The Psalter as Living and Dynamic

I’ve posted a few times on the Psalter in the last week or so, noting how the psalms were written and slowly collected somewhere between the period 1400 and 400 BCE, give or take.  This might be sort of a new concept for many Christians, but rather than detract from our view of Scripture it adds to it, in my opinion.  Here’s one good point by Tremper Longman along these lines.

“The key is to see the Psalter as a living, open book during the whole Old Testament period.  The Psalter was in constant use individually and corporately from its very beginning.  In addition, new psalms were constantly added” (How to Read the Psalms, p. 43).

Though I think “constantly added” is an overstatement (150 psalms collected over 1000 years is not constant addition!), Longman’s point is well noted.  Bernard Anderson, in Out of the Depths (another great study of the psalms), said it this way.

“A closer look at the fivefold structure of the Hebrew Psalter reveals that this symmetrical organization was superimposed upon previously circulating collections of psalms, just as modern hymn books are based upon previous editions” (he cites and explains the “editorial notice” at the end of Psalm 72 here; it is found on page 11).

I’ll continue this thought later…

shane lems

sunnyside wa

More Machen

The church today is facing something similar to what Machen faced less than 100 years ago: Jesus divorced from Scripture, history, and the church.  We saw it a few days back in Deepak Chopra’s “third Jesus.”  Deepak’s jesus used scented lotions and came so we could realize our inner potential, so we might find self-actualization and inner tranquility.  The Christ of Scripture, history, and the church is God in the flesh who came to save people from sinful self-actualization by becoming a bloody curse on the cross, by destroying death in his resurrection, and by ascending into glory where he now lives to protect his church.  This is the gospel truth that Machen so ably defended.

“I do not think that what the New Testament says about the cross of Christ is particularly intricate.  It is, indeed, profound, but it can be put in simple language.  We deserved eternal death; the Lord Jesus, because he loved us, died in our stead upon the cross.  It is a mystery, but it is not intricate.  What is really intricate and subtle is the manifold modern attempt to get rid of the simple doctrine of the cross of Christ in the interests of human pride.  Of course there are objections to the cross of Christ, and men in the pulpits of the present day pour out upon that blessed doctrine the vials of their scorn; but when a man has come under the consciousness of sin, then as he comes into the presence of the cross, he says with tears of gratitude and joy, ‘He loved me and gave himself for me.”

From “What the Bible Teaches ABout Jesus” in J. Gresham Machen, Selected Shorter Writings, edited by D. G. Hart (Phillipsburg: P&R, 2004), 30.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Frei on Precritical Biblical Interpretation

I’ve been reading Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New York: Yale, 1974) for the past few weeks.  This book is quite deep and thick and rich – I know for sure I’m only tracking with the main points that Frei is making.  I enjoy it, but it’s going to take one or two more readings for me to fill in all the blanks.  The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative is not for sissies!

In this book, among other things, Frei notes the huge change/morph in biblical interpretation from the pre-critical to the critical period (roughly speaking, before and during the enlightenment).  Here are two elements of biblical interpretation that changed radically.

First: In pre-critical hermeneutics “if it seemed clear that a biblical story was to be read literally, it followed automatically that it referred to and described actual historical occurrences.   The true historical reference of a story was a direct and natural concomitant of its making literal sense.  This is a far cry from taking the fact that a passage or text makes best sense at a literal level as evidence that it is a reliable historical report.  When commentators turned from the former to the latter interpretive use of literal meaning or used the two confusedly, it marked a new stage in the history of interpretation – a stage for which deistic convictions, empirical philosophy, and historical criticism form part of the technical intellectual background” (p. 2).  If I can reword this or comment on it, I think the difference Frei is pointing out is that in the pre-critical era, the text made sense because it described history accurately.  In the critical era, the shift is huge: the text made sense in so far as it described history accurately.  Hence historical criticism grew like a weed.

Second: In the pre-critical era, “if the real historical world described by several biblical stories is a single world of one temporal sequence, there must in principle be one cumulative story to depict it” (Ibid.).  Frei goes on to say that this means the many smaller narratives fit into the bigger or main one.  Hence, interpretation in the pre-critical era consisted of figures/types (which were the smaller narratives and stories) which pointed to the bigger or main story.  “Without loss to its own literal meaning or specific temporal reference, an earlier story was a figure of a later one” (Ibid.).    The OT types and figures were promises that were fulfilled in the NT, which was one huge thing that held the Scriptures together.  What happened in the critical era of interpretation was that the literal and figurative (typological) reading of the narratives ceased to be allies and instead became almost foes.  “Historical criticism and biblical theology were different enterprises and made for decidedly strained company” (p 8.).

To summarize, Frei makes a strong case for the huge and paradigmatic shift from precritical to critical biblical interpretation.  The former (precritical, which includes the Reformers and their scholastic successors) viewed Scripture as historically reliable with types/figures as arrows that pointed to the overarching story of redemption.  When the enlightenment-critical period came, the figural and historical were divorced and almost at odds.  The BT guys focused on the figural, and the critical guys focused on the historical, which resulted in much hermeneutical hay.

More on this later.  For a great study in this, don’t forget to read Richard Muller’s Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, especially volume two on Scripture.  Muller doesn’t fully chart the above shift, but charts the waters up to and a little into the shift.  It is fascinating to see how rationalism and deism hurt biblical interpretation.  It is also fascinating from our point of view to see how criticism can be done at a “faith seeking understanding” level; we can learn from the critics, even if we don’t adopt their methods.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Prose and Poetry or Narrative Prologues and Poetic Epilogues

Some OT scholars make hay with the seeming discrepancies between Exodus 14 (the exodus narrative proper) and Exodus 15 (the poetic or hymnic reflection on the exodus).  For example, they discuss the history, authorship, and date of the two chapters.  It is true: on close reading of the two texts, one can see some differences such as how the Egyptians drowned, how the Lord did his work, and how the people passed through on dry land.  These “oddities” are what caused the older critics to snip the text up into different pieces.  Some older critics say that Ex 15 is a late poem which has features of both “J” and “P;” this accounts for some of the oddities.

An alternative way to answer these “oddities” is by utilizing the basic point that Richard D. Patterson made in his article, “Victory at Sea: Prose and Poetry in Exodus 14-15″ (Bibliotheca Sacra 161, Jan-Mar 2004).  Patterson first shows several older Egyptian texts that are very similar to Ex 14-15 in this way: there is prose about a battle by a great Pharaoh, then there is a poem about the Pharaoh’s prowess on the battle field.  Patterson then notes several places in the Pentateuch that follow this pattern.  His main emphasis is relationship between the narrative in Ex 14 and the poetic response (a sort of victory psalm) in Ex 15.  There are similarities (theme and vocab) and differences (cf. above) between the two, but this type of relationship between prose and poetry in ANE/OT texts is not abnormal.

How then do we deal with those differences?  “One must deal with the final form of the full story…including the use of poetry set within the flow of the narrative” (p. 50).  Furthermore, “the literary constraints attendant to the genres of prose and poetry inevitably require that each should be evaluated on its own terms.  The victory song of 15:1-18 should not be pressed with a literalistic hermeneutic and the prose narrative should not be expected to contain all the sensational features of the poem” (p. 52).  Though Patterson says more, notice these two. 1) We have to deal with the text as is, despite what one may think about history and author (cf. Childs in Exodus, p. 248).  2) Since they are different genres,  they need to be interpreted (evaluated) on their own terms.  In other words, of course poetry is going to be different than narrative!

Let me use Enns’ similar comments in his Exodus commentary to bolster what Patterson said.

“If we go through this song, as many have done, with a fine-toothed comb, looking for possible discrepancies with the narrative of chapter 14, we will find them; but in doing so we will have misread the song.  It is a modern Western penchant to require complete ‘consistency’ between accounts, but the biblical authors are not so concerned.  We must resist the temptation to impose our modern expectations on a text, which ancient texts are not always prepared [or meant to - spl] to shoulder” (p. 297).

The “oddities” are not insuperable or contradictory, but Ex 14 and Ex 15 give us different perspectives on the same event.  Ex 15 is “a poetic expression of what we have seen in narrative form in 14:14: ‘the LORD will fight for you.’  The battle is God’s; hence, from his vantage point, there is no struggle” (Enns, 305).  In other words, Ex 15 is different in genre (it is a poem with poetic features) and perspective (it is from heaven’s point of view) than Ex 14.  This accounts for the differences, not an amalgamation of textual snippets.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Puritans, Reformed Scholasticism, and Text Criticism

Puritan and Reformed Scholasticism was “built on” an intense, scholarly, detailed, and humble study of the Scriptures – including original languages and semitic studies. The Reformed scholastics were not opposed to early textual criticism – what we may call “lower” criticism as opposed to “higher” criticism. Actually, the scholastics did massive textual and critical work. Take Matthew Poole (d. 1679) for instance. In five large volumes, Poole gathered many different scholarly analyses of Scripture, called the Synopsis Criticorum and also wrote Annotations on the Holy Bible, along with other textual and critical works. Here is a sample of some of Poole’s textual and critical scholarship.

“Poole recognized that some of the statements in the Pentateuch could not have been written by Moses and were probably additions made by later prophets, and in the case of the account of the death of Moses, he could state quite categorically that the problem of authorship was ‘no more impeachment to Divine authority of this chapter, that the penman is unknown, which is also the lot of some other books of Scripture, than it is to the authority of the acts of the king or parliament, that they are written or printed by some unknown person’” (Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics Volume Two [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003], 134).

Concerning 1 and 2 Samuel, Poole admits unknown authorship: he says it could have been written by more than one author (Ibid.). Furthermore Poole notes that Solomon didn’t write the entire book of Proverbs – after chapter 24, the book was “gathered by others” (Ibid.). In today’s language, Poole would not have denied some sort of a redactor concerning the “gathering” of some OT books.

What does this teach us? A few things. First of all, as Muller well says, “there is no clear division [in Reformed Scholasticism] between ‘pre-critical’ and ‘critical exegesis’” (Ibid., 135). Secondly, the Reformed and Puritan scholastics contributed positively to the development of textual criticism – textual criticism is not a “naughty word” in Reformed studies (Ibid.). Thirdly, textual criticism can and does often take a negative turn, but only when approached rationalistically. Francis Turretin’s son, J. A. Turretin, for example, in a more rationalistic way than Poole, opened the door to a wedge between textual criticism and orthodox Reformed doctrine (Ibid., 145). Finally, the hermeneutical principles (principles of interpretation) of Reformed scholasticism were indeed pre-critical. That is to say, though the later Reformed teachers interacted with and utilized later critical methods, they did not utilize later critical hermeneutics. They interpreted Scripture side-by-side with Calvin, Ursinus, and the other earlier reformers while digging deeper into textual criticism than their predecessors.

For more on the above, and before asking deep questions, read Volume II of Muller’s PRRD, especially the above listed pages/sections, along with 248-255. Better yet, read Poole if you can get your hands on it!

shane lems

sunnyside wa