Notes on *Reading Scripture Canonically*

Reading Scripture Canonically: Theological Instincts for Old Testament Interpretation, Mark S. Gignilliat, (Baker Academic, 2019)

Main Idea/Takeaway

• How and why should we read the material of Scripture — words, sentences, paragraphs, books, and so forth — in conjunction with Scripture's theological subject matter? (xiv)

Interaction 

• "Has Sailhamer (JS) described this best in his Old Testament theology on text vs. event"? (15)

• "Revelation is in the text." (18)

• "Note how JS places canonical reading along criticisms" (21)

• "Not less than historical, but absolutely more, and when understood as witness, the question on what to preach is clear. Final form!" (31)

• "In short, the canonical approach places highest focus on the text as God has given it to us. And we should preach this way!" (31)

• "LXX as a kind of commentary." (71)

• "Yes, only because we know that God is the ultimate author of Scripture." (94)

• "Intertextuality- relationship between various books of OT; Innertextuality- book's own textual composition; Contextuality- final shape of canon" (100)

• "See Michael Reeves, 'Delighting in the Trinity.'" (101)

• "But does YHWH 'reveal' himself 'personally' if no particular person should be in view. (see fn.29)" (112)

• "We believe God is the ultimate author of Scripture." (113)

• "We believe the Bible is ultimately about God and is by God." (113)

• "Instincts and Expectations." (116)

• "Sounds like reader-determinate meaning which is a slippery slope?! How does this not also open us up to reader response? The answer it seems, is Scripture's subject matter, God. That he is the ultimate author. KJV speaks of canonical fittingness." " (97)

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part 1: Scripture's Material Form

I. Scripture and Canon

II. Sanding with the Grain: Final Form and Canonical Shape 

III. Canonical Intentionality

IV. Canon and Textual Criticism: The Search for the Christian Bible

Part 2: Scripture's Subject Matter

V. God as Triune, and Exegetical Metaphysics

VI. The Trinity and the Old Testament

Epilogue

Favorite Quotes by Chapter

Introduction

• "The posture, expectations, and (dreaded word) "methods" that one brings to the Holy Scripture will either serve or obstruct Scripture's reason for existence." (xii)

• "The New Testament authors and early church theologians read the Old Testament as a Christian witness. This kind of reading instinct and strategy has always been with the church."(xii)

Part 1: Scripture's Material Form

I. Scripture and Canon

• "A "canon consciousness" is actually embedded in the literature itself, and it exerted pressure on various religious bodies in the creaturely act of canonization or the forming of set lists." (7)

• "While the human and institutional agents attached to the writing, editing, and preserving of the biblical books should never be diminished, Christians around the world today and from the church's inception dive headlong into the Scriptures for the sake of hearing the word of God." (9)

• "As this book hopes to demonstrate, the confession of faith regarding Scripture's nature (or ontology, "what it is") impinges on the interpretive approach taken. In other words, the subject matter being studied shapes the interpretive methods used to understand it." (10)

• "God's self-determination to be a God in fellowship with humanity. On this account, Scripture is the loving gift of God to his people so they may continually seek him and order their lives toward him, while resting in the confidence that God has not left our desire to know him within the realm of human self-achievement." (11)

• "As Webster puts the matter, "Holy Scripture is a function of God. Therefore, Holy Scripture's canonical role as the normative guide for Christian thought and life derives its authority from the loving rule of God. Its textual character remains a dynamic means of continued divine self-disclosure. It is not a static "textual deposit."(11)

• "God as object and Scripture as approach are determinate within the redemptive economy for how God orders the goal and means of our theological pursuits." (12)

• "The differentiated-though-fitting relationship between God and Scripture demands the church's continued giving of itself to the exegesis of Holy Scripture. Because Scripture is not God, while at the same time remaining a sanctified means for apprehension of God, it follows necessarily that the exegesis of Holy Scripture continues as a never-ceasing activity of Christ's church." (13)

• "The prophetic word of God continues to effect repentance in the hearts of hearers around the world." (17)

• "The cognitive principle of Scripture, with God as its object of inquiry, shapes the intellectual approach and method of inquiry. While all the elements of a humanly authored document are true of Holy Scripture, the ontological principle will not allow our method of reading to be hemmed in by its creaturely status." (18)

II. Sanding with the Grain: Final Form and Canonical Shape 

• "But because the canonical approach insists on the character of Israel's Scriptures as witness rather than source, the final form of the biblical text is the privileged form." (25)

• "The problem with this newer redactional analysis is that under the guise of diversity the biblical text is subjected to the criteria of rigorous, conceptual coherence which has been defined according to modern rational categories." In other words, a modern account of conceptual coherence may be an imposition onto the authors and shapers of the biblical material." (36)

• "Childs had no misgivings about the ends toward which critical tools are used: as an aid to hearing the final form of the text well. Childs's clarity on the goal of such critical utilization comes from his commitment to reading the Old Testament as witness to God's identity and ways with his people." (37)

• "Christopher Seitz says it best when he identifies the canonical approach this way: "Canonical reading is therefore not an exact science, but a theological decision about what the proper parameters for interpretation are: the final form presentation and the arrangement and sequencing that it exhibits, over against the simple history of the text's development as this is critically reconstructed." (40)

III. Canonical Intentionality

• "The canonical approach, on the other hand, conceives of intentionality more broadly as it identifies the authorial voice of the text with its final form, along with its privileged arrangement and deployment of texts, traditions, or prophetic oracles whose initial intention(s) may have had a more narrow range of effects. One could construe intentionality of this kind as "thick" rather than "thin." A thin account locates intentionality within a narrow frame of individual authorship. A thick account takes into view a providentially constructed understanding of history where a wide range of historical figures and inspired words are deemed relevant to the texts as they come to their full form. The term associated with this particular understanding is canonical intentionality?"(44)

• "The recognition of the canon's intention, as a theological understanding of the text's ability, to render God's identity and will for future generations has exegetical warrant." (48)

•  "Does the canon expect its readers to come to it with a set of assumptions and anticipations about the text and the reading process? Can one decision about a reading strategy claim a superior status to others? The canonical approach, in accord with the received reading practices of the church, says yes. When believers read Israel's canon in the anticipation of hearing an authoritative word whose source is the communicative action of God, they read Scripture according to its own intention." (51)

• "The glory of the Christian canon is its ability to do this kind of work continually in the life of Christ's church, requiring a robust doctrine of the Holy Spirit to fuel its fire."(55)

• "The gap between text and interpreter is not bridged by more refined hermeneutical tools, helpful as these may be. The gap is bridged by a Person." (56)

• "John Webster is right to claim, "Whether done well or ill, theology and the study of Scripture are spiritual tasks, and the conditions for their flourishing include spiritual conditions." (56)

IV. Canon and Textual Criticism: The Search for the Christian Bible

• "If, however, Scripture functions canonically as the rule of faith for Christian life and doctrine despite questions at the margins regarding the canon's scope, then the settling of the canon's scope is not determinative of the canonical role that Scripture plays even when levels of uncertainty at the margins remain." (75)

V. God as Triune, and Exegetical Metaphysics

• "Freewheeling hermeneutical reflections apart from the nitty-gritty details of textual engagement run counter to the material sufficiency of Scripture. Texts and their language matter. At the same time, biblical texts cannot be separated from their subject matter." (86)

• "Modern biblical criticism is a rich and varied thing, whose results provide important avenues of inquiry and appreciation for Scripture's linguistic, poetic, and historical depth. But somewhere lurking in the shadows, or perhaps dancing in full view, is the historicist resistance to metaphysics as a critical tool for reading historical texts. Brian Daley does not dance around the issue when he claims that historical criticism often operates "methodologically atheistic." (89)

• "When Isaiah or Moses or Jeremiah utter a prophetic word, do not their language and verbal expressions say more than they could grasp?" (93)

• "Does the whole Christian canon as a two-Testament witness pressure us to see the Old Testament's subject as our Triune God, with the Tetragrammaton (the divine name YHWH) as best predicated on the essence of God revealed In the tripersonal naming of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit more of this in the next chapter)?" (93)

• "Therefore, the prophetic word of the Old Testament is an extension of Yhwh's own revealed self, fitted as it is to the singularity of the divine being in tripersonal relation." (94)

• "The source of the Bible's language is the infinite plenitude of the divine being, revealing himself by means of the Word's agency." (94)

VI. The Trinity and the Old Testament

• "Moreover, if as Christians we affirm the triune character of our God, then a question regarding the identity of Yhwh in the Old Testament follows. Is Yhwh a persona of the divine essence or the ousia itself? Put in other terms, is Yhwh the Father or the divine essence of three personae?" (101)

• "Yhwh's proclamation of his own name is the revelation of his glory. The thirteen middot (attributes) of God listed by Yhwh himself (34:6-7) reveal the character of the divine name and in so doing reveal the character of Yhwh." (106)

• "Yhwh's mission to create and redeem does not exhaust the scope of God's being. As various episodes within the Old Testament attest, the being of God resists domestication of any sort."(107)

Epilogue

• "The church's long-term health and faithful witness rests on its commitment to seeking after God's Word in Holy Scripture. Of course, other ecclesial matters are important. But a doctrine of Scripture's sufficiency means that the church's access, to what gives it life, the person and work of Jesus Christ, is through the front doors of Holy Scripture." (115)

• "Still, it is the open Bible that sustains and energizes every component of pastoral ministry and, for that matter, Christian existence. People need Jesus. And Jesus Christ stands at the door of his own Word and knocks." (117)

Notable Content

• Defining Terms. (6)

• Canon and Scripture Ontology. (10)

• The Canonical Approach in Modern Guise:

"While drawing on the resources and instincts of the church's premodern reading of Scripture, the canonical approach makes judicious use of modern criticism's literary engagement with the text's compositional history. The key term is judicious because the canonical approach makes appreciative use of critical tools while at the same time resisting modern criticism's interpretive goals and methodological hegemony." (25)

• Textual Final Form: 

"The final form also leaves an interpretive imprint on the text, rendering the whole as more than the sum total of its parts; it is the culmination of God's revealed word in time, and renders an authoritative frame of reference for the parts leading to the whole--a witness to God's revelation rather than a source for critical reconstruction." (27)

• Canonical Intentionality: 

"The canonical approach conceives of the text's intentionality in the authorial voice of the text's final form. While the religiohistorical phenomena producing the various canonical voices are not denied, the canonical approach understands the text's intentionality as "loosened" from these historical forces for the sake of an enduring witness to divine self-revelation." (46)

• See John Sailhamer categories. (48)

• Textual Pluriformity/Uniformity: 

"The plethora of text and text types discovered in the twentieth century complicates the text-critical pursuit of an "original" Old Testament text. A standard view of the Old Testament's textual history is that a pluriform text type--multiple and divergent texts and text types-in time yielded to a uniform text associated with rabbinic Judaism of the era after AD 70. This chapter makes a different claim: uniformity and pluriformity existed on parallel historical tracks, rather than pluriformity leading genetically into uniformity." (63)

• Hebrew or Greek or Both?:

"The translations of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek remain a significant historical and theological phenomenon. Undoubtedly the Septuagint (LXX) played a formative role in the shaping of the New Testament and early Christianity. The evidence suggests that this historical accident tells much about the translatability of the Old Testament, but it does not necessarily place the Septuagint translation above its Hebrew parent text." (76)

• Fixity: 

"The verbal character of the Old Testament in its literal sense opens up to the future: much like the literal sense of Cézanne's life opens up to the future of his work. Yet in this opening up, the Old Testament's "life" or literal sense or given verbal form is not left behind for greener New Testament pastures. As Cézanne's paintings provide a necessary entry point to the fixity of his life, so too does the trinitarian subject matter of Scripture provide an entry point to the fixity of the Old Testament's verbal character." (98)