Prelude to a Fugue

YHYH

YHWH

AHYH

What is the Bible?  Can this be answered in one word?  Can this be answered in propositional form?  The Biblical narrative, bound up with propositions about reality, defies us to call it something in one word.  Allow me to "call a spade a spade" with my own attempt: the Bible is a scandal. Nay, it is The Scandal.  Ah! Two words.  The Holy Scandal.  Okay, so three words!

And so also is this commentary a scandal.  Every post demonstrates the syncretism I am accused of perpetuating.  But I have separated them out so people can easily see the two ways I approach the Bible.  It is precisely the wedge that is causing the "conservative/liberal" dichotomy today.  I placed them side by side so the reader can be assured that I am not trying to be disingenuous in my exposition.  But perhaps by the end this commentary will be justified as to its orthodoxy.  Or I will be revealed to be a syncretist.  It will be a nail-biter, I assure you... =)

So what is the heresy already?  In the first part of every post I start with "Deductions," in which I hope to be a Christian commentator in this blog.  What does this mean?  It means that I am unpacking the Bible as a biased expositor giving account to all things--deducing from first hypotheses, that is to say the Church's three ecumenical Creeds.  The commentary will be unmistakably Trinitarian; however I will blunt the Christian edge in the Torah and the Prophets for the fact that such a propositional assertion about God appears late--precisely because it is a revelation. There, that wasn't so bad.

Now for the scandal: the second part of every post reads as "Feigning no hypotheses," because I attempt to read the Bible as from the outside, or "neutral observer," as opposed to the above which is someone who reads "from within."  This is the modernist move, put into full force by Newton and others in the Rennaisance who stopped using the approach given by theologians and used a bottom up approach by observation.  One cannot be both, so the accusation goes.  Or perhaps more pertinent to the discussion, one cannot judge the narrative of the Bible according to "universal principles" that even God must obey or that indefatigably defeat all opposition.  Will I be absolved or found guilty of this accusation?  I assure you I, like you, am perched on the edge of my seat with baited breath waiting for the sentence to my crimes of paradigm.

Perhaps I will end up being a chimera of St. Thomas Aquinas and Sir Isaac Newton.  Please God let that be a Lutheran!  But if not I will just accept that I cannot necessarily figure it all out.  At any rate, let us put some things on the table.  The Bible is holy, or separate, from all other accounts of reality.  It is the public witness of a peculiar God who, though hidden, is identified by associating with a particular people who bear witness to this God.

The Bible is an account of how God created all things, what went wrong, and how God has seen fit to remedy the situation.  In this way the Bible is a record of the Divine Service God has performed for man.  Because the Church is the means by which this God performs this service to us, the Bible becomes the raw material upon which the Church draws to perform this service.  In other words, preachers of the Word of God use the Bible as "sermon notes."

The Bible should be understood as a technical reference for professionals.  A doctor has a "physician's desk reference," but this does not imply that the book was written for laity and the practice of medicine stems directly from the book alone.  It is a creature of the practice of medicine.  So also, the Bible is a creature of the Church, and is properly handled by the called servants of the practice of theology.  This is not to say people cannot possess the Bible; it is merely to distinguish between its ontology as a desk reference and, say, something for personal devotion.  The mere fact of the cost of possessing one codex of the NT for many years would be cost-prohibitive, therefore it cannot be understood as something that was developed for private individuals.

The Bible is often times a book written in shorthand.  This has to be the case because of the nature of an account of all things demands brevity or else all the trees in the world would be consumed for need of paper.  One might argue that everything said in the Bible are the most important or central points in the narrative.  Sometimes the text itself requires that we bring something to the text or read something behind the text.  But above all we must not lose what the text is saying primarily.

The backbone of the bottom up part of this commentary I will be using the chronology by E.W. Faulstich.  It will frame that discussion as well as the Book of Concord, and hopefully after this I will remain a Theologian of the Cross.  Followers of this blog will notice that I am going to edit the posts over time as I add new ones.  For example, this preface has been changed once since I started.  I hope readers will be able to make sense of the way I understand the Bible since my growing understanding has hamstrung me from making clear propositional statements about the Bible.  So I hope that this commentary helps.

Your narrator,
Mark Robert Opheim