Metaphors for Scripture: taking up Dale Martin’s challenge

Abstract

New Testament scholar Dale Martin has called for doing away with speaking of the ‘authority of Scripture’. Constructively, he proposes a number of metaphors for Scripture, which, nevertheless, point very strongly to the Church’s dependence on it. This article brings Martin’s programmatic suggestions into conversation with some recent doctrinal writing on Scripture that has given attention to the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of Scripture. The doctrinal reflections pose the question of what it is about Scripture that makes the Church dependent on it and to what end. The article suggests two metaphors that help illuminate the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of Scripture.

Keywords

Dale Martin doctrine of Scripture metaphors Rowan Williams Scripture

Dale Martin’s challenge

In various of his writings, Dale Martin has called for doing away with speaking of the ‘authority of Scripture’.¹ The prompt behind this call is Martin’s disquiet about the very notion of authority and its dangers. There is ‘no way’, he writes in his 2017 Biblical Truths: the meaning of Scripture in the twenty-first century, that ‘language about authority can be used without provoking overtones of hierarchy, inequality, patriarchy, and injustice’.² These overtones make the language of authority ‘dangerous and potentially harmful’.³ Accordingly, he proposes some alternative images for ‘what scripture is and how it is important for us, how we listen to it and respect it’.⁴ He continues:

For me scripture is better imagined as the context in which we live our Christian lives. Scripture is the environment for the church. Scripture is the space we inhabit, the sanctuary where we meet God and Jesus by the guidance of the holy spirit … It is the air we breathe, the water we Christian fish swim in.⁵

Nurturing such images would allow us, he suggests, to ‘dispense quite safely with the problematic, dangerous, potentially violent and abusive – but unfortunately almost ubiquitous – metaphor of scripture as our authority’.⁶

Martin’s disquiet is not to be dismissed, and his alternative metaphors warrant engagement.⁷ Yet something seems awry with the formulation of the problem. There is something odd about speaking of authority as a ‘metaphor’ of Scripture. The phrase ‘scripture as our authority’ is not actually metaphorical. The ‘as’ is more directly descriptive than it is metaphorically suggestive. To refer to the authority of Scripture is to make a literal statement about one of its functions. Still, it is striking that, while eschewing the notion of authority, Martin’s suggested alternative metaphors highlight our dependence on Scripture: it is ‘the air we breathe’; ‘the water we swim in’. But for what, exactly, are we dependent on Scripture? What metaphors might help to both crystallize and illuminate the precise contours and purpose of that dependence? In other words, what metaphors might address Scripture’s ‘what’ and ‘why’?

The theological tradition is not lacking in metaphors for Scripture.⁸ Origen referred to Scripture as a ‘field, filled and flowering with all kinds of plants’, beneath which lies a ‘hidden treasure of wisdom and knowledge’.⁹ Calvin declared Scripture to be the divinely given ‘spectacles’ that allow humans to see what is the otherwise ‘confused knowledge of God’ gleaned from creation.¹⁰ Charles Hodge proposed, somewhat notoriously, that Scripture be understood as a ‘storehouse of facts’.¹¹ Karl Barth spoke of Scripture as a ‘witness of divine revelation’.¹² Vatican II’s Dei Verbum described the Bible as ‘the support and energy of the Church … the food of the soul, the pure and everlasting source of spiritual life’.¹³ Drawing on African American experience and use of the Bible, James H. Evans describes it as a ‘text for outsiders’.¹⁴ Katherine Sonderegger names Scripture as ‘a mode of divine presence’.¹⁵

Some of these metaphors have themselves been very influential as well as often being the topic of much controversy. All of them, however, are embedded in wider reflections on, to use Martin’s terms, ‘what scripture is and how it is important for us’.¹⁶ The metaphors may illuminate some feature of those wider reflections, and with their metaphorical capacity to spark the imagination they can provoke new lines of enquiry or expansion of vision. With that in mind, I will propose two metaphors that illuminate and spark enquiry into the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of Scripture. As a first step towards that, I will draw on some recent doctrinal writings on Scripture.

The ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of Scripture

In the theological imaginary generated by both modern and postmodern concerns, these questions might typically be asked and answered as follows. What is Scripture? A text (or set of texts). Why read it? To determine or generate meaning and to mandate particular actions. How is it read? With various culturally and/or academically legitimated hermeneutical theories. It is also the case that in the modern/postmodern milieu, the third of those questions – the ‘how’ of reading it – has predominated, somewhat to the exclusion of the former two. Partly in reaction, recent doctrinal writings on Scripture have tended to focus on the first two.¹⁷

In their attention to the ‘what’ of Scripture, doctrinal theologians have frequently attended to what Scripture is not. In seeking to lift Scripture out of the foundational role it had assumed in modern Protestantism, John Webster, for instance, did much to challenge the widespread idea of Scripture as an ‘isolated piece of epistemological teaching’.¹⁸ For Webster, a more integrated account of what Scripture is is achieved by placing it in the history of the Triune God’s revelatory, saving and sanctifying activity. Scripture is to be ‘construed as that complex economy of salvation which originates in God’s self-knowledge and has its telos in the reconciliation of all things’.¹⁹ Although this corrective move is good as far as it goes, and has become a commonplace in doctrinal accounts of Scripture, it can nevertheless yield an overly formal answer to the ‘what’ of Scripture. The details of Scripture’s material content seem to be kept at arm’s length. Webster’s anxiety about ‘naturalistic accounts’²⁰ of the formation (or reading) of Scripture has, in effect, the result of allowing little room for the particular human actions and circumstances that produced the literature to inform a theological definition of the Bible.²¹

Echoing Webster, Katherine Sonderegger likewise resists ‘the strong magnetic pull of modern conceptuality’.²² Her metaphor of Scripture – already quoted above – as a ‘mode of divine presence’ is oriented towards understanding Scripture as where ‘we encounter God’,²³ and she underscores ‘encounter’. In fact, she underscores it so much that she argues that the Bible’s significance does not lie ‘in virtue of the content … but in virtue of the Divine Presence’.²⁴ So, even though we ‘will find the history of Israel there, the history and words of Prophets and Apostles … the words and deeds and victory of Jesus Christ’, we turn to the Bible ‘not because we learn these things in its pages, but because we meet God there’.²⁵ The rhetorical intent of this contrast is understandable, but it is also risky. Surely, it is precisely because of Scripture’s content that it can be the place of encounter.

Robert Jenson is one theologian who addressed how the Bible’s content helps define what it is. In the following summary, we can see how Jenson at least names some of the intentionality behind the human, ecclesial agency that produced the Bible:

What Christians call the Bible, or Scripture, exists as a single entity because – and only because – the church gathered these documents for her specific purpose: to aid in preserving her peculiar message, to aid in maintaining across time, from the apostles to the End, the self-identity of her message that the God of Israel has raised his servant Jesus from the dead.²⁶

Jenson points to the theologically loaded nature of the intentions behind the formation of the Christian canon. At the very least, the fact that ‘these particular documents’ were ever ‘gathered’ highlights that theological claims are built into the very existence of the Christian Bible, made up as it is of both Jewish and Christian writings: God’s uniqueness, the unity of creation and redemption, and the pivotal place of Jesus in that unity. Moreover, the fact of the Bible as a ‘single entity’ needs to be part of understanding what the Bible is. To affirm that is not to deny its internal differentiation. Nor is it to impose upon it a prescriptive hermeneutical framework, and even less to predetermine the exegesis of particular texts. But any account of Scripture’s ‘what’ that sidesteps these questions about what it is as a ‘single entity’ will be inadequate precisely as a theological account of Scripture. Nevertheless, Jenson’s comments are less helpful with regard to the ‘why’ of Scripture. The emphasis on maintaining the Church’s identity across time easily obscures the generative capacity of the Bible across time. The Bible accompanies the Church’s history of discovering and even expanding its identity as the Church reads and re-reads it over the course of history.

Telford Work’s Living and Active: Scripture in the economy of salvation²⁷ draws attention to the generative work of Scripture. ‘If Scripture’s character participates in the Father’s will, the Son’s kenosis, the Spirit’s power and the humanity of God’s elect, then its use must participate in the divine economy of salvation.’²⁸ It is ‘living and active’ in the sense that it was the history of interaction between Israel and the word of God that generated the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), formed Jesus’ self-understanding, and equips the Church for mission. Christian Scripture is produced as Jesus was himself formed in his own self-understanding by his engagement with the Tanakh. Instructed by him, the first Christians learned to read their existing Scriptures in ways that brought forth new Scriptures, the reading of which continued to form Christian communities and propel them into witness. The biblical writings are produced as ‘Scripture’ precisely by and in the history of Israel’s and the Church’s engagement with its content. Of the Tanakh, Work writes: ‘It enshrines a tradition of biblical interpretation in Scripture itself.’²⁹ According to Work, it ‘misleads even to speak of “Scripture” and “tradition” in the abstract, for Scripture is itself tradition’.³⁰ While objections might be made to this direct equation of Scripture and tradition, it does highlight that Scripture only is what it is and does what it does because it too is ‘handed over’ from generation to generation and place to place, inevitably accompanied by traditions of reading it.

In stressing the dynamic nature of Scripture’s ongoing history, Work rebuffs the idea of the Bible as a ‘storehouse of facts’:

The Bible is no mere ‘store-house of facts’ on which theology draws for its work of systematization, but reaches into the characters of both God and God’s people. Jesus’ formation and career are inconceivable without it. One might as well say that Israel, Mary, and the Church are dispensable to the Christian story. All of these – their events, their texts, and Christ the Center – are inter-related, not simply as effects and causes, but as mutual causes and effects.³¹

Work thus highlights the content, structure and purpose of this dynamism. Its content is the Christian story grounded in Israel’s hope. Its structure is determined by Christ at its centre. Its purpose is to draw Christ’s disciples into this ongoing history of participation in the drama of salvation to which it bears witness.³² Historically, the idea of Christ at the centre of Scripture has strongly shaped the ‘how’ of reading Scripture. It also suggests something about its ‘what’ and ‘why’. And it does so because it presses the question of the relation of the centre to what lies around it.

The Christological centre

Using different terms, Rowan Williams also captures the centrality of Christ and highlights the dynamism implicated in that centrality. Instead of ‘centre’, Williams speaks of the Christological ‘focus’ of Scripture. Highlighting the diachronic nature of Scripture’s emergence, Williams highlights that the canonical literature bears witness to a tension-filled history where different theologies are in conversation with each other, correcting each other and calling each other to account. ‘The movement of our canonical texts is frequently a quite explicit response to or rebuttal of some other position within the same canonical framework; the world it opens to us is one of uneasy relationships and discontinuities.’³³ But within this uneven canon, there remains a focus:

[T]he existence of conflict and even conscientious division [within the canon] may not be a sign of polarisation but a necessary part of that movement of the story of God’s people and their language towards the one focus of Christ crucified and risen that is the movement of Scripture.³⁴

There are echoes here of Walter Brueggemann’s claim that the Old Testament is witness to a ‘process of profound conflict and disputation through which Israel arrives at its truth claims’.³⁵ Even if the Christian canon is more tightly centred, this Christological focus does not exhaustively resolve the canon’s tensions. The reading of these Scriptures with this focus directs the Church into a particular kind of participation in the drama to which it bears witness. After all, there is much evidence to demonstrate that participation in the ongoing drama of God’s work in Jesus Christ mediated and provoked by Scripture is no less marked by ‘uneasy relationships and discontinuities’ even when Jesus Christ is acknowledged as the focus of Scripture. This point warrants some emphasis. Attention to the Christological focus of Scripture is often accompanied by an emphasis on the harmony of Scripture. That emphasis, however, can lead to an insistence on – and a quest for – a similar harmony among Scripture’s interpreters and their interpretations. But Williams’ mixing of Scripture’s Christological ‘focus’ and the ‘uneasy’ relationships among its theologies can be a warning against premature harmonies. It can also begin to make theological sense of the ‘uneasy’ and even ‘discontinuous’ relationships that exist among Western, African, Asian, feminist, postcolonial, queer, classical and other readers of Scripture as they encounter each other within the Christian community.

The insight from these reflections is that Scripture is a witness to the multifaceted drama of God’s creation and redemption, worked through the history of Israel and brought to focus in Jesus Christ. Scripture both points to and draws people into this ongoing drama. Two metaphors can respectively illuminate these claims.

Two metaphors

The first metaphor to be considered here is that of a ‘compass’. Of course, treating the Scriptures as a compass is not unknown in Christian piety, where it is invoked, somewhat simplistically, to treat Scripture as a source of direction. So used, the metaphor may well combine the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of Scripture, but it does so in a way that treats the Scriptures as a map on which lines are clearly drawn and destinations easily located. But a compass is a more dynamic and, in some important respects, a less precise tool than a map. A compass by itself does not prescribe detailed directions to a destination, but it does provide one’s bearings at various points in the journey. Moreover, in being responsive to the earth’s magnetic field, a compass points to and is dependent on a reality other than itself, and only in this dependence can it perform its designated function at all. Its performance of this function also involves time: the compass needle takes time to align itself to the invisible force it has been constructed to detect. The vibration of the needle in this alignment is a reminder that the force it responds to is a dynamic force. Just as a compass bears witness to the fact that we are enveloped by a magnetic field, so the Bible points to the drama of creation and redemption that envelops the whole cosmos, and into which we are drawn and invited to participate. This metaphor, like Dale Martin’s, illuminates the idea of the Church’s dependence on Scripture – it gives us our bearings without which we could make no decision on any journey. But it also reminds us that the Bible is a witness to the living reality that God is, and that to encounter God in and through the Bible takes time and requires attention.

The second metaphor is that of two concentric spinning wheels, but with each wheel spinning in the opposite direction. One generates a centrifugal force; the other centripetal. This metaphor picks up the centre–periphery of the Christological focus of Scripture discussed above. The centrifugal circle illuminates, to echo Rowan Williams, the movement of Scripture towards its centre. By extension, this illuminates the way in which Scripture draws its readers into its force towards this centre. The centripetal wheel illuminates the way in which this focus remains generative of the history of the Church’s ongoing engagement with Scripture. By extension, this also illuminates the way in which the Christological focus that draws the Church into Scripture is the same focus that sends it out in mission. It also illuminates the way in which the engagement with Scripture produces an ongoing movement of interpretation and the uneasy relationships that exist among its interpreters.

Conclusion

This article began with Dale Martin’s protest against attributing ‘authority’ to Scripture. His constructive alternatives employ metaphors that speak instead, albeit in general terms, of our dependence on Scripture. In conversation with certain doctrinal reflections about the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of Scripture, the metaphors of ‘compass’ and ‘concentric spinning circles’ have been proposed to illuminate the basis and purpose of this dependence. They highlight the way in which the Bible orients Christians to the drama of creation and redemption, while also drawing them into that drama as active participants, including their role in the ongoing – and uneasy – history of reading and interpreting Scripture.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biography

Geoff Thompson is Co-ordinator of Studies in Systematic Theology at Pilgrim Theological College within the University of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Christian Doctrine: a guide for the perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2020).