Revelation and Story

Narrative Theology and the Centrality of Story

Gerhard Sauter, John Barton, Gerhard Sauter, John Barton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351903400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

Revelation and Story explores the relationship between the theology of revelation and the theology of story or narrative theology. Mediating between German systematic theology's concern for revelation and current Anglo-Saxon interest in narrative theology and centrality of 'story', this book illuminates both traditions. Exploring 'revelation' and 'story' from both theological and philosophical perspectives, this book connects these concepts with questions of the authority of religious and literary texts, particularly the Bible. Believing that God's revelation precedes and forestalls all human perception of God, all speech about God, and every attempt to experience anything about God or know Him, leading scholars from both Anglo-Saxon and German traditions are brought together to present a diverse range of conceptions relating to how God's revelation occurs, resulting in a new theory of the relation of revelation and story which transcends the traditional cultural divide. Stanley Hauerwas contributes the Foreword. Revelation and Story offers a valuable new contribution to systematic theology, hermeneutics, and the study of the authority of Scripture, as well as presenting insights into important overlaps between British and German theology. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of philosophy and theology, and to students of literature and literary theory with an interest in hermeneutics.

One
'Scriptural Faithfulness' is not a 'Scripture Principle'

Gerhard Sauter

'Do you stand on Scripture?' This, so we are told, is what Gossler, the Prussian minister, asked Adolf Schlatter in 1893 when he sought to call him to a post in the University of Berlin. The distinguished New Testament scholar, dogmatician and ethicist is said to have answered, 'I stand under Scripture.'¹ What is the difference between standing upon the Bible and standing under it?

People who emphasize standing upon the Bible wish to assert their steadfastness and religious accountability. Perhaps they want to affirm that they stand on solid ground, on the eternal Word of God, and not on the shifting views and changing opinions of human beings. But those who speak like this should see to it that they do not place themselves above the Bible and trample on it in the process. The Bible can never be beneath us. That is what Schlatter wanted to say when he turned the minister's question around and phrased it properly. To place oneself under the Bible means, on the contrary, to expose oneself to Scripture, to pay attention to what it has to communicate. Standing under Scripture does not mean, however, standing under the Bible in order to feel safe as if it were a shelter or a protective covering against bad weather. That would be something entirely different.

1 What does it Mean 'to Begin with the Bible'?

Images of the Bible as a shelter, a bulwark, secure on every side, erected on a rock-solid foundation and therefore rock-solid itself, emerge frequently when we speak of 'the principle of scripture'. Since the beginning of the sixteenth century, Lutheran and Reformed theologians have appealed to the Bible as a theological principle of knowing (principium cognoscendi).² They mean that Scripture is an unconditional prerequisite of theology because God reveals God's own self there and has endowed it with the divine Spirit. God acts in God's Word. Therefore Christian doctrine, with which every dogmatician is especially concerned, may not be attributed to any other source. For this reason theology founded upon the Bible considers itself unchangeable and unshakable by anyone or anything. Such a statement sounds almost as though Luther's song of protection, 'A Mighty Fortress is our God', had been rewritten as 'A Mighty Fortress is our Bible', complete with the military metaphors of weapons and shields. Scripture is seen in this way as a fortress and arsenal because theology wants to be as well armed as possible (if not completely armed). In any case, it does not want to be less armed than philosophy with which it compares itself in terms of their principles of knowing.³ The Bible is studied with these aims in mind: asking what is necessary and sufficient in order to obtain secure knowledge.

In the nineteenth century a different, sharper tone was added. The Bible became the 'formal principle' which was to characterize Protestantism.

The return to the original revelation in scripture is ... the formal principle of Protestantism which presents itself in application as a critique, seeking to distinguish between those things which have been presented as Christian truth, but are suspected to be human work and therefore polluted by the admixture of human error, from that which is sifted out of scripture and judged as the unpolluted source of divine revelation.⁴

These are treacherous images! In this approach the 'critique' operates like a chemical process, in which the original revelation acts as a kind of nitric acid which is used to distinguish the gold from all other substances.⁵ The Bible appears as a pure source which remains unpolluted as long as no one disturbs it. The goal is that all of Scripture should serve a process of 'justification by Scripture.' But what does 'justification' mean in this in stance, if justificatio n by faith alone is, at the same time, defined as the 'material principle of Protestantism'?⁶

It is worth considering here that the appeal to Scripture, indeed to Scripture alone (sola scriptum), can have no other ground than the confession of 'justification by grace alone' (sola gratia). 'Justification' cannot have one meaning here and a different meaning there. God communicates God's righteousness by speaking with us. Reading the Bible, like prayer, should be done with the expectation that God desires to give God's own self to us. The two are not to be separated from each other.⁷ God's unmerited gift is communicated to us nowhere but in the biblical word, and conversely, justification by grace and only in faith (sola fide) depends on the expectation of the action of God, an expectation which leads us to Scripture and lets us search in it. We do not search there to find what we already know, what we have been informed about for all time through a biblical instruction, but rather to come upon Christ in the pages and to hear him alone (solus christus) among all the voices; we encounter him anew time after time. 'You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; but it is they that testify on my behalf' (John 5:39).

In contrast, every 'justification which is produced with the help of the 'principle of scripture' understands itself as something completely different; namely as legitimation and authorization. It is put forward as the ultimate, valid justification with a claim to infallibility, as an unalterable point of departure and an unshakable foundation. In other words, it is presented as the final substantiation of everything Protestantism ever stood for. In this process both justification and scripture are fundamentally misunderstood, as if the Bible serves to derive religious values from divine revelation. These are, of course, assumed to be the values of Protestantism which is therefore, for this reason, to be accepted as the purest expression of Christian religion.

To 'begin with the Bible means, from this perspective, to return to the origin, to the very first moment of religion, because it is here, if anywhere, that God can be found. This means that anything which comes later stands in danger of being all too human additions which taint or completely undermine that which once came purely from God. Such a view appears to be easily compatible with historical inquiry into beginnings, and the search for an 'original event' which must be liberated from every human addition in order to shine in its true splendour. Tradition is thus fundamentally suspected of falsification. In this sense the principle of scripture belongs under the slogan: 'We stand on scripture, the Catholics stand in the Church.'

This is how the supposition of a 'theology versed in scripture could arise, a theology which sees itself like a dike against the prevailing trends of science and ideology which surge against it. Then the person who is true to scripture has a handy Bible verse ready for any situation in life. 'As it says in Scripture ...' becomes a motto on the banner of the 'know all' – or the ignoramus!

Nevertheless, this understanding of a 'principle' contains a measure of truth: one may not go behind the Bible. Christian theology begins with the Bible insofar as it seriously takes 'the scripture,' (that is, the canon as the church's confession of God's address to humankind) to be the place for God's self-communication in Jesus Christ. One cannot get behind the assertion that God has decisively spoken in Jesus Christ, that God has addressed us in him. Whoever pursues Christian theology honestly cannot deny this characteristic of 'Holy Scripture' in its unity and wholeness. This certainly does not mean that everything that can be said in Christian faith must always begin with a word from the Bible. But all Christian discourse must be measured by whether it can be cross-referenced to the contingent event of 'God coming to speech in Jesus Christ' – or whether it comes from another source.

This event may not be traced back to anything else. What the Bible says can be substantiated neither in a return to historically secured facts nor in the psychological analysis of the authors of extant texts (certainly not using depth psychology), nor in the sociological reconstruction of circumstances, as informative as all these may be in their place. The Bible is defenceless against such attempts to get to the bottom of its texts, because they intend to use a 'foundation other than the one that has been laid, which foundation is Jesus Christ' (1 Corinthians 3:11). 'To get behind the Bible' commonly denotes other reasons and motives. The reader wants to find the authors out by explaining their unexpressed intentions, their interests or their reactions to discoverable life situations. Whoever tries to get behind scripture will usually miss what the Bible itself has to say.

So 'to begin with scripture ' means at least 'not going behind scripture ', but what else might it mean? Those who are open to scripture will discover an entirely different beginning, a new beginning, within it. In Luther's dispute with Erasmus of Rotterdam, the issue at stake was not centred upon an appeal to the Bible's clarity and its importance for binding theological language. Nevertheless, Luther referred persistently to a primum principium, a 'first principle'.⁸ In so doing he took up a philosophical category which was the unconditioned presupposition of all further argumentation. By 'first principle' he meant the 'certainty' of scripture, that is its unambiguous communication. On the strength of this certainty one can expect clarity in the important life and death issues. This he contrasted with laws which only order customs and decide controversies.

This 'first principle', however, is not intended to be a 'principle of scripture'. It is not some supernatural quality of Holy Scripture. The Bible is not a starting point for enquiries about life in the world or a key for all life issues. The Bible is not a secure bastion behind which we can barricade ourselves or from which we can launch attacks on others. The primurn principium is God, who steps forth from God's darkness, who confronts us, draws near and deals with us. Stated more precisely, the clarity of scripture is Christ himself as the light which illumines the dark or, better still, who breaks through the dark - the truth as life. The reason we cannot get behind scripture is because God has drawn attention to God's own self so unambiguously clearly there. Therefore we can begin nowhere else, neither before scripture was written nor after. If we try to begin somewhere else, we attempt secretly to get behind our trust that it is none other than God who speaks in the Bible. The search for historical clues in scripture is potentially less serious than an attempt to get behind scripture. Naturally getting behind scripture can be expressed in a flight to the historical, social and psychological limitations of the authors, but it can also be practised in the subsequent, seemingly advanced, co-shaping and reshaping of texts by their readers. For this reason any truly urgent reading of the Bible, driven by life and death issues, begins with the questions, 'Who is the God who becomes audible in scripture? Who is the one of whom I read in the Bible?'

2 Biblical Proof Texts or Biblical Grounding?

It would be the exact opposite of the 'primum principium to try to draw attention to oneself (and certainly to assert oneself) by using biblical words. It is because of such attempts, however, that the 'principle of scripture' has lost a great deal of vitality. This is an odd irony, yet unfortunately logical. For a long time the Bible was used to challenge ecclesial authorities, who had treated faith as if it were like a door off its hinges, no longer able to swing freely and function properly. The principle of scripture was used as a kind of Archimedian fulcrum and lever to lift faith back to where it belonged. In this way it was hoped that freedom, which ecclesial authority had taken away, could be restored to faith. Later on the Bible itself was classified as being part of the tradition from which enlightened Christians had emancipated themselves, in order to recover scripture's living foundation in an original and unmediated relationship to God – or so people thought.⁹ From this critical point of view, the principle of scripture was seen as one of the last vestiges of a mediaeval obeisance to authorities. Though reformation theology continued to adhere to it, the Enlightenment was the first to cast it off completely. Thereafter the Bible was continually used – and misused – to make obligatory what ought to be done, when other motivations were either lacking or too weak to stir people into action.

According to this line of thinking, everything that ought to be done without excuse or complaint must have a biblical 'reason.' It is striking, even treacherous, that today the Bible is so often 'used' as instructions for action. This is not surprising when one considers how much in the field of ethics today is controversial, and how even doing what is most necessary evidently requires stronger motivations than those already present. But it certainly gives one cause to wonder, when biblical precepts or mere motifs taken from the Bible are commonly used – after the event – to make obligatory what is already known, that is to sanction what has already been discussed as a possibility for action. The Bible is then no longer studied to find a biblical direction for action in the midst of urgent and necessary decisions. Such direction should not relieve us of a decision, but point us beyond the decision to a view of God's promise. It directs our view to God's act which embraces us, an act which cannot be confused with our goals, regardless of how honourable they may be.

Currently, in the German Protestant Church it has become customary to propose 'biblical grounds' for each and every thing. The practice already appears to have a tradition. Did not the Reformers refer to scripture passages when they criticized the traditional sacramental practices, called canon law into question and revised church order? With these actions, however, the Reformers did not pit untouched origins against degenerative developments. They professed, rather, Jesus Christ as the present acting Lord of the Church! They wanted to hear him, not a stranger, when – and this is crucial – they described the nature of ecclesial action.¹⁰ But today 'biblical grounds' are urged primarily when urgent decisions need to be legitimated. Such a process goes like this: Bible verses are brought to bear which correspond to the current theme to be clarified. 'What is there in the Bible on this issue?' prompts a search through thematic similarities, corresponding situations, repeatable tasks, or perhaps simply key words in scripture. All that is found presumably leads directly to 'what the Bible says'. This recitation of evidence is assumed to answer the question at hand. Usually, the answer cuts off all further inquiry.

As a curious but symptomatic example I refer to the debate over 'wine or grape juice at communion' which was conducted some years ago.¹¹ It began with a concern for alcoholics for whom even a sip of wine was considered to be dangerous. One would think that nothing more or less than a pragmatic regulation would be necessary in order to include these parishioners in the celebrati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 'Scriptural Faithfulness' is not a 'Scripture Principle'
• 2 Story and Possibility: Reflections on the Last Scenes of the Fourth Gospel and Shakespeare's The Tempest
• 3 Disclosing Human Possibilities: Revelation and Biblical Stories
• 4 Reading the Bible Theologically
• 5 Revelation as Gestalt
• 6 Allegoria: Reading as a Spiritual Exercise
• 7 'Revelation' and 'Story' in Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic
• 8 Does the Gospel Story Demand and Discourage Talk of Revelation?
• 9 The Productive Vagueness of an Untranslatable Relationship
• Bibliography
• Index