Beyond the Bible by I. Howard Marshall

Beyond the Bible by I. Howard Marshall

Author:I. Howard Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL006400, REL067000
ISBN: 9781441206633
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group


4

Into the Great “Beyond”

A Theologian’s Response

to the Marshall Plan

Kevin J. Vanhoozer

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Introduction

It gives me great pleasure to respond to the preceding chapters, both to their author and to their topic. Professor Marshall has been a faithful laborer in the vineyard for decades, training two generations of New Testament scholars. North American students in particular have gone into the far country in order to work with him. If I. Howard will not come to the mountain, the mountain must go to I. Howard. . . .

I did not go to Aberdeen for my Ph.D., but I was awakened from my hermeneutical slumbers some twenty-five years ago by a book that Howard edited: New Testament Interpretation: Essays on Principles and Methods. Already in that book he was saying that New Testament interpretation “reaches its goal only when it examines the meaning of the text for today.”[1] And he notes in the introduction that a concern for exposition and for the present-day reader may take us “beyond the original intention” of the biblical authors.[2]

Let me suggest that we approach this question—what it means to be biblical in our exposition—not with Lessing’s famous metaphor of the “ugly ditch” that separates biblical studies and systematic theology, but with the more hopeful metaphor of the “chunnel.” The chunnel—the tunnel dug under the English Channel—is a most impressive engineering project. The British bored one way and the French another, and they met, thanks to sophisticated global positioning instruments and the like, exactly in the middle. That is the image we are after: exegetes from Aberdeen and Tyndale House chunnelling toward the Continent, the land of systematic theology, and systematicians chunneling toward the exegetes from their own side.

Where will exegetes and systematicians meet? On the fertile ground of the theological interpretation of Scripture, defined as “that practice whereby theological concerns and interests inform and are informed by a reading of scripture.”[3] This chunnel has, of course, been dug before. Before there was an ugly ditch separating biblical studies from theology, biblical interpreters in the early, medieval, and Reformation church were reading Scripture prayerfully and reflectively in order better to know and love God.

Marshall defines exposition as “understanding what the text may be saying to contemporary readers as opposed to original readers.” To exposit is to set forth or interpret. Exposition may well be the place where the biblical and theological chunnels meet. As Karl Barth well knew, what makes theology necessary is the task of preaching, of reflecting on how it is possible to proclaim, “Thus saith the Lord.” Exegesis and theology are the crucial guardrails against “impository” preaching, whereby the interpreter imposes his or her own notions onto the text. Marshall’s search for a principled way of expositing the Scriptures for today is therefore to be commended.

The Argument: Contours of the “Marshall Plan”

Although there is much in these chapters that is descriptive, I take it that Marshall’s ultimate aim is prescriptive; hence his plea for a “principled” approach. Let us call the main prescription—to develop theology as does the Bible itself, that is, with biblical principles—the “Marshall plan.



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