What is TIS (Theological Interpretation of Scripture)?
While I am not crazy about all the permutations of this in the TIS movement (Theological Interpretation of Scripture), I do think both Vanhoozer and Osborne's insights serve as guiding principles. We need more than systematic theology, we need to be open to a distinctly theological-canonical hermeneutic.
What is Theological Interpretation?
1. Theological Hermeneutics is the purview of all theological disciplines who mutually share the responsibility to interpret and apply the Church’s text. That is to say bluntly, these texts do not belong to historical-critical, traditio-critical, source or form critical, redaction critical scholarship.[1] These texts belong to the people of God and it is the “church of the living God,” which is “the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15), not the academy. This of course does not deny sola scriptura, but would instead disavow sola criticus—the view that the biblical critic is the final or sole arbitrator of the texts’ meaning.
2. Theological Hermeneutics attempts to follow the Bible’s own “governing interest”.[2] Since God exists ontologically prior to sacred communities, sacral praxis, and sacred texts, then a truly responsible exegesis will seek to recover and discover the Bible’s own preoccupying interests. To divorce biblical studies from a distinctly theological approach is to deny the biblical authors their intended subject (God), while concurrently denying the reader the authors’ intended predicate (the study of God). Vanhoozer states, “If exegesis without presuppositions is impossible, and if some of these presuppositions concern the nature and activity of God, then it would appear to go without saying that biblical interpretation is always/already theological”.[3] In the “mere exegesis” approach of authorial meaning, we run the risk of dissecting the text without actually hearing its message to us. Instead, we should seek a kind of “theological criticism” which turns the critical method back inward toward the reader, allowing the author’s own theological aims to be fully appreciated and rightly faced.
3. Theological Hermeneutics calls into question the autonomy of the natural world, human history, and critical sciences.[4] That is to say, since the text presupposes God’s sovereign place over creation, history, and science—then the interpreter is warranted to proceed as if God actually has sovereign priority in those pursuits. Vanhoozer states, “God is not simply a function of a certain community’s interpretive interest; instead, God is prior to both the community and the biblical texts themselves” (Vanhoozer 22). This of course is a self-conscious presupposition, but it is in line with the Bible’s own assumptions—namely that God exists and that his non-existence is absurd. This is not to abandon the tools of critical interaction, nor to abandon the instruments available to history and science, but rather to privilege the God who makes them possible. And on that note…
4. Theological Interpretation recalibrates, or perhaps reprioritizes our use of critical tools and scientific methods. Their function being “ministerial not magisterial” (Vanhoozer 22). That is, these helpful disciplines do not stand sovereignly over the text in judgment of it, but rather aid in establishing the text and the ministry of God’s Word through it. Theological Interpretation is not another method of historical criticism aimed at establishing the world “behind the text”, or at establishing mere literary relationships “within the text”, or creatively exploring the world “in front of the text.” The true “meaning system” of the text is both its ethnic milieu, but that cultural setting is inherently theological.
5. And lastly, Theological Interpretation is not in any way allergic to the task of exegesis. But the task of exegesis is a first leg in the interpretive journey, not an end in of itself. A properly exegetical approach which takes into account setting(s), structure, syntax, semantics, summation, and significance,[5] nevertheless privileges the text’s theological message. This theological message is Christological and cruciform as the Spirit enables our cognitive faculties to perceive the “folly” of God’s wisdom (1 Cor. 2). That is to say, all Scripture unfolds into Christ and his cross. Christ is the consummating and integrating focus of Scripture. God’s message of salvation is a mystery understood only through the cypher key of the cross—God’s instrument of redemption. Thus, all Scripture is not only God-breathed, but it is Christ-centered as it unfolds into Him.
[1] Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Downers Grove, MI: IVP Academic, 405. Obsorne cites Vanhoozer’s priorities of “The proper response to a postmodern society is to experience God in a new way by indwelling the biblical texts and experiencing them as divinely communicative speech acts.”
[2] Kevin Vanhoozer, Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, Kevin J. Vanhoozer gen. ed. (Grand Rapids: MI, Baker Academic, 2005), 22.
[3] Vanhoozer, Dictionary, 21.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Bruce Corley, Steve Lemke, Grant Lovejoy, Biblical Hermeneutics: A Comprehensive Introduction to Interpreting Scripture (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2002), 9.