God’s self in the saving death and resurrection of Christ, and continues to involve the divine self in creation through the intercession of the Son and the Spirit (8:16, 26–27, 34). God’s self-revelation and sustenance of creation does not then, I think, leave room for a believer to assume a posture of mastery or domination when it comes to knowledge of God or study of the Scriptures, since this would be to confuse the Creator/creature distinction.17 Instead, the primacy of God’s action ought, as Murray Rae urges, to cultivate a posture of attentiveness toward the Scriptures—which is the fitting response of creatures who encounter the Lord of All who has drawn near in love.18 To read as creature is thus to read always with an awareness that we are continually held in the hands of Christ, and therefore all of our readings are “at the end . . . still in [God’s] presence” (Ps 139:18). Cultivating a sense of our creatureliness in line with Rom 8 likewise ought to lead to a greater appreciation of the contingency and limitedness of our interpretations of Scripture.19 In Rom 8, it is precisely the believers’ life in the Spirit that brings awareness of their relatedness to God as children (v. 15) and thus to one another as siblings (v. 29).20 Moreover, their communal groaning in the Spirit is creaturely groaning for the restoration of creation (v. 23). Thinking along with Rom 8, then, to read Scripture as a creature is also to read Scripture relationally—as brothers and sisters. This will necessarily entail recognizing the contingency of one’s own reading and then actively seeking out other voices as one embraces the chorus of Spirit-led groaning,21 which is a posture sorely needed in much of Western biblical studies, as well as the church. Perhaps we might even say that there is virtue in scholarship recognizing its own locatedness, which allows interpreters to appreciate how their readings are both provisional and peripheral when viewed from another location. In Rom 14–15, Paul seems particularly concerned to highlight that groaning in solidarity does not mean an erasure of difference nor a laying aside of conviction. Instead, the creaturely contingency of believers necessitates the active decision to welcome one another with the welcome of Christ, even when deep disagreements are present, so that God might be glorified (15:7). Reading as brothers and sisters then becomes an act of neighborliness focused on finding Christ in one another—particularly in those with whom we may have deep interpretive disagreements. I would also add that reading as creatures ought to attune us to the groans of nonhuman creation, since all creation is in bondage to decay (8:22–23). In his conclusion, Fowl is surely right to remind us that we cannot separate “the formation of practically wise readers of scripture” from “the formation of practically wise people,”22 and twenty-five years later, it seems that these two tasks are still fragmented within academic biblical studies and perhaps in many churches. Thus, Fowl’s challenge for Christian biblical scholars to think more intentionally about the contexts and interests that ought to constitute Christian readings remains relevant today. Perhaps though, Rom 8 finally presses us to set Fowl’s challenge against an eschatological backdrop—a backdrop of God’s final act in Christ, which surely chastens all our conclusions, increases our empathy, and urges a prophetic inhabiting of the Scriptures. Against this backdrop, Fowl’s call to form practically wise people and practically wise readers is not a mere suggestion to increase collegiality in the academy and the church among the various camps who disagree. Rather, Fowl’s call ought to take on a prophetic dimension—one that necessitates wise readers seeing and naming those places where both human and nonhuman creation are groaning under the pain of injustice, brokenness, and sin, and calls for readers to be always straining in hope toward the triune God who has promised to make all things new.