The state of the Bible in the twenty-first century

When I told a British NT colleague about the assigned topic of these lectures, he responded "That sounds like a tall order!" And indeed it is at least that, if not an impossible one. I can do no more than give you my personal take on these matters as an evangelical, but I suppose and hope that this is what you are interested in and why I was invited to give these lectures.

Every generation, it seems, has worried about the state of the Bible and has addressed the issue of the apparent ineffectiveness of the Bible in the church. As a sampling, I mention the following publications. In 1969 the Netherlands Reformed Church produced a volume titled The Bible Speaks Again (Minneapolis: Augsburg), designed "to bridge the gap that has developed continuously during the last hundred years between the biblical scholars and the man in the pew" (p. 10). The basic thought of the book "is the Reformed insight that the Bible carries its own authority" (p. 10). In the following year, James D. Smart published The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Church: A Study in Hermeneutics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970). Smart argued that modern biblical scholarship has the potential to liberate the Bible to speak more meaningfully to church members and enable them to engage the important theological issues. An ecumenical conference in 1988 brought forth the volume Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: The Ratzinger Conference on Bible and Church (ed. Richard John Neuhaus; Eerdmans, 1989), with essays from quite different perspectives, Ratzinger accepting only a qualified use of the historical-critical method, and George Lindbeck emphasizing consensus and community building.

Of particular interest to me, given the locations of these lectures, are two volumes involving Lutherans. The first, growing out of conferences sponsored by the Lutheran Council in the U.S.A., is Studies in Lutheran Hermeneutics. (1) This volume focused on the propriety and problematic of the historical-critical method and reflected the pain of the divisions occurring among Lutherans in the preceding years. The discussion seems rather tame by today's standards. The second volume, Reclaiming the Bible for the Church, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), grew out of a conference jointly sponsored by the Center of Catholic and Evangelical Theology and the American Lutheran Publicity Bureau. The editors' preface speaks of the "crisis of biblical authority and interpretation in the church" and observes that "the Bible seems to have lost its voice" (p. ix).

As helpful as this book is, perhaps twelve years ago was just a little early for it to confront the hermeneutical crisis currently facing the church, posed particularly by the emergence of postmodernism. (2) I got excited when I discovered the book What Have They Done to the Bible? A History of Modern Biblical Interpretation by John Sandys-Wunsch (Liturgical Press, 2005), because this is the question I am interested in. But the book focuses on the beginnings of the historical-critical method and takes us only to the nineteenth century. How much more now in the twenty-first century must we ask "What have they done to the Bible?"

Among significant church statements on scripture we especially note the Roman Catholic statement "The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church" (1993), (3) which affirms the indispensability of the historical-critical method to the interpretation of the scriptures, and the various statements of the Presbyterian Church USA. (4)

Others have undertaken to address my topic and to assay the situation facing us in the new millennium. Edgar Krentz did so prophetically in his 1993 article "Biblical Interpretation for a New Millennium" (Currents in Theology and Mission 20:345-59). As more representative of the avant garde, I mention only five books: The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A Constructive Conversation by Luke Timothy Johnson and William S. Kurz (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002); New Paradigms for Bible Study: The Bible in the Third Millennium, ed. Robert M. Fowler, Edith Blumhofer, and Fernando F. Segovia (New York: T & T Clark International, 2004); Reading Scripture with the Church: Toward a Hermeneutic for Theological Interpretation, essays by A. K. M. Adam, Stephen E. Fowl, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, and Francis Watson (Grand Rapids, Baker: 2006); and Hermeneutics at the Crossroads, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, James K. A. Smith, and Bruce Ellis Benson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). (5) Finally, I call attention to the remarkable new book by Markus Bockmuehl, Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006). We will have occasion to refer to some of these books, and especially the Bockmuehl volume, later in this lecture.

In the twenty-first century we are in fact experiencing a revolution in the approach to the biblical text. John Dominic Crossan has likened the changes occurring in biblical criticism to a revolution as consequential as that which took place in the eighteenth century with the introduction of the historical-critical method itself. (6) This was true already with the impinging of a variety of new disciplines upon the study of the Bible, which is what Crossan had in mind. These new approaches can be regarded as adjunctive to and enriching of the historical critical method rather than necessarily undermining it. Now, however, the dimensions of the revolution appear much larger and perhaps even ominous.