A Journey, Personal and Institutional, Toward Theological Renewal

“All theology is autobiography,” the adage notes. My theological sensibilities and judgments are no exception. With what is certainly imperfect self-awareness of my own story, I’m thankful for the opportunity to engage in a reflection on the always-stimulating work of my friends’ manifesto, Reformed Catholicity. The tenth anniversary of this book providentially corresponds to my twentieth anniversary of being a professor of New Testament studies and almost exactly thirty years since starting seminary. I will use these four timeline moments – 1995, 2005, 2015, and 2025 – to organize my observations on the vision outlined in this excellent book.

In the mid-1990’s, I began my Master of Divinity studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, arguably the premier evangelical seminary at the time. Attempting to drink from a fire hydrant is an apt description of what this non-theologically trained young man experienced. I received a great education under the auspices of what we would now call “Big Tent Evangelicalism” – unity in the essentials, charity in the non-essentials. Creedal orthodoxy was what united the diverse group of faculty and students. This generous commitment to historic (Protestant) Christianity via the Evangelical Free Church of America grafted into me a DNA that has remained. I’m glad.

Yet this unity within diversity did not lack tensions. Particularly, the theologians and the biblical scholars at TEDS lived in a Jets and Sharks West Side Story relationship, each confident in the superiority of their cultural worlds and wary of the other’s. Rarely was there any open conflict, but there were skirmishes rumored and real. I experienced the problematic disjuncture between theology and biblical studies that Allen and Swain identify.

For whatever reasons, I found a place on the New Testament side of the street and headed into PhD studies in Scotland confident our gang were the ones really doing academic Christianity rightly, unlike those “proof-texting” theologians. With an undiagnosed arrogance comparable to a 19-year-old would-be Marxist attending university on daddy’s dime, my world was about to be rocked. St. Andrews in the early 2000s was one of the places where a lot of light and heat were generated in what later became known as the Theological Interpretation of Scripture movement, one branch of the ressourcement that was occurring as Modernity broke down. If fire-hydrant-drinking marked my time at Trinity, cognitive dissonance and worldview-expansion describe my time at St. Mary’s College. The Church Fathers and other theologians were no longer embarrassing uncles, but people to learn from.

When I began teaching in Louisville in 2005, I re-entered a conservative evangelical world where I was comfortable doctrinally and ecclesially, but where I quickly realized that my hermeneutical sensibilities had become somewhat out of sync. This was not because I had become “liberal” as sometimes happens with doctoral education, but because I had prayed to un-receive in my heart Descartes, Gabler, and others. The problem was mine. The ways I had been taught to study the Bible in my own seminary years were not bad or wrong, just insufficient for an integrated reading and practice of Scripture in the life of the Church. I realized that ironically, much of evangelical hermeneutics had unknowingly adopted the devastating posture of the Enlightenment, creating a chasm between biblical studies and theology. This chasm, I came to see, was wider than the modern evangelical “biblical theology” movement was able to sufficiently span. I set out to model for my students a way of reading Scripture that was rooted in creedal fidelity, rigorous textual study, and openness to the insights of theologians both ancient and modern.

Ten years into this journey, Reformed Catholicity appeared, articulating well what had been shifting in much of the confessional Christian world and offering a way forward. That way forward included looking backward toward retrieval without a flat-footed or shrill attempt at repristination of some supposed golden past. The communion of (all) saints is not merely a confessional line but should be a humble commitment.

Allen and Swain offered an ecclesially-situated, Christological, pneumatological, and creedal vision for reuniting biblical and theological studies. Their subtitle offers promise for both theological and biblical studies and, indeed, both disciplines needed help. For some three hundred years in the West, man had tried to put asunder what God had forever joined. Unfortunately, many theologians and biblical scholars pursued this divorce whole-heartedly. In recent decades, however, the Enlightenment expanders that had been artificially inserted between biblical and theological studies have been cracking and crumbling. The question and desiderata are whether these two fields will square up seamlessly when they snap back together after so many centuries apart.

I found Allen and Swain’s final chapter, “In Defense of Proof Texting,” particularly challenging and beneficial as one who has tried to navigate an intellectual life in the “divide between biblical and theological studies in the modern academy.” Aquinas and Calvin represent a reformed catholicity that models both rigorous biblical exegesis with theological commitments that go well beyond biblicism. As a biblical scholar working in the wake of Modernity, I still find it difficult to do biblical studies in the academic world with theological sensibilities. It often feels like trying to graft a tree onto a light pole. Nonetheless, I have sought to find this narrow path, aware I still have much to learn from trained theologians.

As we stand at the quarter point of the 21^st century, whence and wither with reformed catholicity? It is amazing to see how much has changed for the good in the last thirty years. A more theological reading of Scripture, the serious study and utilization of the history of interpretation, and appreciation for patristic and pre-modern hermeneutics have become much more standard fare at academic conferences and bookstalls. The Overton Window has shifted in the right direction. A legion of studies about the problems of modernity and the methodologies needed for renewal have poured forth. But as Allen and Swain note, we now need more examples of what this reconciliation looks like, not mere explorations of what it could be.

The pulpit has usually done a better job of keeping these worlds together than the academy. In the publishing world, there have been several commentary series seeking reproachment between biblical and theological studies, but their success has been mixed at best. Both theologians and biblical scholars still have much to learn from each other and the methods of these two worlds often don’t easily square. This is made more difficult by the sheer mass of things to know in our era of incredibly specialized knowledge. Even with a PhD in New Testament Studies and twenty years of professoring under my belt, I still feel quite insecure when I teach outside of my specialization in the Gospels, such as in Pauline studies, let alone attempting to understand the world of systematic theologians.

Nonetheless, I think the reformed catholic retrieval is well under way. I’m hopeful as I sense our adolescent phase is finally passing (and isn’t it a necessarily awkward phase for any human growth?) and, at least in the confessional Christian world, we are entering a season of young but maturing progress in moving forward with Christ’s witness in the world. I’m thankful for Reformed Catholicity and the ongoing work of Allen, Swain, and others as we seek to learn once again to read Scripture in and for the Church.