Fall 2019 · Vol. 48 No. 2 · pp. 194–196
Book Review
Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis
Craig A. Carter. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018. 279 pages.
How is the church to interpret Scripture today? This is the question which concerns Craig A. Carter in Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis. Carter, Professor of Theology at Tyndale University, makes the polemical argument that “every single component of the conventional wisdom [of historical criticism] is wrong or, at the very least, highly misleading” (ix). Thus, his book is an attempt to correct the negative downturn he attributes to modernity by appealing to the hermeneutics of what he terms “the Great Tradition” (xv). While he claims that his book is relevant to all Christians, it is clearly aimed at those who have been trained in the academy to interpret Scripture primarily through the historical-critical method.
The main thrust of the book is a constructive proposal for how one ought to interpret Scripture today. Carter advances this proposal through two movements. The first is bibliological. Here, Carter does not present a formal hermeneutics but rather sets forth his vision of what he believes the Bible to be. This is because “the nature of the Bible precedes the interpretation of the Bible” (36). If one wants to interpret Scripture correctly, they must first know something about what the book itself is. For Carter, there are three elements one must understand correctly before beginning to interpret Scripture: (1) Scripture is inspired by God and it is God who speaks through Scripture today; (2) one must possess the correct metaphysical assumptions, which Carter refers to as Christian Platonism; and (3) Nicene dogma aids the reader towards correct interpretation of Scripture.
Carter’s second movement is where he gets to the practice of exegesis, {195} that is, “what we can learn from the church fathers about how to do it well” (130). Again, there are three elements of Carter’s movement which he sees as essential: (1) proper interpretation necessitates reading the Bible as a unified book, a unity centered on Jesus Christ; (2) the literal (or plain) sense of Scripture must be allowed to control one’s interpretation; and (3) Christ speaks through the Old Testament, and Christian interpretation ought to hear him speaking there.
Carter is no doubt correct that there is a need for reform within the academy regarding the teaching and scholarly interpretation of the Bible. Interpretations of Scripture which only draw upon historical-critical methodology will inherently lack the spiritual character needed for Christian discipleship. Furthermore, he is equally correct in grounding his hermeneutics in the work of theologians such as Irenaeus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin. These thinkers were theologians, but they were first and foremost theologians guided by Scripture. Thus, if one wants to bridge the unnecessary and unfortunate gap between biblical studies and theology, there may be none better to turn to than those who saw biblical interpretation and theology to be impossible without each other.
Despite these strengths of Carter’s approach, his book ultimately falls short in several areas. Here, I identify four significant weaknesses. Two are methodological and two pertain to the content of Carter’s argument. First, the book lacks sufficient nuance. Carter repeatedly insists that modern biblical exegesis in the tradition of the Enlightenment is entirely void of spiritual significance. He charges the modern period with attempting to “hijack the Bible and claim that it says something foreign to its true meaning” (159). I too have reservations about the philosophical and theological traditions of modernity, but it appears to me that Carter is overstepping in lambasting the entire Enlightenment tradition in this manner.
Second, Carter attempts to do too much in this book. As a result, he fails to provide a comprehensive account of the hermeneutics of the Great Tradition. For example, his chapter on the literal (or plain) meaning of Scripture examines the hermeneutical thoughts of Augustine and Calvin. Carter, however, rushes through his accounts of the hermeneutical principles employed by those two thinkers, leaving the reader inadequately apprised of how those in the Great Tradition actually interpreted Scripture. Carter would have been better off to discuss in greater depth Augustine or Calvin, but not both.
Third, Carter insists that one must have the proper metaphysical assumptions in order to interpret Scripture correctly. Indeed, he devotes the third chapter of his book to uncovering what he believes to be a biblically grounded metaphysics, namely, Christian Platonism. He argues that “Christian Platonism is a synthesis of the best of rational Greek philosophy {196} and biblical revelation and is responsible for the flowering of Western Christendom” (84). But is it true that one cannot interpret Scripture correctly without this Western metaphysics? While it is true that the dominant strand of Christianity emerged through the West, what do we make of Eastern, Syriac, or Coptic Christian traditions, all of which have existed just as long (if not, in some cases, longer) than the Western tradition? And what does this mean for cross-cultural missions today? Must we really teach Western metaphysics before we teach the Bible?
My final concern is that it is not entirely clear what Carter understands the Great Tradition itself to be. Carter appears to assume that it is monolithic, yet he is vague about who fits into it. He draws extensively on the work of Irenaeus, Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin, but these are only four theologians out of the multitude that appeared over the course of almost sixteen-hundred years. Beyond spiritual exegesis, Nicene dogma, and adherence to a Christian Platonist metaphysics (111), minimal space is given to exactly what membership in the Great Tradition involves. The book would have benefitted greatly from a section providing a more detailed answer to this question.
Carter’s book begins with much promise but does not live up to expectations. As this book is a prolegomenon to Carter’s forthcoming companion book, Trinitarian Classical Theism: An Introduction to the Christian Doctrine of God, it is my hope that Carter considers the critiques offered above as he writes. There surely is much for twenty-first-century Christians to glean from the Great Tradition, and we need retrieval work to teach us these things. However, we cannot reverse the Enlightenment and travel back to a time when the Great Tradition held sway. We are left to interpret Scripture where we are today, amidst the messiness with which modernity has left us. And, while Carter’s book does indeed give us some help in this task, more is needed to leave the reader fully convinced of his hermeneutical vision.
