Exegesis and Theology

The Blog of Brian Collins

Roy E. Beacham, “Literalism and the Prophets: The Case for a Unified Hermeneutic,” in Dispensationalism Revisited

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Central Baptist Theological Seminary just published Dispensationalism Revisited: A Twenty-First Century Restatement. This book is a Festschrift for Charles Hauser, Jr. that is comprised of chapters by his former colleagues and students. The first three chapters focus on the classic sine qua nons of dispensationalism. This chapter by Roy Beacham defends literal interpretation as a sine qua non of dispensationalism.

Beacham’s thesis is that dispensationalists are correct to insist that “God intended all prophetic foretelling in Scripture to be understood literally and only literally” (32; cf. 36). He clarifies that literal interpretation does not negate “figures of speech” or “exaggerated” language, but he is not inclined to abandon the term (32, n. 1). Beacham’s method in this chapter is to demonstrate that what God says in Scripture about the genre of predictive prophecy requires such prophecy “to be literally and only literally understood, interpreted, and fulfilled” (33). He further clarifies that the involves rejecting “any form of other-than-literal, less-than-literal, or more-than-literal interpretation of prophetic predictions” (37).

Beacham makes his case by examining what Scripture says about the “purpose, ground, nature, function, and test of divinely appointed predicative prophecy” (37).

Beacham argues that the purpose of predictive prophecy is “apologetic”—it is designed to demonstrate that only God is the true God. In support of this thesis he cites Isaiah 41:21-24, 26; 42:8-9; 44:6-8; 45:18, 20-21; 48:3-5. From these texts Beacham concludes, “Any hermeneutical viewpoint that espouses any form of other-than-, less-than-, or more-than-literal fulfillment of God’s foretelling negates the declare purpose and evidentiary worth of this genre” (41). I see how this arguement counters “other-than” and “less-than” fulfillments, but I’m not sure it holds for “more-than.” If everything God predicted happened exactly as God said it would, but more happened in addition to what God predicted, how does the “more-than” negate this purpose for the prophecy? In fact, given the fact that no prophecy is exhausive, how does one escape “more-than” fulfillments.

Beacham argues that the ground of predictive prophecy is “God’s immutable person and efficacious speech” (42). Isaiah 45:18-19; 45:22-25 are cited since these are passages in which God swears by himself to perform what he has stated. He also appeals to Isaiah 44-48, noting that since the prophecy regarding Cyrus was fulfilled as stated God’s words about the nation Israel in this passage will also be fulfilled as stated. He concludes, “The prophecy itself gives neither the original hearers nor the ensuing readers any indication that God intended some of these sworn forecasts to be fulfilled exactly as stated, while others he intended to signify, typologize, expand, and/or spiritualize” (48). Once again, “expand” strikes me as an outlier in this list. How does expanding on a predictive prophecy undermine the fulfillment of what was predicted? In fact, what is progressive revelation but an expansion upon previous revelation. For instance, is not every subsequent revelation about the Messiah’s redemptive work an expansion of Genesis 3:15?

Beacham’s concern about expansion is detailed in note 32: “The argument seems almost ubiquitous among partial nonliteralists and  complementary heremeneuticians that people should be thankful and that God should be admired if he produces a ‘more expansive’ fulfillment than those that he originally swore. According to this innovative hermeneutical theory, God can do more than he promised, he just can’t do less…. In any case, the outworking of expanded nonliteral fulfillment usually does not result, formulaically, in the equation, ‘God promises to do x but instead he does x+,’ (something more than x). Rather, it results in the equation ‘God promises to do x but instead he does y, which, in their view is ≻ x (something greater than x). In reality, however, y us not x at all. It seems more theologically sound to assert, in every case, that if God swears on his own person and nature to do x, then God will in fact do x, nothing more and nothing less. Any other outcome, expanded or diminished, would call into question the efficacy of hiw words, not to mention the integrity of his person. No outcome can be ‘better’ than the exacting accomplishment of God’s self-sworn pronouncements all the time” (51, n. 32). I agree with Beacham that if x+ in reality means y instead of x, there is a problem. But that doesn’t really describe an “expansion” of the promises; it describes replacement under the lablel of expansion. Thus, I do not see who this argument negates expansion in principle as Beacham goes on to do. In fact, I am again left to wonder how expansion can be eliminated without predictive prophecy being exhasutive. For instance, is it not an expansion that the prophecies regarding Christ are divided into a first coming and a second coming?

Next Beacham argues that the nature of “predictive prophecy was univocal” (51). He argues that “there is no divergence of meaning between the human authors and the divine author” (52). He roots this in Deuteronomy 18:15-22, from which he concludes that “the human prophet served as no more than a mouthpiece” (55). (It is important to recognize that Beacham is here speaking specifically of prophecy.) Thus, “The prophet may have fully understood the prediction that he announced on behalf of God (1 Kgs 22:17, see 22:28) or the prophet may have found the forecast utterly perplexing (Dan 7:15-16), but neither case affected the prophecy’s meaning or intent whatever. If a true prophecy consisted of God’s words alone, and it did, then that true prophecy bore God’s meaning alone” (55). I’m not sure that this arguement advances the thesis. Those who wish to find a fuller sense find it God’s meaning. So negating the human meaning to focus on the divine meaning doesn’t really address this challenge. 

I would agree that there can be no contradiction between the divine and human authors of Scripture in terms of meaning, but as I’ve written elsewhere, “God, who knows all things, knows the whole scope of what he will reveal in Scripture along with all of the potentially correct applications. The human author is limited in what he can intend” (Scripture, Hermeneutics, and Theology, 211-12). For instance, Moses recorded the redemptive promise of Genesis 3:15. But did he understand all that God intended in that promise? Did he understand even what New Testament believers understand to day in reading that text? I am doubtful even though I also think that Old Testament believers understood more than scholars often give them credit for. Moses and God did not intend differenet things in Gensis 3:15 but God certainly intended things beyond what Moses could have known.

Beacham is also critical canonical interpretation. He is right to be concerned about appeals to canonical interpretation that negate promises like the land promises to Israel. But canonical interpretation seems to simply be the way that texts are read. If a person is reading a series of novels and one character seems ambiguous or evil in earlier volumes while a later volume reveals him to have been a secret agent working for the good side, that later information will necessarily reshape how those earlier scenes are understood. Likewise, when the seed promise of Genesis 3:15 is read in light of all the progressive revelation that develops that promise, a richer understanding of that promise is had by readers of Genesis 3. The abuse of canonical readings does not negate its proper, even inevitable, use.

To make his approach work, Beacham draws a stark line between meaning and  “implications and applications” (59). But it is not clear that the line between these is stark. E. D. Hirsh wrestled with this problem. At one point he said, “‘There is no magic land of meaning outside human consciousness.’ But Hirsch realized that humans often intend their meaning to be true in situations of which they presently have no knowledge (the distant future, for instance). Thus Hirsch was willing to broaden his statement so that principles from the original statement may be applied to new situations without violating authorial intention. But, he notes, his original statement ‘would be true if, godlike, we could oversee the whole of human consciousness, past, present, and future.'” This leads me to conclude, “One of the difficulties, where to draw the line between meaning and significance, is greatly mitigated if the Author intends all possible right applications from the beginning” (Scripture, Hermeneutics, and Theology, 210-11, citing E. D. Hirsch, Jr., “Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted,” Critical Inquiry 11, no. 2 (Dec. 1984), 202, 204).

Next, Beacham appeals to “the function of predictive prophecy” according to Deuteronomy 18:19. On the basis that the prophets were to be obeyed, he concludes that “all that they foretold, was both comprehendible and practicable by the ordinary person…. There could be no vast passing of time until the ultimate true meaning of God’s words to Israel could acquire their final significance through canonical reinterpretation and/or typological fulfillment” (61, emphasis added). I understand Beacham’s concern, expressed in footnotes 56-57, regarding interpreters who conclude that God will not do exactly as he predicted through the prophets but might actually do something other than the prophets said. I share that concern. But I’m not confident that Deuteronomy 18:19 is saying that that everything the prophet said was comprehended by the original audience. I’m not even sure that Beacham truly wants to press the point that far, since he acknowledged earlier that the prophets didn’t fully understand all that they were saying all that they were given to say. Nor do I want to diminish what the Old Testament saints could understand. I think they often understood more than modern scholars given them credit. Nevertheless, to turn again to Genesis 3:15, surely the understanding of the ultimate true meaning of God’s words has grown as God progressively revealed more about his redemptive plan in Christ. Doubtless Christians understand the meaning of Genesis 3:15 better than Adam or Moses. Or, to give another example, the Old Testament revealed much about the gospel going to the Gentiles and about Israel’s role in God’s plan in connection to this mission to the Gentiles. Surely Old Testament texts about the gospel coming to the Gentiles should be read in light of Acts and the Epistles.

Finally Beacham argues that the “test of predicative prophecy” supports his view (63, emphasis added). Deuteronomy 18:21-22; Jeremiah 28:7-9; Ezekiel 33:30-33 all affirm that the test of a true prophet is that his predictions come true. Beacham observes, “No caveat existed in God’s declared test of genuine prophecy to allow for spiritualized, typified, multi-intentioned, expanded, or canonically resignified fulfillments” (64). Once again, I would agree that interpretations in which the fulfillment of Old Testament texts are replaced with spiritual interpretations or resignified are condemned by these texts. Allegorical interpretation was something the pagans had to do to make sense of their sacred texts. It was not a method that Christians needed to or should have resorted to. But I remain puzzled about the inclusion of “multi-intentioned” and “expanded” in the list. If there are texts in which God says, “I will do X for believing Israel,” and he does X for believing Israel while also revealing later that he always intended to do the equivalent for believing Gentiles as well, how does that fall afoul of the above passages?

While the texts that Beacham adduces do rule out the spiritualizing approaches that were popular in previous centuries and some of the approaches today that reinterpret Old Testament texts, I do not think that the texts he cited contradict a complementary hermeneutic or interpretations in which the Old Testament texts retain their integrity while progressive revelation clarifies or extends the these OT texts.

In sum, while I share Beacham’s concerns about approaches to Old Testament interprertation that re-interpret the text contrary to authorial intent or which posit a “reality shift” (to borrow terminology from Craig Blaising) between the Old and New Testaments, I think that the approach he advocates makes it difficult to understand numerous New Testament interpretations and fulfillments of Old Testament passages. I want to interpret the Old Testament literally. I also want to interpret the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament literally.

The Reformation and the Fourfold Sense of Scripture

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It is becoming popular for Protestant scholars to defend the fourfold sense approach to Scripture interpretation on the grounds that it is a more historic approach to Scripture than modern, historical criticism. However, these defenses tend to underplay the Reformation’s critique of the fourfold sense approach. Here is David Daniell’s characterization of Tyndale’s critique of the fourfold approach.

“The dangers of the Church’s method, however, were twofold. It can become a licence to what is little more than wilder forms of free association, whereby words can mean anything, according to whim; and it automatically suggests something that suited the Church very well at the time—that all Scripture is difficult to interpret, and only the very learned can handle it. […]

Thou shalt understand, therefore, that the scripture hath but one sense which is the literal sense. And that literal sense is the root and ground of all, and the anchor that never faileth, whereunto if thou cleave thou canst never err or go out of the way. And if thou leave the literal sense: thou canst not but go out of the way. Never the later the scripture useth proverbs, similitude, riddles or allegories as all other speeches do, but that which the proverb, similitude, riddle or allegory signifieth is ever the literal sense, which thou must seek out diligently. As in the English we borrow words and sentences of one thing and apply them to another and give them new significations.

Such use of metaphor he illustrates from common speech, ‘Look ere thou leap’, ‘Cut not the bough that thou standest upon . . . Such common examples soon become barbed. ‘When a thing speedeth not well, we borrow speech and say, the Bishop hath blessed it . . . And of him that is betrayed and wotteth not how, we say, he hath been at shrift. (Even more is conveyed by ‘she is master parson’s sister’s daughter, he is the bishop’s sister’s son, he hath a cardinal to his uncle…’) Scripture uses metaphor, as in ‘Christ is a lamb’; but proper interpretation is not wild, but applies the matter to the basis of Christ and the faith. The literal sense should bear the allegory as the foundation bears the house. Allegories by themselves prove nothing.

Tyndale illustrates how it should properly be done by interpreting the incident where Peter cut off Malchus’s ear (John 18), and showing Paul using the same method with the story of Hagar from Genesis. He continues, in a famous passage:

And likewise do we borrow likenesses or allegories of the scripture, as of Pharaoh and Herod, and of the scribes and Pharisees, to express our miserable captivity and persecution under antichrist the pope. The greatest cause of which captivity and the decay of the faith and this blindness wherein we now are, sprang first of allegories. For Origen and they of his time drew all the scripture unto allegories. Whose ensample they that came after followed so long, till at the last they forgot the order, and process of the text, supposing that the scripture served but to feign allegories upon. Insomuch that twenty doctors expound one text twenty ways, as children make descant upon plain song. Then came our sophisters with their Anagogical and chopological sense, and with an antitheme of half an inch, out of which some of them draw a thread of nine days long. Yea thou shalt find enough that will preach Christ, and prove what some ever point of the faith that thou wilt, as well out of a fable of Ovid or any other Poet, as out of St John’s gospel or Paul’s epistles. Yea they are come into such blindness that they not only say that the literal sense profiteth not, but also that it is hurtful, and noisome and killeth the soul. Which damnable doctrine they prove by a text of Paul, 2 Cor iii where he saith the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life. We must therefore, say they seek out some chopological sense.

(‘Chopological’ is a word of Tyndale’s coinage, for ironic effect.)

David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 239-40.

Notes on Leithart’s Deep Exegesis

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In my post on Mitchell Chase’s 40 Questions about Typology and Allegory, I noted that Peter Leithart is an unhelpful mentor in the area of hermeneutics. A number of years ago I read Leithart’s Deep Exegesis and jotted down these notes.

Leithart, Peter J. Deep Exegesis: The Mystery of Reading Scripture. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009.

1. The Text Is a Husk: Modern Hermeneutics

In general, I found this chapter helpful.

  • His critique of paraphrastic translations was on point.
  • He rightly identified Spinoza as the turning point who ushered in modern hermeneutics.
  • His discussion of Kant’s influence on modern religion, including evangelical religion was on point.
  • I think Leithart’s goal of allowing the NT authors to shape our hermeneutic is correct.

Caveat for chapter 1:

  • Leithart clearly likes the four-fold hermeneutic; he even tries to connect Calvin with it. I don’t think Calvin is easily connected to the four-fold hermeneutic. Calvin completely rejected the division of senses into literal and spiritual. He even identified the hermeneutical turn to allegory in the previous era as Satanic (cf. Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, trans. King, 1:114; Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians, trans. Pringle, 135). Calvin did have a richer literal sense that was attuned to analogy, typology, theology, and moral issues. But this richer literal sense is fundamentally different from the fourfold sense approach.
  • By linking Calvin to the quadriga, I fear that Leithart will present us with a false option in this book: modern hermeneutics or the quadriga. But I think Calvin shows us that this is a false choice. The argument in my dissertation is that we can look to the Reformers and Post-Reformation exegetes—standing as they do between the medieval and modern periods—for a pre-critical exegesis that avoids the problems of both modern and medieval hermeneutics.

2. Texts Are Events: Typology

Helpful:

  • The observation that placing texts within various contexts (original historical context, canonical context, personal life context) affects meaning.
  • The analogy drawn between the meaning of historical events and the meaning of texts

Weaknesses:

  • Leithart does not provide definitions for meaning or for typology. Part of what makes this chapter work is the slipperiness of the terms. They mean (!) slightly different things, I think, in different parts of the chapter. If E.D. Hirsch has drawn too stark a line between meaning and significance, Leithart keeps things fuzzy where it would be helpful to make some distinctions.
  • It would have been helpful for Leithart to make use of the categories of author, text, and reader.
  • Surely the author has an intended meaning. A merely human author can write in such a way as to fail to communicate his meaning, but the divinely superintended authors of Scripture do communicate divinely intended meaning. We do need to assert the stability of that meaning or else we participate in what Carson calls the gagging of God. These author-intended meanings are not found outside the text but within the text.
  • These texts are found within the canon of Scripture. While that means that when we read earlier texts in light of the whole canon, we can see a fuller meaning than we would if the text were isolated, I would want to insist that this fuller meaning is always tethered to the original meaning of the text. The fuller meaning is seen because of God’s progressive acting in history and because progressive revelation.
  • I agree with Leithart that readers have a role to play in interpretation. Leithart brings out that texts may mean different things to the same person at different points in their life due to differing life experience. But here it is important to note that we are not talking about the meaning of but the meaning for. If the connection between the meaning of and the meaning for is utterly broken, we would say that the reader has misunderstood the text. On the other hand, if the connection is close, we would be willing to say that a reader better understands a text after having greater life experience. With certain non-inspired texts I would even be willing to say that some readers can better understand the meaning of a text than the author—if the meaning of the text concerned some aspect of reality that the reader understood better than the author. This, of course, could not apply to the divine Author of Scripture since the Bible since God is omniscient (though it may describe a difference between the human writers of Scripture and Christians readings of Scripture today).
  • It is unhelpful to collapse the difference between meaning as it relates to author, text, and reader. For instance, I dealt in the dissertation with Paul’s use of Genesis 16 in Galatians and found that Paul was not allegorizing as the Fathers conceived of allegory. Leithart’s proposal regarding parallels between Ishmael, Isaac, and Israel are interesting, but I don’t think that is what Paul had in mind in Galatians 4. Paul’s reading was something that could be derived from a theological reading of the literal sense of Genesis 16. I think Leithart’s explanation for the rock following the people in the wilderness is on point. Regarding Hosea 11, it seems that Leithart opts for simple typology, which is fine. But Leithart is misleading when he says this changes the meaning of Hosea’s text.

3. Words Are Players: Semantics

Helpful

  • I think the opening critique of dynamic equivalence is correct. I have long thought that common arguments regarding translation and interpretation that are narrowly informed by linguistics are too often lacking in literary sensitivity—texts and their words are interpreted almost mathematically rather than literarily. Leithart is sensitive to the literary nature of biblical interpretation. 

Weaknesses

  • Characteristically, Leithart takes a good thing and presses it to the point where it is no longer valid. I seriously doubt that the name Nicodemus is meant to be a play on the words nike and demos in connection with his being called a ruler of the people.
  • I am also unconvinced of Leithart’s argument that the diachronic meanings of words are routinely significant for exegesis. Leithart’s point only works with certain, selected words, but no one is aware of the history of most words. Thus, writers do not bring a historical awareness of most words to their writing. (I am indebted to Mark Ward for this observation)

4. The Text Is a Joke: Intertextuality

In this chapter Leithart again elides certain key distinctions. He makes the valid point that good readers bring information with them to the text. So, a good reader of Matthew 1:1 will bring a knowledge that “book of the genealogy” is making a Genesis allusion, that “Christ” is a messianic term, that “son of David” and “son of Abraham” carry covenantal connotations, etc. But Leithart then labels this eisegesis because this information is not explicitly stated in the text. He links his Matthew 1:1 example to the fathers who compare Moses’s outstretched arms to the cross or Rahab’s red cord to the blood of Christ.

The problem is that Matthew intended the allusions in Matthew 1:1 (likewise with Leithart’s bartender, Shrek, Virgil, Eliot, Wind in the Willows, Watership Down, and Lion King illustrations).  It is exegesis, not eisegesis, to notice allusions that the author has put into his text. The fathers were operating from different principles in which harmony with the rule of faith was more decisive than authorial intention (though the latter was not irrelevant to them) (see Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, 3.2.2; 3.2.5; 3.27.38; 3.28.39).

5. Texts Are Music: Structure

Helpful

  • I’m not opposed to the idea that texts can have multiple structures.

Weaknesses

  • But Leithart’s example from John 9 falls flat. In part, I’m not convinced that the biblical writers regularly structured narratives (as opposed to poems, proverbs, etc.) as chiasms. Narratives outlined chiastically always seem to be forced, and the chiastic structure regularly stands in tension with the normal flow of the plot: rising action, crisis, climax, falling action, resolution. Often the chiastic center does not align with the crisis or the climax, and yet it is taken to be central or most important according to the chiastic structure.
  • In the next chapter Leithart admits, with reference to his John 9 example, “As we saw in the previous chapter, the narrative of John 9 is constructed, rather oddly, so as to put the Pharisees’ interrogation of the blind man’s parents at the chiastic center. This is not obviously the main episode in the story, and its presence in the center of the text’s labyrinth is something of a disappointment” (177-78). I think this shows the flaw in the proposed chiastic structure.

6. Texts Are about Christ: Application

Helpful

  • Leithart wants to see Christ-centered application that does not stand over against or in tension with the personal lives of Christians.
  • He rightly bemoans: “If the Bible is about Christ, some preachers and interpreters conclude, then any direct application of Scripture to the life of the believer introduces works and threatens to collapse into moralism. Other preachers insist that the Bible be made practical, so that the stories of David are read not as foreshadowings of Christ but as stories that teach us courage, faith, and tricks (e.g., spittle on the beard) for dealing with oppressive fathers-in-law and kings” (174).

Weaknesses

  • Leithart’s solution is itself problematic. He wishes to revert to the fourfold hermeneutic. As he says in the epilogue, “the hermeneutical method offered here is very similar to the fourfold method developed by medieval Bible teachers. For the medievals, the literal sense of the text opened out into a christological allegory, which, because Christ is the head of his body, opened out into tropological instruction and, because Christ is the King of a kingdom here yet also coming, into anagogical hope” (207).
  • Leithart thus opts for a patristic and medieval solution to modernist hermeneutics without reckoning with why the fourfold sense was on the wane in the latter part of the Middle Ages. Early on the spiritual senses had precedence for medieval interpreters because the spiritual senses seemed to solve apologetical difficulties and because that is how certain texts seemed to become relevant. But as the Middle Ages progressed, the literal sense became more and more important. The rise of Aristotle gave interpreters are greater appreciation for the theological significance of the material world. In addition, teachers outside the church’s mainstream could make use of allegory in ways that exposed it as a two-edged sword. Though the spiritual senses were not abandoned in the Middle Ages, the literal sense gained more prominence. In the Reformation, hermeneutical skill had developed to the point where interpreters could address apologetical challenges and make applications from texts without leaving the literal sense. Leithart hasn’t demonstrated why a pre-critical Calvinian or Bucerian approach would not provide the proper corrective to modernist hermeneutics.
  • Leithart demonstrates by his multivalent reading of John 9 the problems of the fourfold hermeneutic. Leithart’s argument that John 9 supports infant baptism (because the blind man washes his eyes before he knows who Jesus is and confesses him as Lord) shows that those operating with this hermeneutic end up imposing their rule of faith on Scripture rather than attentively hearing the voice of God from Scripture.