Beyond the Bible (review)

A review of:

Beyond the Bible: Moving From Scripture to Theology
I. Howard Marshall with essays by Kevin J. Vanhoozer and Stanley E. Porter Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic / Paternoster 2004 pb ISBN 0-8010-2775-6
136pp inc. scripture & subject indexes

(for Churchman)

Beyond the Bible provides a valuable, stimulating, yet problematic evangelical conversation about the perennial necessity of moving from the ancient authoritative Scriptures to contemporary application and developed doctrine. Hot potatoes at least hinted at include the historicity and authorship of Biblical books, infant baptism, ecumenism, the roles of women in ministry and family, homosexuality, slavery, apartheid, medical science, Old Testament ‘genocide’, open theism, penal substitution, the nature of hell and God’s judgement, capital punishment and fundamentalism.

Professor Marshall’s first chapter lays out some of the hermeneutical issues facing evangelicals and provides a useful historical sketch of biblical interpretation, defending believing grammatico-historical criticism. Taking J I Packer’s ‘Understanding the Bible: Evangelical Hermeneutics’ (1990) as a representative example, Marshall alleges problems with evangelical attempts to arrive at applications, arguing that contemporary exposition is more complex than is often realised.

Drawing on the work of W J Webb, Slaves, Women and Homosexuality and C H Cosgrove, with a wealth of examples from ethics, worship and doctrine, Marshall’s second chapter contends that doctrinal development is both a fact and a necessity, to which Scripture itself bears witness. The agenda for Marshall’s final chapter, then, is ‘The Search for Biblical Principles’ for going beyond the Bible.

Marshall’s conclusions are neatly summarised in seven propositions on pp78-79. He believes that he has found development, incompleteness, diversity, tension, continuity and discontinuity in the whole of Scripture, which he continues to affirm as supremely authoritative, but sometimes ‘no longer valid in their original form… but… authoritative in a different way’ and always in need of interpretation and fresh application. We are called, then, to ‘a task that involves considerable risk’: ‘some teaching of Scripture needs to be understood and applied differently from in the first century’ with ‘A Mind Nurtured on the Gospel’ (p70f).

Kevin J. Vanhoozer makes a very helpful 15 page response to what he calls ‘The Marshall Plan’ in which he examines four possible senses of ‘going beyond’ Scripture biblically. Vanhoozer suggests that what is needed for the contemporary application of the Bible is, rather, ‘a mind nurtured on the Christ-centred canon’ (p94).

In the final essay in this volume (31pp), Stanley E Porter (of McMaster Divinity School) considers five hermeneutical approaches to New Testament interpretation that offer to yield a valid theology, thus: (1) the historical critical method, interacting with G B Caird’s New Testament Theology (2) Wittgenstein’s Classes of Utterances as developed by Anthony Thiselton (3) Speech-Act theory, drawing on the work of Thiselton, Vanhoozer and Briggs (4) Marshall’s developmental theory. Finally, Porter makes his own proposal identifying what he calls a Pauline approach of core beliefs with ‘translation’ on a dynamic equivalence model into other cultures and situations.

This book is far from presenting itself as the last word on hermeneutics, and it is just as well. Maybe it is not naïve to suggest that Marshall tends to overestimate the hermeneutical gap and fails to emphasise the perspicuity and sufficiency of the Scriptures that were written ‘for us’. Readers may think that Marshall has gone beyond the Bible in unbiblical directions regarding women’s ministry (p76) and that his discussion of the way in which Jesus’ teaching is relativized by his salvation-historical context (p63ff) and the contention that Jesus’ imagery of divine judgement is inappropriate to our times (pp66-68) seem risky indeed. It is not obvious that Marshall has set out sufficiently robust criteria to keep his successors from effectively leaving the Bible behind.