Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters
Reviewed by Robert P. Mills, June 3, 1999
Why pay nearly $30 for a reference work that can’t be mined for clever quotes to slip into a sermon, Sunday School lesson or campfire conversation? Because preaching and teaching the Bible are not solo sports and because ignorance of the saints who have labored in this vineyard is not a virtue.
Donald McKim, a PCUSA minister and academic dean at Memphis Theological Seminary in Memphis, Tenn., has gathered essays on more than 100 biblical interpreters ranging from Justin Martyr in the early second century to such contemporary exegetes as Raymond Brown, Brevard Childs and radical feminist Phyllis Trible.
The collection is arranged in six chronological sections, with the 20th century being divided into European and North American interpreters. An introductory essay offers a helpful overview of each section. As McKim rightly notes, readers may quibble about who was included and who was left out. However, the breadth of his selections is without question one of the strengths of this sizable volume.
Essays on the individual interpreters place them in their historical and theological context, outline the major influences on their thinking, and note their major contributions to the history of biblical interpretation, frequently including quotes from the individual’s key writings. Most are four or five pages long. All conclude with bibliographical references for further study.
From the Church to the academy
In reading through these entries chronologically, one cannot help but notice that for biblical interpreters in the early and medieval church, and even for some (such as Charles Hodge) in the 18th and 19th centuries, reading Scripture was first and foremost an exercise in spiritual formation. For these exegetes, to read Scripture was to be shaped and formed by Scripture’s ultimate author, the Holy Spirit, into the image of the living God; it was to learn about the nature and character of God, and about God’s intention for his human creation. As a result, reading and interpreting the Bible were both intensely personal and unavoidably communal. Scripture could not be rightly understood apart from the Church, and, if rightly understood, it could not help but make a difference in the readers’ faith and life.
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”
II Timothy 3:16But as we enter the modern era, reading and interpreting the Bible has become quite antiseptic, a scholastic exercise undertaken with the clinical detachment of an entomologist dissecting, studying and classifying a six-legged creature in a laboratory. The task of “correctly handl[ing] the word of truth” (II Timothy 2:15) has been removed from the Church and reassigned to the academy, by the academy itself. Indeed, the prevailing academic ideal is that the most trustworthy Scripture scholars are those who lack a prior commitment to Scripture’s truthfulness and trustworthiness. (For details, consult any work published by The Jesus Seminar.)
The still unfolding impact of the Church’s acquiescence can be measured, at least in part, by the low esteem in which Scripture is held by many of the pastors who have been trained in our academically correct seminaries, pastors who now stand in our pulpits and, as one PCUSA pastor described his own approach “preach against the Bible.” No longer ministers (literally, “servants”) of the Word, far too many pastors now see themselves as Scripture’s master. As this academic arrogance has trickled down from the academy to the pulpit to the mainline pews, the membership and influence of denominations like the PCUSA has eroded steadily.
That the Church has bent the knee to academic imperialism would outrage Hodge, Edwards, Calvin, Luther, Aquinas, Agustine, Origen, Athanasius and most of the other interpreters whose work is described in this insightful volume.
A reflective reading of this resource might help begin the process of prying loose the academy’s stranglehold on Scripture and returning the Bible to the Church, which then could once again affirm that “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (II Timothy 3:16).