Theology Today - Vol 42, No. 3 - October 1985 - ARTICLE

281 - Toward A Postliberal Hermeneutics

Toward A Postliberal Hermeneutics
By Albert C. Outler

"The aim of a postliberal hermeneutics is to reposition Holy Scripture as a unique linguistic medium of Gods self-communication to the human family. Its primary task is to re-present the Bible as the human medium of a divine revelation that has endured and will endure in and through the cultural metamorphoses that succeed each other as history unfolds."

Ages follow ages, not as the seasons pass, but as climates of opinion change. And always, the transitions from age to age are uneven, ambivalent, and unpredictable. Thomas Kuhn has taught us to think or scientific revolutions in terms or paradigm shifts-mutations in scientific overviews that prompt the displacement of a given set or controlling images and ideas by a new set (as in the move away from Ptolemaic astronomy or, more recently, the new views of evolution as an intermittent process of punctuated equilibria). Mutatis mutandis, one may speak of the succession of cultural epochs in terms or gains and losses or faith in given clusters or axial ideas. There would seem to be a constant stock or perennial human problems; what gets altered are the contours or their hermeneutical horizons.

The Age of Reformation, for example, took hold as large numbers or devout men and women began to lose their faith in the papal church's monopoly of the means of grace. They turned, instead, to the twinned alternatives or sola fide and sola Scriptura. That epoch, in its turn, was supplanted by an Age of Orthodoxy as the Reformers' early hopes for unity and peace failed, and as they were forced, or so they thought, to rely more and more on confessional consensus, buttressed by vast treatises on systematic theology (loci theologiae).

Albert C. Outler is Professor of Theology, Emeritus, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. A versatile scholar in such areas as psychotherapy and religion, translator of Augustine, and editor of the works of John Wesley, Dr. Outler has also served on numerous ecumenical commissions. This present article is a revision of an invitational address presented at the 1983 annual conference of the Society of Biblical Literature in Dallas.

282 - Toward A Postliberal Hermeneutics

Within two centuries, however, orthodoxy had begun to make way for yet another era, modestly self-styled as Enlightenment (with its classic definition given it by Kant in his Was Ist Aufklarung?, 1784). We know how the great notions of Enlightenment-liberation from oppression and involuntary tutelage by church or civil state, progress and innovation, human capacity and perfectibility, the omni-competence of science and technology- were passionately believed in as actual possibilities within reach and how they unleashed enormous energies in Britain, France, and Germany (and in their cultural spin-offs in the new world). The dogmaticians were fortified by their sense of Semper Eadem; the pioneers of the new age foresaw a splendid Novus Ordo Seclorum (as we know from a famous seal, copies of which most Americans carry about in their wallets and purses).

After two full, notable centuries, replete with great achievements and yet also with many tragic ironies, the signs increase that "The Age of Enlightenment" (with liberal Protestantism as its chief religious aspect) has begun to lose its cultural hegemony in the post-colonial world. The shape of things to come is not yet clear. The nascent future remains inchoate and ill-defined. This is seen in the backward-looking phrases in common use: post-critical (Polanyi) post-modern (Huston Smith), post-liberal (George Lindbeck). Nevertheless, there is this widespread sense of a great reversal, marked more by undertones of irony than of confidence.

The least that this can mean for biblical hermeneutics is that the familiar perspectives of the age of liberalism are already in full course of mutation."The Word of the Lord endureth forever" (I Peter 1:25); but no one supposes that its interpretation is not culturally conditioned. The Hellenistic Christians were deeply perplexed by the Hebrew Scriptures (as we know from Marcion and the Gnostics) and came up with a variety of "hellenistic" hermeneutics. Gothonic Christians were baffled by their patristic inheritance (as we know from Henri de Lubac's L'Exégése Medieval). Protestantism was wracked by bitter clashes over the proper interpretation of crucial texts (as in that fateful impasse at Marburg in 1529 over the dominical words. "This is my body").

The perennial task of hermeneutics has always been the mixed art and science of orthotomounta (II Tim. 2:15): how rightly to dissect "the word of truth" (ton logon tes aletheias)- a surgical metaphor with echoes of the Platonic notion of to metrion. This requires great skill in anatornization and the imaginative power to re-present the Scriptures' wholeness in a different cultural context. Orthodox hermeneutics had its obvious hermeneutical biases. Liberal interpretations were pliant to the dominant ideas of the Enlightenment. And now, in yet another time of transition, it is a matter of urgent interest for thoughtful men and women to look ahead, toward one sort of postliberal hermeneutics or another.

283 - Toward A Postliberal Hermeneutics

The most obvious initial interest of the emergent liberalism was its quarrel with inherited traditions and their errors ((he famous querelle des anciennes et des modernes). The pioneers of Enlightenment (the British deists, French philosophes, the German Aufklärer) began with an abhorrence of the dogmatic temper of orthodoxy, its intellectual dishonesty (as they saw it), its blind loyalties to the age-old alliances between throne and altar (inherently oppressive), its appeals to Scripture in defense of the standing order. This had bred a deep suspicion of institutional religion and its defenders a trait that has persisted as characteristic in liberalism.

Orthodoxy's sorest offense, in liberal eyes, was its stress on human sin and moral disability, with its rejections or any and all schemes of self-salvation. Over against such pessimism (note that this term and its antonym, optimism, are both of Enlightenment coinage), the philosophes proposed a more cheerful set of theses about the human condition and, therefore, about the human prospect. I still recall the splendid uproar set off by Carl Becker's The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century, Philosophers (1932), and his neat summary of the Enlightenment credo:

(1) Man is not natively depraved;
(2) The end of life is life itself: the good life on earth instead of the beatific life after death.
(3) Man is capable, guided solely by the Iight of reason and experience, of perfecting the good life on earth.
(4) The first and essential condition of this ... is the freeing of mens minds from the bonds of ignorance and superstition, and of their bodies from the arbitrary oppression of constituted authority [in church and civil state].
(5) Man is natively good, easily enlightened, disposed to follow reason and common sense; generous, humane, and tolerant, more willing to be led by persuasion than compelled by force (pp. 102-03).

Scripture, read through optics like these, looked vastly different than it had to the Lutheran and Reformed interpreters.

This hopeful view of the human prospect can be seen in the new-style theists, like Schleiermacher, Coleridge, and Ritschl. Moreover, the credulities of old-order hermeneutics could now be eagerly exposed bw men like Reimarus and Bruno Bauer. The same basic impulse took on a romantic tone in a man like Renan. It also stirred strong political commitments (as Marilyn Massey has shown in her Christ Unmasked: the Meaning of 'The Life of Jesus' in German Politics, 1983). With the rise of historical consciousness and of literary criticism, the Bible became a splendid "dig" for revisionists and new critics. Biblical scholars came to be preoccupied with questions of provenance, datings, editorial genres, literary connections, and the like. Orthodox dogmas had guided both the methods and substance of traditional hermeneutics. Liberal interpretations found abundant evidence to bolster their negative view of dogma and its negative role in the history of Christian thought. Harnack's masterwork, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, and later, his

284 - Toward A Postliberal Hermeneutics

Grundriss, had both the intent and effect of discounting the very notion of dogma.

But liberalism had its own new dogmas the sacred cause of liberty, the dyad of progress and perfectibility, the promise of science and technology, the sense of Western civilization as global paradigm. Taken together, these massive notions shaped a new perspective in which the Bible appeared chiefly as an ancient charter for human hopes of divine aid in the adventures of life. The human prospect never looked so bright as it appeared in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward- 2000-1887 (1888). One sees this same confidence in the Social Gospel, in the utopian hymns of the time (J. A. Symonds, Ozora Davis), in triumphalist histories (J. B. Bury, H. G. Wells), and in theological visions of a superlative human future (Teilhard de Chardin).

"The guns of August" (1914) and "the October Revolution" (1918) were seen by some (Woodrow Wilson) as nothing much more than setbacks. To others (Karl Barth, Oswald Spengler, Gilbert Chesterton), they were convincing proof that liberalism was a spent force. But when Barth and others tried to transvalue the age of orthodoxy (cf. Barths "Preface" to Heinrich Heppe's Reformierte Dogmatik, 1935: Eng. tr. 1950), the result was rightly seen as neo-orthodox). Moreover, this development was countered by an obverse neo-liberalism (as in Bultmann), with its frank appeal to "the best science of the time" as a sufficient warrant for a hermeneutical program that melded existentialism with anti-supernaturalism.

After three decades of unabated disorder in a world tragically divided into three "worlds," of radical desacralization, of the failed promises of human progress, and now under the shadow of the Bomb, there is an emerging consensus to the effect that neither neo-orthodoxy nor neoliberalism are adequate for the on-coming new age. There is a mounting confusion, in the secular forums and in the churches, that suggests a massive shift or expectations from soaring hopes (as once in men like William Godvin) to something not far from consternation (as in Jacques Ellul).

III

The roster of current doom-sayers is long and familiar. Their common refrain is that liberalism has failed to deliver on its promises and is not likely to. John Nisbet has written an instructive obituary for the flagship notion of the Enlightenment (in his History of the Idea of Progress, 1980). Liberal optimism has been countered on several levels by people like Robert Heilbronner, The Human Prospect, 1974. Langdon Gilkey, Sacred and Secular: Towards a Theology for a Culture in Decline, 1981; Nicholas Lash in Theology on Dover Beach, 1979, or, in a very different key, by Christopher Lasch The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, 1984.

Rueful musings about the failures of science and technology to measure up to their advertisements have been offered by participant

285 - Toward A Postliberal Hermeneutics

observers as astute as Peter Medawar, Ivan Illich, E. J. Mishan, Talbot Page, and Lewis Thomas. Suspicions grow that even if "man is not natively depraved," men and women are at least natively aggressive (Freud, Lorenz, the socio-biologists); or that they are "alienated from the ground of their being" (Tillich); or, at the very least, "not identical with the idea of their destiny" (Pannenberg). The move from confidence to query can be traced in a comparative study of Karl Menninger's cheerful first essay, The Human Mind 1930) and his plaintive valedictory, Whatever Became of Sin?( 1973).

A profound awareness of the ethical problematic in this emerging new age has appeared in Alasdair MacIntyre's epitaph for emotive ethics, After Virtue (1981). Its import for comparative religion is probed by Huston Smith in his Religion in a Post-Modern World (1983). A remarkable preview of the theological tasks ahead can be seen in George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine in a Postliberal Age (1983). In the field of biblical hermeneutics, the pioneering probes have been made by Brevard Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (1970), Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974), and Childs, again, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture( 1979) and The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (1985). It is of nearly equal significance that nothing comparable has appeared on behalf of a viable repristination of the older tradition. It is common knowlege that, in most seminaries, the courses in biblical introduction are in the throes of revision, but as yet without consensus.

There is, of course, a danger of grave confusion in any glib comment about liberalism in decline. It can give too much aid and comfort to the wrong people, for the wrong reasons. For we still have among us a turbulent host of anti-liberal critics (fundamentalists, reactionaries, the inerrantists, "the new right"), all too eager to depreciate liberalism's extraordinary achievements and to take us back to orthodoxy in its least winsome forms.

There is a crucial distinction, too often blurred, between the decrepit liberal dogmas and the refreshing liberal spirit (Wesley spoke of it as "catholic spirit") the tempers and attitudes of openness, tolerance of critical and honest inquiry, a firm insistence upon public evidence and rational argument, and, correspondingly, a sense of the immorality of uncritical credulity. This spirit, since Socrates, has enriched human culture, as dogmatism (of any sort) has never done. It was a misfortune that traditional Christian doctrine was linked up with dogmatism, for there is no essential connection. By the same token, the liberal dogmas and the liberal spirit were never truly symbiotic-the latter can live on without the former. That is why the deprivation will be so grievous if the wastage of the liberal dogmas is matched by a spoilage of the liberal spirit. The cultural aggregates of the older orthodoxies still persist, like animated fossils. but they no longer dominate whole cultures-except in special cases, like Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam.

Protestant fundamentalism and Roman Catholic traditionalism are

286 - Toward A Postliberal Hermeneutics

less intimidating than they appear (if you look behind their scowls). Their arrogant claims to a vested monopoly of the whole truth is no longer convincing in a world that has noticed that, in the cases where different whole truths are in intractable conflict, the results are more heat than light. What is even more threatening is the radical desacralization of human society, which, if not reversed, will be the death-knell of high religion.

And yet-a mysterious Trotzdem-the Bible remains as a unique focus of interest and inquiry: to believers and non-believers, to historians, literary critics-all sorts and conditions" of men and women. It still evokes interpretation although not so much in the reshaping of it into an adequate system of "biblical theology,"nor in continuing chiefly in its anatomization. As legitimate as such endeavors are, they are still no more than instrumental. The aim of a postliberal hermeneutics is to reposition Holy Scripture as a unique linguistic medium of Gods self-communication to the human family. Its primary task is to represent the Bible as the human medium of a divine revelation that has endured and will endure in and through the cultural metamorphoses that succeed each other as history unfolds.

Some of the priorities in such an endeavor seem clearer than others. The first of these, more urgent than any other, is a fresh clarification of the question of the unity of the Bible, and of what Wesley spoke of as its "general tenor." Traditional hermeneutics took such a unity for granted, but proceeded to couple it so closely with creeds and confessions that the latter came to serve, in effect, as surrogates for continued critical inquiry into the biblical message on its own terms. Orthodox theology became scholastic, more and more disposed to treat the Bible as resource rather than as source. Thus, the rich and disconcerting diversity of Scripture came either to be ignored, or homogenized-or, antithetically, the way was opened to selected "canons within the canon."

Liberal hermeneutics, on the other hand, took the Bible's diversity for granted. On the assumption that its unity was largely an accident of church history, the liberal critics zeroed in on the obvious disparities. These posed intriguing puzzles (which, in turn, generated more ingenious hypotheses in explanation than there ever was hard evidence to confirm or infirm). The notion of the Bible, in all its diversity, as the diaphanous medium of a single light was rarely denied outright, but it rarely served as an organizing idea. By consequence, the once fruitful notion of the analogia fidei as a prime hermeneutical principle was quietly marginalized. This left the Bible as not much more than a remarkable miscellany, some bits and pieces of which could be taken as more edifying than others. But the judge of any such edifying power had to be the interpreter, with his or her more or less accidental preunderstanding. This left the inquirer with the option of picking and choosing this interpretation, or that, chacun a son gout.

287 - Toward A Postliberal Hermeneutics

There is no longer any denying that the Bible is a miscellany in some important sense. Historiographically, its narrative is spread thin over an immense span of time. Its literary styles include almost every conceivable form-except those two most often demanded of it: philosophical analysis and systematic theology. Why, then, did such a collection ever become "the Bible" or "the Scriptures"? Clearly, both orthodox and liberal answers to such a question must be reformulated.

In a postliberal age, a fresh case must be made for the Bibles integrity, if this can be done-and if the proper hermeneutical implications can be drawn. If such an integrity is to be denied, the alternatives cannot be evaded. Neither Judaism nor Christianity can survive with their Holy Scriptures regarded as nothing more than anthologies of religious literature.

Judaism has, from the outset, presupposed the unity of its Scriptures. Its chief hermeneutical task has been the definition of the permissible limits of agreement and disagreement in interpretation (with notable results, as in Mishnah and Talmud). In the early church, there were different versions of "The Gospel-according, to... The apostolic fathers had different formulations of the one faith, their different articulations of essential Christian teaching (regulae fidei). Catholicism (East and West) entwined its sense of the integrity of Scripture with its sense of the stability of the liturgy, so that Word and worship could be sensed as interdependent. Protestant Orthodoxy preferred catechisms, confessions-and biblical preaching!-as its mode of expressing this same integration. Liberal Protestantism was forever restating "the essence of Christianity," usually as a simplification of "the whole" or a distillate thereof (as in Harnack's Das Wesen des Christentums, which was far more widely read and influential than his vastly learned Dogmengeschicte).

How will this problem be dealt with in a postliberal hermeneutics? It is much too soon to say, except to notice the preoccupations of scholars with postliberal mindsets, some with notions of "a biblical narrative" (Frei, Lindbeck, Fackre, et al.) and others more impressed by the biblical metaphors, images, and polygamous insights. Here one remembers Austin Farre'rs pioneering ventures (The Glass of Vision, 1948, and A Rebirth of Images, 1949) and also how many of us, at that time, considered it a pity for so promising a genius to turn from his brilliant beginnings as a philosophical theologian to the then less prestigious arena of biblical hermeneutics.

More recently, we have had the first volume of a fresh study of the Bible as a whole by an eminent literary critic, Northrop Frye, in The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982). Here, a master-critic in English literature sums up a lifetimes reflection upon Scripture, as one accustomed to hearing the texts speak and asking them questions. Out of this, he has come to feel that one can identify great axial themes that run from Genesis to Revelation (creation, exodus, Torah, wisdom, prophecy, Gospel, the ordo salutis, and apocalypse). He even ventures to sum up

288 - Toward A Postliberal Hermeneutics

his sense of the general tenor of Holy Writ:

What the Bible gives us is not so much a cosmology as a vision of an upward metamorphosis, of the alienated nature of man in nature and society transformed into a spontaneous and effortless life-not effortless in the sense of being lazy or passive but in the sense of having energy without alienation (p. 72).

Such a formulation may, with some warrant, be adjudged minimal, anthropocentric, and "psychologized" (as postliberal orientations tend to be). And it is true (though unsurprising) that The Great Code has been dismissed by some old-order biblical scholars as the work of "an amateur"-as if this was not the case with all of us, save the specialists in their arbitrarily delimited fields. At the very least, it is a wise mans rendering of the analogia fidei. The phrase "energy without alienation" is a fresh way of speaking about grace-and is at least as profound as Pannenbergs characterization of sin as "non-identity."

The problem of the analogia fidei is being raised afresh in other ways by the multiplication, within the current decade, of significant ecumenical experiments in doctrinal consensus taprooted in Scripture. In the Faith and Order Commission, there is an exciting project aimed "Towards Confessing the Apostolic Faith." In the Consultation on Church Union, there is a first draft of "shared beliefs" being circulated among the member churches. In the Lutheran and Presbyterian church families, new, confessions are being drafted in connection with their reunions. The several denominations within The World Methodist Council have been summoned to a joint effort in reconsideration of their biblical heritage.

Such enterprises have already exposed the fact that neither preliberal nor liberal hermeneutics are as helpful as some had expected them to be. The ecumenical future may depend more upon the development of something like a postliberal hermeneutics than had been realized.

These concerns about the unity of the Bible and its general sense inevitably raise correlative questions about the biblical canon. Both orthodox and liberal interpreters have tended to focus more on the canon closure (what was finally included and excluded-and why) rather than on the canonical process (its dynamics and distinctive logic). This latter is a frontier not yet fully explored (although "the state of the [new] question" has been defined, tentatively, by Childs, Sanders, Seeligmann, Farmer, Farkasfalvy, and others). The relevance of this distinctive process for hermeneutics is almost self-evident, even though the requisite data for a fully credible account of it are lacking. At the least, one may hope for clearer views of the canon in the making, before it came to be so largely a juridical issue.

In both orthodox and liberal hermeneutics, there was a high level of self-assurance in the authority of their respective interpretations. The

289 - Toward A Postliberal Hermeneutics

orthodox were secure in their possession of the sum of biblical truth. The liberals were equally confident in their methods of inquiry-which is to say their faith that almost all historical and literary questions were, in principle, soluble. Increasingly, it is beginning to appear that many of the vexed historical questions (for example. the so-called Synoptic problem) are formally insoluble, for want of sufficient external evidence. They are, therefore, open to alternative hypotheses, each of which has its own merit, but none to the exclusion of all others.

Moreover, in view of the radical ambiguity of religious language, the sense of its polysemous character is becoming more vivid now that the expectations of both orthodox and liberal exegesis for definitive conclusions have been deflated. The orthodox have always claimed that the Bible had an inherent power of self-interpretation (facultas se ipsum interpreiandi). But this begged the question; it always had an unspoken codicil, namely, "self-evident to faith." Liberal hopes that historical reconstruction and literary analysis would bring the critic to the very heart of the matter have proved elusive, even to the probes of genius itself (Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Ricoeur). The discernment of more than the historical or literary values in the Bible when it is read as "a classic among the classics" requires an Archimedean vantage point that is bound to remain subjunctive. To approach the Bible as if it were an inspired whole is to risk all the dangers of obscurantism in its traditional Kantian sense (as in Division Two of the Critique of Pure Reason).

Postliberal hermeneutics will. therefore, have to wrestle with the old paradox of biblical history and language as both tantalus and riddle, and yet also as numen et lumen. The special genius of Scripture has always been that of imparting wisdom from beyond to ordinary people in the here and now. One recalls Louis Bouyer's Chalcedonian metaphor about the Bible's existing in "two-natures" (one "human," the other-divine"). And there was Karl Rahner's characteristic comment in his very last lecture about "God's luminous incomprehensibility" and "the divine surpassing of all our conjectures about it in the face of Jesus Christ." This apophatic sense of the futility of even the most ingenious of human reconstructions of biblical truth would seem to be the most nearly positive proposal of the deconstructionists (Derrida, Dumont). Can postliberal hermeneutics learn to live with mystery without seeking its domestication?

It was the glory of liberal hermeneutics that it opened itself to the new challenges-to the strictures of the best science of its time, including its consensus about reductionism and a closed universe. At the behest of the dominant naturalism in his culture, Bultmann was honest enough to proceed to its logical implication: the demythologization of biblical texts that could not be brought within the world-views of science. His existentialism remained as his interface with the mystery that he never intended to deny.

In our new age, the best science of these times has begun to block the way back to mechanism and to open the future to a cosmology open to

290 - Toward A Postliberal Hermeneutics

the unexpected. Scientists as diverse as Ilya Prigogine, Roger Sperry, John Eccles, and Wilder Penfield have begun to speak freely of "the unfounded bias of reductionism" (Sperry), and of the fresh relevance of such notions as randomness, teleology, and moral responsibility. In the ghostly world of artificial intelligence, new questions about human selfhood and individuation have begun to emerge. At the very least, the embargo on "God-talk" as the Encompassing Mystery, self-disclosed in Scripture, has been lifted, at least by a little. But if this is so, then the agenda for hermeneutics has been changed significantly.

Orthodoxy (for all its rationalism) made overbelief its stock in trade. Liberalism (for all its romantic yearnings) swung the pendulum in the other direction toward methodological skepticism ("the morality of knowledge" as an inhibition on making truth claims without "proof"). But, as there is but a single mis-step from overbelief to superstition, so also there is no more than a jiggle from methodological to existential skepticism. The latter, in the very nature of the case, is self-stultifying: Meno's "ignorance" would have been invincible but for Socrates gift of evoking latent "knowledge."

A promising example of the possibilities for a postliberal hermeneutics may be seen in the proposals of Peter Stuhlmacher of Tubingen-toward "a hermeneutics of agreement (Einverstandnis) with the biblical texts." These have been laid out, tentatively, in his Vom Verstehen des Neuen Testaments: Eine Hermeneutik (Gottingen, 1979). It is an interesting mix: a rejection of "neo-pietism," an affirmation of a "catholic exegesis," a willingness to wrestle with the bristly issues of pneumatology and inspiration, and a frank appeal to the tradition of ex auditu Verbum. What is most interesting here, perhaps, is the phenomenon of a major figure in the German academic establishment peering beyond the conventions of its traditions.

I remember one of those frequent conferences on the future of theology, two decades ago, where my table-mate was the late Abraham Heschel. For the most part, the great Rabbi sat by quietly, but, toward the end, he spoke up almost wistfully:

It has seemed puzzling to me how greatly attached to the Bible you seem to be and yet how much like pagans you handle it. The great challenge to those of us who wish to take the Bible seriously is to let it teach us its own essential categories: and then for us to think with them, instead of just about them.

At the time, this seemed as quaint a comment as Barths familiar phrase about "the strange new world within the Bible." And yet, as the years have worn on, I have come to think that what we had heard was a sort of charter for a hermeneutical approach that would be more and more relevant in a postliberal age.

In almost any foreseeable future, Christianity will "disciple all the nations" more effectively, as it is enabled to summon more and more

291 - Toward A Postliberal Hermeneutics

open-hearted interpreters (in the church and out of it) to hands-on engagements with the Bible as the church's very special book (fons revelationis). This will be less a "spiritual hermeneutics" than a hermeneutics of the Spirits prevenience (both in the inspiring of a text and in opening the hearts of believers to its light). In response, inquiring souls may stand before the Scriptures-not under them in mindless assent; not above them, in hermeneutical arrogance-to see and hear what may be seen and heard of the Mystery of the Lord Almighty. Then it would be as in II Cor. 6:17-18: "I will accept you, I will be father to you and you shall be my sons and daughters"-and, therefore, brothers and sisters to each other and to all Gods family in the world.

Consent to texts like this will not only open the eyes of faith to the general tenor of the Scriptures but also will be a participation in that sovereign grace which, in good times or grim, gives meaning to our living and dying-in the deathless power of the Spirit.