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This article is a pre-publication copy of an appendix in Chalcedon's forthcoming publication, Infallibility and Interpretation, by Rousas John Rushdoony and P. Andrew Sandlin; Copyright Chalcedon, 2000. A
Note on Redemptive-Historical Interpretation One of the greatest Biblical theologians the Reformed Faith ever produced was Geerhardus Vos, professor of Biblical theology at Princeton. In the last few years of the nineteenth century until his retirement in 1932, Vos was the leading proponent of the redemptive-historical method of interpretation. In large part, Dutch Biblical theologian Herman Ridderbos later adopted this view, though apparently somewhat independently. Its leading proponent today is Westminster Seminary professor Richard Gaffin. The exegesis and theology of all three of these men are superior, and sometimes dazzling. The fresh way in which they approach the Scriptures often yields deep theological insights. Usually these insights spring from the practice of the redemptive-historical method itself. What is it? The Method Defined Reacting against the rather scholastic, a-historical approach of much of Reformed exegesis and theology, the practitioners of the redemptive-historical method perceive the Bible primarily in terms of its own history. The Bible, they note, is not a theological textbook but a divinely inspired and infallible account of certain discrete historical events, preeminently the great events of redemption surrounding Jesus Christ's great redemptive complex: His life, death, resurrection, ascension, and second coming. Gaffin explains: "Specifically, the focus or orientation of Scripture in all its parts is the history of God's accomplishment of the redemption of his covenant people, which reaches its climax in the work of the incarnate Christ. So far as its content is concerned, biblical revelation is redemptive-historical (or covenantal) and christocentric. What needs to be made clear is that for Vos, this generalization holds for biblical revelation in its entirety. His point is not that by far the largest part of Scripture or its main emphasis concerns the redemptive work of Christ while the other, less prominent portions are basically independent of this concern, related to redemption only indirectly or not at all. Rather, in its way, every single aspect or strand in the rich diversity of biblical revelation is oriented to salvation in Christ. The death and resurrection of Christ constitutes the focal point of all biblical revelation." (1) Revelation is distinctly organic. It unfolds historically, that is, within the historical period described by Scripture: it "comes in a historically progressive fashion." (2) As it moves forward in its description of history, it progressively reveals its message; that message comes to fulness in the New Testament epistles of Paul. Because of the historically shaped character of Biblical revelation, practitioners of the redemptive-historical method devote great attention to the historically shaped character of the text: its human authors, composition, style, and so forth. They are quick to dissociate this preoccupation from the theologically liberal diminution of Biblical authority on similar historical grounds. For its orthodox Reformed supporters, a high degree of inspiration is not jeopardized by an intense interest in the Bible's historical nature. In fact, they argue that only such an interest can bring to light the glory of the inspired Scripture. (3) Insights of the Redemptive-Historical Method This approach leads to some interesting, and often dramatic, insights. For instance, one conclusion of Gaffin's Resurrection and Redemption: A Study in Paul's Soteriology (4) is that the traditional Reformed ordo salutis (order of salvation) as it pertains to individuals has New Testament, or at least Pauline, soteriology quite wrong. The Biblical depiction of the individual's salvation is not one of a sequence of divine acts: regeneration, justification, sanctification, glorification, and so on. Rather, these are all facets of salvation simultaneously imparted at the sinner's union with Christ. Gaffin, following Vos, marshals extensive exegetical evidence that it is specifically union with the resurrected Christ (that is, in all of His resurrection power) that imparts salvation to the heretofore unbeliever. This implies, among other things, that Gaffin is willing to rethink the traditional Reformed idea that regeneration precedes and causes man's faith, usually considered the instrumental cause of justification. (5) Another interesting feature of the redemptive-historical method is that it sees Paul and the modern New Testament interpreter as contemporary, as far as their approach to the interpretive task is concerned. Vos, Ridderbos, and Gaffin see Paul not merely as an instrument of divine inspiration, but as a theologian in his own right. (6) The gospels give us an account of the great redemptive complex, and Paul is their primary theological interpreter. (7) In short, Paul is a systematic theologian. While, of course, Paul wrote under divine inspiration and is, in this sense, qualitatively different from today's interpreters, both he and they are interpreters together of Christ's great redemptive complex on which the entire Bible centers. Paul is not only our teacher; he is also our partner in the interpretative task. (8) This entire paradigm is possible because the redemptive-historical method shifts attention from man's existential situation to the specific, concrete, historical work of Christ and His great redemptive complex. Vos, Ridderbos, and Gaffin argue that this great Christological redemptive complex, and it alone, is the matrix within which man's existential salvation occurs. The issue is not an individual ordo salutis. The issue is union with the resurrected Christ, and all that this implies. The redemptive-historical method is a powerful reaction to the highly existential form of Christianity that arose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and, indeed, survives to this day. Salvation is not mainly about my own personal dilemma and how to get out of it. Rather, salvation is about union with the resurrected Christ and the great work of redemption, which He accomplished in time and history. Not only so, the redemptive-historical method presents a healthy alternative to an excessive scholasticism in both theology and in the church. Scholasticism, while inevitable, is tempted to reduce the Faith to arbitrarily assigned theological categories, diverting attention from the kind of book the Bible really is: a record of revelation-history. In Gaffin's words, "[T]he history of redemption [is] the subject matter or focus of the entire biblical record . . . . [A]ny theological reflection basing itself on biblical interpretation must recognize and work from out of this redemptive-historical framework. The redemptive-historical perspective is an indispensable horizon for understanding Scripture in part or as a whole." (9) This approach creditably diverts interpreters from abstract theological categories and re-focuses their attention on the historical revelation of the Bible itself. Omitting the Post-Biblical History of Interpretation Despite these strengths, the redemptive-historical method manifests certain troubling weaknesses. First, this method exalts history, but only a particular epoch of history, namely, the period covered by the Biblical records. It gives little attention to history since the closing of the canon, particularly with respect to the history of interpretation. One need not agree that "church history is the history of the exposition of Scripture" (10) to recognize the vital role that development of doctrine historically should play (and actually does play, whether we want it to or not) within the church in our present interpretation of Scripture. A development of orthodoxy, as well as Christian exegesis of the Bible, is not a factor that we can simply jettison. We confront Scripture in a particular historical context, and part of that context is a development of doctrine and exegesis within the church. The redemptive-historical method, while strongly historical with reference to the Biblical era, is decidedly a-historical with reference to the subsequent era of Biblical interpretation. In this point, at least, it seems heavily influenced by Enlightenment presuppositions, which attempted to wipe away understanding as it has developed historically and commit that understanding to a few extant, bright minds. (11) Ironically, therefore, the redemptive-historical method is anything but historical as it pertains to interpretation within the full horizon of the "history of redemption," that is, the entire interadvental era. Truncating the Biblical Message Second, the redemptive-historical method forces the revelation of the Bible into an arbitrary, pre-assigned Procrustean bed. It sees the entire Bible in terms of redemption, but the Bible itself will not permit this reduction. The Bible is largely, though not exclusively, about redemption; and the teachings of the Bible pertaining to redemption depict it more broadly than the redemptive-historical method recognizes. (12) Not redemption as such, but the Triune God Himself is the interpretive theme of the Bible (13) , particularly the sovereignty of God in the affairs of creation, and preeminently man. Man's pre-fall task was to exercise dominion in the earth under his God's authority. When man fell into sin, God did not abandon His plan for man, but rather instituted redemption as the only means whereby man could be restored to this calling. The sovereign authority of the Triune God in the earth mediated by humans in submission to Him, and not redemption as such, is the Bible's guiding premise. Redemption is not the end, but the means to that end. The redemptive-historical method seems to honor Christ by interpreting everything in the Bible through a redemptive grid, but in reality this truncates the full-orbed message of the Bible. For example, Vos, in his treatment of the Mosaic economy, devotes nearly forty pages to the ritual or ceremonial law, and not a single page to the civil law. (14) This surely is an imbalanced view of the revelation as we find it in the Old Testament, but it is plausible given the redemptive-historical method's presupposition of redemption as the theme in terms of which the entire Bible must be interpreted. In this, too, the redemptive-historical method is ironic, in that, while it justifiably criticizes the abstractionism of much of Reformed systematic theology, it mires itself in one of the greatest abstractionisms of all: erecting a single master principle to which the entire Bible must be give tribute. It neglects the only possible guiding theme of the Bible's message: the Triune God Himself. Thus, despite its valuable contributions, the redemptive-historical method, in largely dismissing the history of interpretation and, more significantly, forcing all Biblical data into a rather arbitrary theological grid, creates as many interpretive problems as it solves. Further, it leaves the church with less than a full-orbed message by which to press the claims of Christ's kingdom in the earth. *************************************** 1. Richard B. Gaffin, Jr.,
"Introduction," Redemptive History and Biblical
Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos, ed. Gaffin
(Phillipsburg, NJ, 1980), xv-xvi, emphasis supplied. |