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The problem with theology-first reading. Most books built around the story of the Bible more often than not fall into the trap of theology-first reading. A great example is Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen’s The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story (Baker Academic, 2004). Bartholomew and Goheen’s work is perhaps the closest to what I present here—at least from a biblical theology point of view.
We hew closely on many of the main themes of the overall text and make use of similar language as far as the literary force of many texts is concerned. However, Bartholomew and Goheen still end up tracing the metanarrative of the Bible with theological threads rather than literary ones. Opting for the twin lenses of “covenant and kingdom” (322), Bartholomew and Goheen articulate a vision of the Bible’s story that’s certainly cohesive, but shaped by the constituent parts’ role with respect to the overarching theological themes of covenant and kingdom.
As a result, they are content to import data from all over the text to build their categories, and then to leverage those categories as interpretive lenses for determining the meaning or import for the story in its various movements. For Bartholomew and Goheen, the literary nature of the metanarrative is valuable only insofar as it can give color or structure to their predetermined theological categories for God and his work.
The book fails to present the progressive development of the Bible’s main character: God himself. He becomes a stagnant and ever-present reality almost behind the scenes to a primarily human story. Bartholomew and Goheen must then make statements about God deriving from the text rather than allow it to show God.
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Giving the authors of the Bible back their voice. I owe a great debt to Dr. Elliott Johnson (now retired from Dallas Theological Seminary) for his work in the field of hermeneutics. Johnson was responsible not only for emphasizing the importance of the original authors in the process of interpretation, but also for establishing a rigorous methodology for accessing and then validating interpretations in light of those authors. His book Expository Hermeneutics: Advancing the Discussion (Wipf & Stock, 2023) is an excellent resource and introduction to the task of author-driven hermeneutics. Any serious student of the Bible and the methodology behind reading it well would benefit greatly from Johnson’s work.
Additionally, Johnson introduced me to the work of E. D. Hirsch, who himself was deeply concerned with developing a thoroughgoing methodology for validating interpretive decisions when reading a text. I accept Hirsch’s methodology, and his approach to interpretation undergirds everything in Of Deity and Dust—from the conclusions I draw about the various authors’ intended message to the way I construct the overarching metanarrative of the Bible. His work Validity in Interpretation (Yale University Press, 1967) is what I consider the definitive work on the science of the interpretive task.
When I say that I want to read the Bible “the way it wants to be read,” I am in many ways tipping my hat to the methodology presented first by Hirsch and then by Johnson.