Dancing with the New Testament

As part of last week's Study Leave I took up Stephen Neill and Tom Wright's The Interpretation of the New Testament: 1861-1986 (Oxford UP: 1988). This thorough review of scholarly work surveys the big names of New Testament criticism, exegesis, and theology from a century which still undergirds so much current thinking. I read with joy and wonder the ability of Neill and Wright to summarize, honor, and criticize--the latter always with the humble reserve of OxBridge scholarly culture--such a vast landscape of literature. I appreciate their honest recognition that the work of New Testament studies brings the persistently human in contact with the persistently divine, so that in spite of the excellent quality of the labors of the Ivory Tower a certain incompleteness always remains. But I am enriched from having received Neill and Wright's engagement, often very personal, with these labors.

At the end of the book--which, we must remember, is a survey rather than a thesis in itself--Wright draws our attention back to the very source of Enlightenment criticism, from which all the scholarship surveyed here grew. The insistence of the Protestant Reformation on the "literal sense of scripture" gave birth to all the critical tools of evaluating the text we have in the Bible. The use of these tools leads us, however, to a realization the Wright describes and which resonates with my own experience: "we find that this literal sense points us beyond itself" (p445).

Throughout the book, Neill and Wright drop hints that historical criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, and the rest of the members of the critical family have not (at least as of 1986) gotten to the matter of Jesus' resurrection, the Easter moment. Questions of "the historical Jesus," raised by all Three Quests (maybe there's a Fourth Quest by now), have only skirted this primary historical criterion of faith. Even the review of E.P. Sanders' novel idea that Paul had a "participationist eschatology" (p427) does not bring up the strange event of Paul's conversion, which hinges on a Resurrected Jesus encountering Paul personally.

I find the academic work described so masterfully in this book profound and greatly helpful in my own vision of what it means to be an interpreter of the New Testament for today. But it seems that this work keeps its distance from the experience to which the New Testament itself testifies: a Resurrected One who speaks with the voice of God to persons in every generation. Perhaps this is a necessary limit of the scholarly task. Perhaps Wright humbly recognizes the proper bounds of this task, when at the very conclusion he seeks to describe New Testament interpretation in the metaphor of music with its melodies and harmonies. Criticism bounded, as it must be by reason, may not be able to grasp the essence of the New Testament, any more than one can grasp why a shift from a major to a minor chord changes the mood of a melody. One may simply require experience and participation to understand. (This is not to cast doubt on whether Neill and Wright have such an experience, but only to recognize that experience may not be welcome in the scholars' colloquy.)

One thing remains, on which this book and I agree: We must continue to grapple with the New Testament, to wrestle with it, to dance with it, to sing its melodies and improvise its harmonies. After all, it is the story of Jesus Christ, and by faith in him it is also our story. I thank God for such a chorus of thinkers who continue to offer us their meditations, that we may be built up and equipped for our good works.

~ emrys