399 - The Why and How of Commentary

The Why and How of Commentary
By F. Dale Bruner

WHY and how do commentaries get written? There will, of course, be as many answers as there are commentators. My ruminations will have their own unavoidable spin, and sin, on them, and therefore they may not be perfectly representative. But I think I will speak for many, particularly for those who have written theological commentary.

I

The reasons for writing commentary that have suggested themselves most forcibly to my mind are four: the truth of the biblical message; the conviction that the church is the locus classicus of the message's proclamation; some particular experience of the church's mission to the world; and, quite simply, the pleasure of it all.

1. The Truth of the Biblical Message. It takes the breath away to think that God has spoken, but that is the faith of the church. We believe that the great, invisible, omnipotent, almighty Creator God has actually said things, important things, and that what this God has said can be understood and taken to heart. If it is true that God has spoken, then commenting on that speaking, saying something about what God has said-responding ("what does God mean by this?!")-would seem to be the most natural activity in the world.

If, for example, "once upon a time" all God's main thoughts had dropped on the Yukon, and if this great gift were made known to the world, one can imagine mass migrations across the continents, people suffering every possible sacrifice for access to this most precious of treasures. The church believes that something very much like this has in fact happened. In the history of Israel, which reached its summit in the coming of the divine Messiah, and in the accounts bearing witness to this history, collected in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, God spoke words to the world. In Jesus of Nazareth, who is the Christ of God, the world has been given God's own consummate Word in person; thus in the prophets who promised him and in the apostles who proclaimed him we have God's authorized words about God's Word. Holy Scripture is God's words about God's Word.

I am not saying anything idiosyncratic. This has been the common

F. Dale Bruner is Professor of Biblical Studies and Theology at Whitworth College, Spokane, Washington. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Hamburg, and he has taught at Union Theological Seminary in Manila. He is the author of Commentary on Matthew (1987).

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faith of the church: "I believe in God the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord"-and then follow the great data of the biblical gospel in confessional succinctness. It is because we believe that in Holy Scripture we have nothing less momentous than the very thought of God-incarnate in Jesus Christ, "inscripturate" in the words around him-that the church preaches the gospel and teaches the Bible. The simple conviction of the presence of the thought and Word of God in the Christ and Scripture of God seems to me to be the first reason that church teachers write biblical commentary.

It is all too possible for even serious Bible students to stop at the Bible and to make it and its sundry teachings the point, and so miss the point. The Bible is not about the Bible, it is about the Bible's God. And yet the church has always believed that the authorized witness to this God and to this God's saving Messiah is laid out only in penultimate Scripture. The church's argument for the indissoluble relation between ultimate Christ and penultimate Scripture is, of course, circular; but historically Christians have found little difficulty in living in and thinking from this saving circle. It is a circle that has proved its truth over and over again; it is a viable, not a vicious circle.

Luther and Calvin are redolent with "the circular connection" between Christ and Scripture as authority in the church. The Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Yerbum) is the most recent authoritative and impressive witness to the connection. The only dependable Christ is the biblical Christ; but Christ is Lord over and of the Bible.

As almost everyone now acknowledges as received wisdom, there simply is no such thing as coming to a text objectively. The scholar who thinks himself or herself most objective will be caught in the most invidious trap of all-one's own loaded and unguarded subjectivity, which hosts a demon's horde of distorting witnesses. What we need in commentary writing is not more independence, it is more dependenceon the communio sanctorum.

2. The Church as the Locus Classicus of the Message's Proclamation. Commentary on Holy Scripture is usually written to the church. It is almost always written by believers to believers. Speaking now quite specifically, the commentator writes mainly because he or she wants to help pastors and teachers prepare their Sunday sermons and lessons. The commentator thinks, "If I can just make the meaning of this passage as clear as possible, perhaps I can help pastors and teachers present it with even more power to their people." In this way the commentator hopes to get in on the joy of world mission. It is pastors and teachers, in the gathered setting of the church, who are given the gift of bringing the Word of God to the faithful congregation and the visiting world (a "world" present at church services more often than we realize-not least in the "faithful" themselves). Commentators cherish

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the conviction that the main way they can reach faithful congregations and outside world is by helping pastors and teachers reach them. The spiritual fruitfulness of commentators is a mediated fruitfulness; if the work of the commentator does not reach the pastors and teachers to whom it is mainly aimed, it will not reach anyone at all, and the commentary dies still-born.

To put this church conviction in an arguable way: it is the conviction of the commentator that "it happens on Sunday." I believe that the deepest things of all, the "source" things, the seminal realities, occur Sunday morning in the teaching and preaching of the gospel in the churches. This conviction contributes to the excitement of writing commentary.

3. Experience in the Church's World Mission. Every commentator is placed somewhere in God's world, and life in this world will inevitably shape the commentator's comment. Our family's first call-teaching a decade at Union Theological Seminary, Philippines, and in the neighborhood Sunday School class in barrio Pala Pala, Dasmarinas, Cavite, not only influenced my writing commentary, it literally drove me into writing commentary. For a while at the seminary I mimeographed a little monthly, which I immodestly called "The Preacher's Helper," and which was an attempt to exposit Scripture and theological texts for students in printed form. The words "The Preacher's Helper" have at least the virtue of saying almost exactly what most commentators want their commentaries to be: a help to those who proclaim the gospel.

I hope that the Philippine situation also taught me the importance of social considerations. If Philippine poverty cannot socalize one, few other realities can. I could not begin my Matthew commentary in the Philippines without an almost constant reference-sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly-to the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary environment in which the commentary was aborning. The alreadypresent urgency of the gospel itself, was surcharged now by the surrounding urgency of Third-World poverty in a way that made me want to address both spiritual and social realities in texts.

I also learned in the Philippine missionary experience that I lacked extensive energies. I mean, I did not enjoy "going out," which is one of the root meanings of mission (missio, "sent"). I wanted to "stay home and study."

4. The Pleasure of It All (Voluptas). I would not be a faithful witness if I did not add that a final reason why many of us write commentary is, simply, that it is fun. It is sheer delight to be rummaging in the thoughts and words of God in the effort to learn what really concerns the Creator of us all. It is a great honor to wake up in the morning and hardly be able to wait to work. I believe that those called to be students of Holy Scripture have the right to consider themselves the happiest people in the world.

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It is also fun to be called to "echo" God's words out into the larger world by writing commentary on what one hears. In the famous scene in the Appendix to John's Gospel where Jesus calls out to the disciples, "Young men, did you catch anything?," and where the beloved disciple then says to Peter, "It's the Lord," I see a little parable of what both preaching and commentary can be (John 21:1-14; notice the threefold "it's the Lord," v 7 (twice] and v 12). What triggers all the activity is the Word of the Lord-that is primary. But according to the story it is the task-it is the privilege-of one disciple, then, to tell another "it's the Lord," Only then does the seeking Lord factually meet his people, as the story shows. The Word of the Lord initiates everything; but the Lord uses his disciples' echoing of that Word to other disciples to bring the church to the Lord.

II

Every academic commentary demands a knowledge of the languages, of course, and an interest in the document's era, background, protagonists, etc., along with an acquaintance of biblical theology. But after that, commentators go their own ways. I can only explain my way, hoping that I speak for others.

Commentary in my experience has come to life through two main sources-church teaching and college teaching.

1. Sunday School Teaching. The absolute beginning of commentary writing for me is the Sunday morning Adult Sunday School class at First Presbyterian Church, Spokane, Washington. The material developed for this class is the embryo from which the body of the commentary grows, the atomic nucleus or tiniest component of the finished whole. The commentary commences in the most elementary way as a series of consecutive Sunday School lessons. Beginning my study of the biblical document this way allows me to hope that the basic datum of the later commentary-the verse-will not be a dry-as-dust biblical antiquity, venerable but irrelevant. The verse will be a truth wrestled with personally, which I have tried to interpret publicly in the midst and for the sake of a body of living men and women, who will either get the text and be moved by it or who will find the text to be of no use in their lives.

This first step in Scripture interpretation, I think, allows the biblical text to be what it was originally intended to be-the living Word of God to the living people of God. When commentators have tried to teach the text they will later seek to write-to real live human beings-they can honestly say that the verse-that sacred atom-is a personal friend with whom one has had a number of interesting experiences together, not just an ancient line with only Greek and Roman connections; a wrestling partner, not just foreign Writ; a challenge, not a commonplace.

Each week during the school year one consecutive unit of Scripture lies challengingly and tantalizingly ahead on Sunday morning. What does this text say? Then what does this saying mean now? What did it

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mean to the church over the centuries? What does it mean to the brothers and sisters today? Can it change our lives? Is some rich, unappreciated truth of the gospel lying there on the surface, or just under it, for us to reappropriate? Is there some special form of the gospel here for our time and world?

The first half hour to forty-five minutes of each work day is set aside for the study of the text-for old-fashioned devotional Bible study of next Sunday morning's paragraph. Over the course of this week of half hours I seek to commit to memory the paragraph (or sometimes two paragraphs) that will be next Sunday morning's lesson. (In translation, in case this might be helpful to other teachers, I work from the Greek text into contemporary American English, trying especially to catch the force of the tenses and the power of key words. Contact with the raw original is somehow electrifying.)

As I am seeking to make this text mine, I am also writing little notes in the margins of my Testament and of my wide-margin loose-leaf Bible-on everything from grammatical notes on tenses used, to content notes on the meanings or applications of particular words, phrases, and sentences. The memorizing-cum-mediating-cum-note-taking all merge into one happy work-week of morning Bible studies on a very concentrated portion of Scripture.

Then comes Thursday night. I set aside this evening for reading the church's best commentaries on this paragraph or paragraphs in Scripture. Almost always the commentaries will correct mental or marginal notes I made on the text; and even more frequently, the commentaries enrich what I had thought about the text and what I thought I would teach from the text. I like spending the first half-week of morning half-hours thinking independently about the text; but I love learning from the fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, dependently, on Thursday nights; I love learning what the church has thought about the text, believing that the Paraclete Spirit has led them, and does not just lead me, into the text's most important points. The most delicious Thursday night comment I enter into my own marginal notes.

Then comes the class. After introduction of visitors and a prayer for illumination, I narrate the memorized text. (The trick here is to keep this from being a performance-"How wonderful that he knows the Bible by heart!") But I have learned from experience, first of all in Philippine mission, that biblical texts were meant for narration, intended as told stories. And I believe that a faithfully (and not too dramatically) told biblical story has its own internal and uncanny power.

So I unapologetically tell the story from memory, trying to give myself to the narration of the sacred text as conscientiously as I will to the teaching that follows, believing that the simple telling of God's story can do its own work.

I store the lesson away in a notebook, and the collection of lessons is the embryo of the later commentary. Much of the church's commentary originates not only in libraries, but in neighborhood churches; the

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commentary's origin is also the commentary's destination-the congregation. And since how anything begins is of decisive importance for how it develops, I have felt it worthwhile to explain how the verses that will later become print were, in most cases, usually first told, spoken, proclaimed. (This is true of Scripture's own origins-before Scripture was Scripture it was proclamation. Perhaps this is how much writing happens.

2. Monday Evening College Lectures. When a whole biblical book has been finished at church, my college lets me teach the book as a course. Then for several years I have the happy experience of going over the book a second, third, and fourth time, each year adding new notes to the margin, memorizing texts more relevantly and sharply, reading new commentaries, making points more provocatively, shuffling off uninteresting or irrelevant expositions, and so on. This college reworking of the Sunday School texts (for three hours on Monday nights during the school year) helps me see the texts now in larger units, and adds the insights, problems, and concerns of younger people.

The texts have been taught; the church's counsel has been sought; the best literature has been read. On to the writing!

The writing is the precipitate, the overflow, of all the preceding meditation, reading, teaching-and, no doubt, living-that one has done. And what the commentator has in the back of the mind as he or she writes-to say this one more time-is mainly the hope that this writing will help pastors and teachers in their proclamation of the gospel of the text. In our most ecstatic moments we hope that something we write, some insight into a text, might help contribute to a congregation's longed for renewal, revival, and mission to the world. In our most depressed moments we ask ourselves, "who do you think you are?" For in writing I think we sometimes sound more authoritative and sure of ourselves and of our texts than we usually are. Yet, all in all, I think many commentators feel, and justifiably, that the original Inspirer of the original texts is also seeking to be the present Inspirer of this contemporary commentary on them. We, too, insofar as we seek to be faithful to Christ and to his church's historic standards, are in the apostolic succession. (I think this faith in apostolic inspiration and succession is a fair reading of the Paraclete texts in John's Gospel.) Most commentators' sense of worth has come, I think, from a daring hope-the hope that they are actually passing on God's own Words, wrapped in our time's language and concerns.