Post Series:
1—Imperialism of the Present
2—Reformers as Proto-Postmodernists
3—Ad Fontes, Erasmus, and the NIV

As I wrote in our first post, this month IVP launched their new Reformation Commentary on Scripture series with their inaugural title Galatians & Ephesians . Accompanying this release is a book by the series general editor, Timothy George, called Reading Scripture with the Reformers . I received this book to review and I thought I would do a few posts on what was striking to me as I read through this supplement to what I expect to be a good commentary series.

In the past post I addressed what Timothy George called the imperialism of the present and heresy of contemporaneity, which both speak to the tendency to dismiss the past in favor of present theological and hermeneutical innovations. Thus the cackle calls from several in certain pockets of the Church for a new kind of Christianity, a Christianity worthy believing where, jn the end, love ultimately wins. I argued we need to be broken of our heresy of contemporaneity, of our imperialism of the present by reorienting ourselves, in mid orbit, around what the Reformers themselves reoriented: the Bible.

In so returning to the Bible we must also wrestle with such a returning in the particular condition in which the Church finds herself: the postmodern condition. Postmodernism challenges the historic Church’s hermeneutical ability by casting doubt on languages ability to act as a reliable medium of truth; denies the ability to cull a consensus of truth from texts by placing meaning in the eye of the reader, rather than the writer; and prevents the Church from claiming a single reality defining story, because any hope for a single metanarrative has been replaced by local stories.

In the face of this challenge, Timothy George asserts that several other habits of postmodernism actually fit nicely with “the hermeneutical legacy of the Protestant Reformation.” (37) These “habits of reading” include: the relational and correlative nature of knowledge; a humility with regards to studying the Text of Scripture in light of a trinitarian hermeneutics of the cross; and the communitarian nature of knowledge and interpretation. (38-42)

First, as postmodernism has emphasized the relational character of knowledge, so too does Reformed hermeneutics. Calvin says, “nearly all the wisdom we posses, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” Calvin wrestled with the problem of understanding and recognized the finitude of the human person, while rejecting naive objectivism. (38) In so doing, he and other Reformers recognized the need for the Holy Spirit to bear witness to God and his knowledge, while rejecting an “independent epistemological platform on which we may stand and sovereignly survey our theological options.” (38) Likewise, the whole purpose of our hermeneutical endeavor is the restoration of our humanity as image of God, individually and communally.

Secondly, a trinitarian hermeneutics of the cross invites us to study the Bible with humility and conviction. According to George who references Jens Zimmerman, “the postmodernist critique of autonomous reason, including the notion of deconstruction itself was foreshadowed in an important strand of early Reformation theology. (39) George goes on to say, “In his 1518 Heidelberg Disputation, Luther argued that the message of the cross destroyed, dismantled and reduced to nothing all abstract, speculative and objectified knowledge of God,” arguing that it is God himself who reveals. (39) In fact, apparently young Heidegger was drawn to Luther’s critique of Aristotelian scholasticism. Luther’s and subsequent Reformed “hermeneutics of the cross” should engender humility in that the individual and his or her gumption and ingenuity has no place; it’s God’s revelation and grace all the way down. Along with epistemic humility, however, also comes conviction and committment, because God himself has acted and revealed in history.

Lastly, while Luther and the reformers who followed him were early advocates of what Dilthey called the “autocracy of the believing person,” their reformation and deconstruction effort did not happen in isolation but was deeply connected to the body of Christ throughout time. George notes, “The reformers read, translated and interpreted the Bible as part of an extended centuries-old conversion between the holy page of God’s Word and the company of God’s people…theirs was nonetheless a churchly hermeneutics.” (40) I like that…a churchly hermeneutics. A communal hermeneutics in which Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, Beza, Bucer, et al sought knowledge of God in community, connected to the historic Church. As one Reformer, Johannes Oecolampadius commented: “The Church is the vineyard of the Lord…The person who does not love the Church does not love Jesus Christ.” Which means the person who does not love the historic Church does not love Jesus Christ, to which the Reformers attested.

But over against a postmodern attitude that asserts its notion there can be no, single, universal, coherent reality-defining story, the Reformers also read Scripture as an all-encompasing, coherent story that tells of God’s rescue through Jesus Christ in which our own individual, local stories are to be understood. Thus while the Reformers might be proto-postmodernists in the sense that they anticipated certain themes in regards to knowledge and interpretation—i.e. relationality, humility, and communality—they also stand against postmodernism by declaring God is here, in the one man Jesus Christ, and he is not silent; God has revealed therefore we can know; and the biblical story cannot be reduced, in the words of Richard Bauckham, “to an unpretentious local language game in the pluralism of postmodernity.”

And it was the Reformers great conviction that God, through His grace, has spoken, to us, through the life/death/resurrection of Jesus Christ as witnessed by the Scripture. It is this conviction that we should join them in also holding in order to stand firm in the face of postmodernity ourselves. I don’t say that with any chicken-little conviction. I only say it in recognizing that as the Church we have a Story, given to us by both the Holy Spirit and Communion of Saints, one that we need to be reminded of and reorient ourselves around. Something I think the Reformers can help us with 500 years removed.