Theological Interpretation of Scripture Matters—16

The Holy Spirit and Theological Interpretation

Pentecostal Ourpouring of the Holy Spirit, Brick wall painting (source: PickPik).

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[I introduced the question of the role of the Holy Spirit in theological interpretation in the tenth contribution to this series. For introductory comments and some recommended reading, see there.]

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What can we say about the role of the Holy Spirit in biblical interpretation? What difference would it make if we were to read the Bible self-consciously as people of the Spirit?¹

On the one hand, reflection on these questions can never be straightforward. As Jesus observes in another context, “God’s Spirit blows wherever it wishes” (John 3:8). Accordingly, we ought to proceed with all due caution before we create PowerPoint slides tying down what the Spirit accomplishes (and how the Spirit accomplishes it)! On the other hand, we can draw on our understanding of both the church’s Bible and the Holy Spirit. So I do not mean to deny the important sense in which the Spirit’s work in biblical interpretation, as in all other realms, is beyond our ken; I am urging, though, that we can explore that mystery, however incompletely, by attending to certain interests and practices.

Three Caveats

Before reflecting further on the work of the Holy Spirit in theological interpretation, I want to register three provisos.

1. Referring to the activity of the Spirit in theological interpretation of Scripture is not an excuse or an invitation to bypass the important work of disciplined study of Scripture. After Howard Marshall wrote the New International Greek Testament Commentary on the Gospel of Luke, I asked him whether he found his rather technical work on that book to be an act of worship. With only a moment’s hesitation, he replied with a resounding yes. The slow, detailed work of exegesis ought to be an instrument by which the Holy Spirit is engaged in the interpretive process, not its counter.

2. Although it is easy to cast dispersions on the theological aridness of much of modern biblical studies, I should add that its contribution to the church need not be deleterious. If one of the chief aims of teaching students to read biblical texts closely is to slow down the process of interpretation so as to encourage reflection on the capacity of these texts to speak into and over against the Bible’s interpreters today and to cultivate a basic disposition of respect for its character as “other,” then serious study of the Bible today has much to offer. In this sense, disciplined attention to Scripture can only benefit the church.

3. Globally, including parts of the West and segments of the eastern and southern hemispheres influenced by the West, the priorities of modern biblical studies have not universally problematized the church’s theological interests in and commitments to Scripture. A great deal of theological work with Scripture continues in all sorts of venues—sermons, prayer, liturgy, hymnody, and Bible studies, among them. Some of this interpretive work is seasoned by the disciplined study of the Bible sponsored by academic biblical studies, and some of it would benefit from being seasoned in this way.

At the end of the day, though, theological work with Scripture—listening to what the Spirit is saying to the church in and through Scripture—finds its home in the church and not in the university. Listening for God’s address in Scripture is an ecclesial practice that, ultimately, does not and cannot depend on academic accreditation.

Reading with the Spirit

In our present climate, it’s essential to emphasize that to speak of the Holy Spirit’s work in the interpretive process is to deny the hermeneutical autonomy of individual readers of Scripture as well as to qualify the utility of technique in biblical interpretation. It is, instead, to affirm our dependence on the Spirit and on the community of God’s people generated by the Spirit. If, as Charles Taylor puts it, modern identity in the West promotes self-sufficiency and self-determination, is apprehended in self-referential terms, and is realized through self-autonomy and self-legislation,² then a hermeneutical stance of hospitality to and dependence on the Holy Spirit undercuts much of what we take for granted in the stories we tell about ourselves. Moreover, it requires us to recognize our need for resources beyond ourselves—and to acknowledge that recognition among others.

The entailments of this emphasis are legion, but primary among them would be our recognition that our interpretive interests find their real home in the church. The Spirit forms us as and within interpretive communities, gatherings of the church of Jesus Christ, continuous through history and across the globe.

1. This means, first,

   1. that notions of a private or individualized reading of the Bible are suspect;

   2. that we must resist any claim that the Bible belongs to a particular class of people, however well trained they may be, or to a particular segment of the church (such as the Western church or the American church or the baptist church); and

   3. that the door is wide open for participation by the whole people of God in the interpretive task. The way is open, too, for the whole people of God, over time and in all its diversity, to discern between faithful and unfaithful interpretations of what the Spirit is saying to the church through its Scriptures.³

2. It means, second, that worship, preaching, prayer, baptism, mission, and Eucharist—these and other ecclesial practices comprise the space within which Scripture is most faithfully read and discussed. And when these ecclesial practices do not comprise that immediate context, then, surely, our engagement with Scripture is informed and motivated by, and serves, them.

3. It means, third, that, just as the Spirit continues to press the church forward in its messianic identity and mission, so our work with Scripture must be seen as open-ended. The text of Scripture is relatively stable, to be sure, but the same cannot be said of the changing arenas in which the church actively seeks by the Spirit to read its sacred Scriptures.

4. At the same time, fourth, we honor the history of biblical interpretation, the history of the effects of the church’s engagement with its Scripture, and the work of interpretation taking place in communities near and far other than our own. These represent arenas of the Spirit’s work among our mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers in the faith, whose interaction with the Bible is potentially formative of ours and whose readings can pull back the curtain on how parochial our interpretative efforts can be.

5. Fifth, we embrace the wider tradition of the church as the arena in which the Spirit has been at work and, so, as the context within which we discern the shape and substance of genuinely Christian interpretation. “Interpretation and realization of Scripture are ecclesiological events, and therefore the church and its tradition are integral to the handling of the Bible.”⁴ To proclaim the work of the Spirit in the ongoing life of the church is to recognize the importance of reading Scripture in relation to the classical faith of the church and in conversation with those expressions of the church that have stood the test of time.

Accordingly, it is worth reflecting on how it matters to our reading of Scripture that we routinely recite the Apostles’ Creed, that we meet each other again and again at the Lord’s Table, that we actively engage with people who do not share our faith, that we regularly share meals in each other’s homes, that we participate in homebuilding and homemaking efforts for those with no home, and that we pray to Jesus as though he were God. (Similarly, what difference does it make to our reading of Scripture when we do not engage in practices such as these?)

If contemporary biblical studies curricula underscore, say, the importance of philology and structure and context, those who come to Scripture as people of the Spirit highlight also the Spirit’s work in readying us to read Scripture through inculcating in us dispositions and postures of invitation, openness, and availability. An integrated life of devotion to God and our willingness to participate in conversionary readings of Scripture—these dispositions and concomitant practices are the fruit of the work of the Spirit in our lives.

Negatively, this emphasis on the role of the Spirit works against certain emphases in biblical interpretation today. Attitudes of skepticism accompanying historical inquiry are eclipsed by an openness to the God who acts to liberate. Minimalist approaches to meaning are set aside in favor of an openness to the interests of Scripture’s divine author, and to the sometimes surprising ways a biblical text finds significance in the divine economy.

Admittedly, Spirit-animated reading of Scripture may appear to take risks when compared with those forms of modern, critical study most alert to what might go wrong in the interpretive process. But this is the way of pneumatological exegesis, and our taking this necessary risk is an expression of our trust in the Spirit not only to guide our interpretation but also, over time, to direct the church in its interpretation and embodiment of Scripture. As Henri de Lubac put it,

No matter what suppleness of mind is brought to determining this meaning, no matter what changes are rightly envisaged in the ways leading naturally to it, the Spirit of God cannot be omitted. It is a gift of this Spirit. In order to receive it, it is not enough, therefore, to “press hard,” to “seek”; it is also necessary to “pray,” to “implore.”

He continues, “For anyone who thinks he [sic] is able to do without the Spirit of God and yet uncover the Mysteries of Scripture is exactly like a man who, without a light, loses his way and has only unfamiliar walls to touch.”⁵

Accordingly, we might speak of reading Scripture as self-involving (rather than dispassionate and neutral). Alternatively, we might characterize Spirit-animated scriptural reading as conversionary. From this vantage point, Scripture does not give us a set of principles awaiting modern application. Instead, Scripture engages us over time in a transformative encounter by which we understand reality according to its terms and, then, come to live differently. This formation of Scripture-shaped minds that understand God and God’s creation through Scripture-shaped lenses—this requires patient, deliberate reading, reading, as it were, for no good reason but for the sake of having our dispositions and reflexes shaped by the Spirit in our encounter with Scripture. Engaging with Israel’s past or Jesus’s parables is therefore not an antiquarian exercise as much as it is the means by which God’s Spirit forms and fashions us.

A pneumatological hermeneutic calls into question the ultimate utility often allotted to human efforts at understanding the Bible, but this does not mean that a pneumatological approach is Spirit-centered. God’s Spirit is God’s agent and, as a consequence of his exaltation, Jesus, too, is Lord of the Spirit. We hear in these words an affirmation that, as the Spirit was active in the generation of Scripture, so, in our ongoing performance of the Scriptures, the Spirit conveys God’s voice even as the Spirit points us to Christ. We also recognize a certain constraint on how we read Scripture, since we thus anticipate that Scripture (and scriptural interpretation) will never counter how God is revealed in Christ.

1. For what follows, I have taken my earlier ruminations on this question as a starting point; see Joel B. Green, Seized by Truth: Reading the Bible as Scripture (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 94–100. Some parts of this essay are adapted from my essay, “Spiritual Hermeneutics,” in Third Article Theology: A Pneumatological Dogmatics, ed. Myk Habets (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016), 153–72. Unless otherwise indicated, citations from the Bible follow the Common English Bible.

2. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

3. Cf. Christopher Bryan, And God Spoke: The Authority of the Bible for the Church Today (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 2002), 17–21.

4. D. H. Williams, Evangelicals and Tradition: The Formative Influence of the Early Church, Evangelical Ressourcement (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 101.

5. Henri de Lubac, Scripture in the Tradition, Milestones in Catholic Theology (New York: Crossroad, 2000), 152–53.