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Overview
In the five centuries since the Reformation, the confidence Luther and the Reformers placed in the Bible has slowly eroded. Enlightened modernity came to treat the Bible like any other text, subjecting it to a near endless array of historical-critical methods derived from the sciences and philosophy. The result is that in many quarters of Protestantism today the Bible as word has ceased to be the Word.
In The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture, Iain Provan aims to restore a Reformation-like confidence in the Bible by recovering a Reformation-like reading strategy. To accomplish these aims Provan first acknowledges the value in the Church’s precritical appropriation of the Bible and, then, in a chastened use of modern and postmodern critical methods. But Provan resolutely returns to the Reformers’ affirmation of the centrality of the literal sense of the text, in the Bible’s original languages, for a right-minded biblical interpretation. In the end the volume shows that it is possible to arrive at an approach to biblical interpretation for the twenty-first century that does not simply replicate the Protestant hermeneutics of the sixteenth, but stands in fundamental continuity with them. Such lavish attention to, and importance placed upon, a seriously literal interpretation of Scripture is appropriate to the Christian confession of the word as Word—the one God’s Word for the one world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781481306089 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Baylor University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/31/2017 |
| Pages: | 724 |
| Sales rank: | 627,504 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.80(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
1 Introduction 1
O Little Town of… Wittenberg
I Before There Were Protestants Long-Standing Questions
2 Scripture and Canon in the Early Church 27
On Chickens and Their Eggs
3 The Formation of the Christian Canon 55
The Pressure of the Twenty-Two
4 On the Meaning of Words 81
The Literal, the Spiritual, and the Plain Confusing
5 The Reading of Scripture in the New Testament 107
All That the Prophets Have Spoken
6 Literal Reading, Typology and Allegory in Paul 131
A Rose by Any Other Name
7 Justin, Irenaeus, and Tertullian 151
False Economies and Hidden Treasure
8 Origen, Theodore, and Augustine 173
The Fertility of Scripture
9 How Shall We Then Read? 199
The Church Fathers, the Reformers, and Ourselves
10 The Septuagint as Christian Scripture 227
It's All Greek to Me
11 The Vulgate, the Renaissance, and the Reformation 253
When in Rome…
II Now There Are Protestants Scripture in a Changing World
12 The Perspicuity of Scripture Alone 283
A Lamp unto My Feet
13 The Authority of Scripture 313
Thy Word Is Truth
14 The Bible, the Heavens, and the Earth 347
The Beginnings of an Eclipse
15 The Emergence of Secular History 383
The Way We (Really) Were
16 On Engaging with a Changing World 415
Fight, Flight, and the Fifth Way
III Still Protesting Scripture in the (Post)Modern World
17 Source and Form Criticism 455
Behind the Text
18 Redaction and Rhetorical Criticism 487
The Persuasive Text
19 Structuralism and Poststructuralism 517
Texts and Subtexts
20 Narrative Criticism 549
Getting the Story Straight
21 Social-Scientific and Feminist Criticism 577
Texts as Social Constructs
22 The Canonical Reading of Scripture 609
The End of Criticism
23 Postscript 641
Appendix: Modern Developments in Our Understanding of the Biblical Text 643
Bibliography 649
Index of Biblical References and Ancient Jewish Sources 687
Index of Authors 697
Index of Subjects 711
What People are Saying About This
Iain Provan has given us here a vigorous affirmation on how to read the Bible as a Protestant. An important and nuanced argument set in the context of the wider Christian tradition and recent hermeneutical developments, this book stands out among the welter of recent writings on the Reformation.
Using the magisterial Reformation for his compass, Provan surveys the current landscape of biblical interpretation and seeks to chart a faithful path forward. His sprawling, historiographical cartography explores the trails taken by those he styles as inveterate historical critics, unrepentant fundamentalists, modish postmoderns, and fashionable post-Protestants, all so he can offer a timely affirmation of ‘literal’ reading, rightly understood. Provan’s ‘fifth way’ entails a chastened, reframed use of critical methods, rather than capitulating to them or rejecting them. His ultimate destination is a renewed emphasis on ‘the Great Biblical Story as a canonical whole.’
This prodigiously well-read, well-written, elegant, and accessible study has a passionate and serious treatise to expound. As its title hints, it is not another book on the history of interpretation, except in the sense that Professor Provan believes that the history of interpretation, especially in the time of the Fathers and the Reformers, has vital significance for the twenty-first century. So, we need to pay attention if we are to get interpretation on the right track five hundred years after Luther posted his theses. Aspects of Professor Provan’s own thesis about literal interpretation are unfashionable and therefore need to be pondered with open minds.
I’ve been waiting years for a book such as this: a comprehensive treatment of the nature, history, and significance of the Bible’s literal interpretation. Here is a sustained argument for the importance of reading with the Reformers, which in Provan’s account means doing as they say, not exactly as they do. This is a brave book that sails against the prevailing winds of hermeneutical fashion, charting a ‘fifth way’ that avoids reductive historical, expansive postmodern, narrow literalistic, and unregulated spiritual ways of reading the Bible. Read literally, Scripture is not a wax nose that can be turned this way or that, but a divinely inspired, authoritative text with real bite.