Joe Gordon’s Divine Scripture in Human Understanding makes an important contribution to a growing field of what Telford Work has called “Systematic Bibliology.”1 This genre is not to be confused with studies regarding the origins of the biblical writings, the manuscript evidence, and the process of canonization. Neither are its aims apologetic, attempting to defend a particular view of biblical inspiration or scriptural authority. Gordon’s work can be catalogued among works committed to the Theological Interpretation of Scripture (TIS), but its focus is not on interpretation per se, but rather the ontology of the Bible. The book is an ambitious project since the notion of “systematic theology” is presently contested, the textual evidence that comprises what is considered “the Bible” is technical and complex, and Judaism and Christianity’s conception of Scripture is vast and diverse.

What sets Gordon’s work apart from other systematic theologies of the Bible is the scope of his project. These works typically employ traditional dogmatic categories such as Trinitarian theology or soteriology and engage noted theologians from the patristic period to the modern era. This methodology is unsurprising given that TIS seeks to revive ecclesial resources for reading the Bible rather than the so-called scientific methods of historical criticism. Rarely do these bibliologies engage “contextual” theologies and technical discussions regarding the extant textual evidence for the Bible. Gordon’s work differs in that he believes engagement with historical-critical, theological, and contextual readings are necessary for a theology of the Bible. This decision is rooted in his adoption of the theological methodology of Bernard Lonergan as well as his understanding of the task of systematic theology. For Gordon, theology is not the pursuit of totalizing discourse but rather the understanding and articulation of the mysteries of the Christian faith for the theologian’s current context. Such an endeavor requires human authenticity on the part of theologians and their recognition of, and accounting for, their own subjectivity and that of their audiences. Gordon repeatedly employs the maxim, “concepts have dates,”2 not to insist on historical accuracy to attain objectivity, but rather to acknowledge human subjectivity in the entire theological process from the writing and formation of Scripture to its interpretation and application. He acknowledges that theology is always contextual and embodied and therefore historical research is necessary to understand ideas set forth in the past and taking human subjectivity into account is necessary to formulate a theology for the present.

Gordon recognizes that the question, “How should these various approaches—historical critical, contextual, and theological—be related to one another, and how should they inform contemporary engagement with and use of Scripture in Christian communities today?” (5) is of pressing importance to the church today. To this query he responds, “This is a challenging question, and the present work cannot answer it completely” (272, n21) and states he will address this question in a subsequent monograph. TIS scholars have typically engaged historical and theological issues, but have largely neglected contextual concerns, a point I have written on elsewhere.3 What is disconcerting is that so many TIS scholars acknowledge the importance of understanding the role of human contexts in the theological task, but then leave this work to others. If these questions are vital to theology, why set them aside for the present and what does this deferment reveal about the composition, values, and priorities of theologians? Typically, TIS scholars acknowledge the vital role of human context in the theological task by voicing the importance of “humility” or “diverse voices.” In a similar manner Gordon, drawing from work of Lonergan, speaks of the important role of human “subjectivity” in theology and repeatedly acknowledges the provisional nature of theological assertions but he, like other TIS scholars, has little to say on doing theology in multicultural contexts. 

When speaking of the importance of human context, Gordon most often refers to the “world behind the text,” the cultural context of the ancient writers and tradents of Scripture rather than the “world in front of the text,” the cultural contexts of modern readers. When moving from text to modern application, Gordon focuses his attention on the effect of Scripture on the human soul. He devotes an entire chapter to recover a robust doctrine of the soul following the teachings of Henri de Lubac and Lewis Ayers. If deification is the goal of God’s sanctifying purposes in history and Scripture is the divinely ordered means to this end, for Gordon a theological anthropology is necessary to properly understand the transformative role of Scripture. Gordon consistently applies his theological method by drawing upon both ancient and contemporary sources. He writes, “Our need today is for an articulation of the intelligibility of human nature that maintains the advances of understanding in historical philosophical and theological anthropologies and simultaneously address the pressing questions about the historical locatedness and cultural diversity of humanity that have arisen in recent years in an adequate way” (120–21). Drawing upon and developing the thought of Aristotle and Lonergan, Gordon concludes that what is universal for all humans is the intrinsic ability for self-transcendence. This ability is uniquely human and sets them apart from other animals. The Scriptures are both a product of human self-transcendence and an instrument to facilitate self-transcendence for subsequent generations. Following Lonergan, Gordon describes this experience of self-transcendence as affecting the four levels of human consciousness: the empirical, the intellectual, the rational, and the responsible. Each level possesses its own respective exigencies, and the role of Scripture is to reform each of these in their own terms. 

Gordon writes that “all engagement with the textual otherness of Scripture depends on the subjective constitution of the individuals or communities” (28, italics his) While he acknowledges the important roles cultural diversity and communities play in the reception of Scripture, Gordon gives no account of how Scripture transforms communities beyond the self-transcendence of individuals. This omission is noteworthy given that the church continues to struggle to give an account of why so many of its followers who claim its doctrines, participate in the life of church, and practice a vibrant devotional life, continue to be blind to social sins such as nationalism and racism. Skeptics both in and outside the church wonder whether the Scriptures possess the means for social transformation. If a theology of Scripture is written today to address the pressing needs of the church, it must engage how the Bible functions within human social contexts and not merely at the level of individuals.4 Such a focus aligns with the nature of the biblical materials themselves since they are primarily addressed to communities rather than individuals. 

Given the importance of human context in the theological endeavor, Gordon rightly acknowledges, “Any adequate understanding of the nature and purpose of Christian Scripture, though, must do justice to the actual evidence of Christian Scripture” (169, italics his). He highlights how the printing of single volume pandects of Scripture known as “the Bible” obscures the diversity of materials that fall under this rubric. Rather than ignore the textual diversity of the Bible, or marshal apologetic arguments for an authoritative version, Gordon acknowledges that there are five hundred thousand textual variants among the five thousand, six hundred-plus extant Greek manuscripts. He cites the evidence demonstrating that the textual history of the Jewish Scriptures is fluid, that Christians utilized both and Hebrew and Greek versions of the Jewish Scriptures even when they contradicted each other, and acknowledges terms such as “canonical,” “apocryphal,” or “pseudepigraphal,” are all anachronistic and the judgments of later communities. Gordon cites the evidence demonstrating that the Jewish Scriptures were of secondary importance to the oral and written testimony concerning the events of Jesus Christ in the early church. This history supports TIS’s emphasis on the telos of biblical interpretation to be the res of the gospel of Jesus Christ yet somewhat relativizes the necessity for close readings of biblical texts. 

Gordon acknowledges the theological questions that arise given the diversity of the manuscript evidence and the church’s reception of Scripture. Neither the biblical materials nor Christian creeds are sufficient to address of the textual diversity of the Bible, and therefore Gordon, like others, defaults to the doctrine of providence to form a theology of Scripture. He believes that if Scripture is a divinely ordered means in the economy of salvation, then what has been written, translated, and preserved is sufficient for such ends. If Gordon’s observations and assertions are correct, Christian readers of Scripture, particularly biblical scholars, may need to reconsider the nature of their work. According to Gordon, so much variation exists within the wide range of texts accepted by the church, the memory of the events of Christ were considered far more important than the Jewish Scriptures, and NT writings were initially considered mere memoranda. Certainly, quests for authoritative autographs and canons ought to be abandoned, but one wonders whether the focus on textual detail by biblical scholars is warranted. Biblical scholars obsess over word choices, grammar, literary genre and structure, manuscript variations, intertextuality, the inclusion of, and ordering of literary materials, and so forth. In this regard, biblical scholars engaged in TIS are no different and assume theological significance resides in textual details. They may eschew the more speculative aspects of historical criticism but nonetheless still write technical theological commentaries. One need only look to the works of Brevard Childs, arguably the founder of TIS in its current iteration, as an example. Yet if one adopts Gordon’s narration of the role of the Scriptures in the early church, such close attention to textual detail for theological purposes appears unwarranted. 

As a biblical scholar myself, I recognize that modern biblical scholarship often seeks a precision to, and quantification of, biblical data that the ancient manuscripts simply do not possess. An examination of redactional theories demonstrates how so much of the work of academic biblical scholarship is speculative and over-analyzed. But one still wonders how much theological significance ought to be attached to textual details, particularly if one can find theological meaning in allegorical interpretations. Should modern theological commentary writing, which continues to be quite a contested genre, altogether abandon traditional forms of exegesis, and should Scripture take a secondary role to the proclamation of the events of Christ’s life? Highly liturgical traditions have chosen the latter. Perhaps the extensive effort of TIS scholars to write exegetical and theological commentaries on the entire Bible is misplaced and unnecessary. TIS scholars have criticized theological commentaries such as those in the Brazos (Brazos) or Belief (Westminster John Knox) series for failing to engage in substantive exegesis, but perhaps their critique is unwarranted.

While described as a systematic theology, Gordon’s work is infused with biblical scholarship such that it truly straddles the disciplines of theology and biblical study and therefore fulfills the aspirations of TIS. Christian biblical scholars and theologians will be challenged by this work, and both will come away having to think more critically about their understanding of nature and role of Scripture. 

“An adequate contemporary understanding of the nature and purpose of Scripture must affirm its abiding authority even through the variegated cultural historicity of its contents” (151). In the context of systematic theology today, Joseph K. Gordon offers us a most needed book. It addresses the most vexing question for many faithful: how to cope with the sense of relativity acquired over the past centuries through the results of historical critical examination, and over the last decades through the multiplication of methods and approaches, without yielding to relativism? As “one attempt to grapple with the extant historical data of Christian Scripture, the histories of its use and interpretation, and traditional doctrinal judgments about Scripture itself” (264), the book does meet the challenge it sets itself.

Gordon’s book fills a vexing lacuna in many courses intended to introduce Scripture to students in divinity. One can only share Gordon’s dissatisfaction with “how little scholarly achievements concerning the actual material history of Scripture have figured in theological accounts of the nature and purpose of Scripture” (27), and one can only share his aims in this book.

For all the brilliant scholarship and truly edifying sense of theological responsibility which it displays, though, Gordon’s book could be supplemented. Readers who know of my own research will not be surprised that I find Gordon’s rendering of the linguistic, literary, and poetic dimension of Scripture and revelation not entirely satisfying. “Exegesis without presupposition is impossible,” and so too is systematics, (38) and despite Gordon’s attempt to reach the most balanced view between Tradition and contemporary challenges, he remains “modern” in his relative distrust towards the revelatory capacities of language.

Gordon rightly intends to account for history without being positivist or historicist. Yet, citing Lonergan, he tends to reduce scriptural writing to representing (historical) exteriority. When he writes that “a Christian approach to Scripture will necessarily take its point of departure from a Christian theology of history. A fully responsible Christian exegesis of Scripture will be impossible without a critically articulated Christian understanding of what has happened in the history that is” (40), we would add that not only a Christian theology of history is needed but also of literature/poetics. Taking into account the poetic nature of revelation is exactly what would prevent positivism.

When Gordon rightly insists that “Christian Scripture is the primary linguistic instrument that the Triune God has given to the world through which God continues to facilitate such transformation in communities and interpreters” (266, italics mine), we would like to add: linguistic, poetic, and literary, and we would wish to see that properly verbal dimension of revelation treated. But—maybe in excessive reaction against the invasion of the so-called “hermeneutic turn” of theology— Gordon downplays the importance of verbal inventio in the birth of Christianity. However, do not de Lubac (237, n107) and more recent authors such as Bokedal, Hurtado, or Wicker (344, n112), stating the fact that the earliest Christian “found Christ everywhere in the ancient scriptures” (238), invite us to think that it was both “ontological” and “hermeneutical?” Not only did “[t]he early Christians [treat] the ancient Jewish Scriptures as authoritative support for their proclamation of the definitive coming of Christ” (238), but the recognition of this living Word in Jesus was and is dependent on texts (cf. the proto-rabbinical kata tês graphès in the earliest NT credal forms). Unfortunately, Gordon embraces a pseudo dialectic between words and things, history and language, or sacredness and utility, citing Barton who strongly contrasts “irreversible event in the external world” and “exegesis of Scripture,” (229) and who claims that the apostolic witnesses “functioned not as holy texts but records of living memory” (238). But in the history of Western culture, is this dialectic not exactly what the incarnation overcame? Does not the gospel (hence the Gospels) represent the unique case of “myth” which “really happened”?1 From this point of view, Christian realism cannot be based on a crude dialectic between reality and language, and we must be careful not to retroject our modern “oblivion of language” onto ancient times. The new understanding of Scripture reconfigured by faith in Christ did not come without using words, and that wording was mostly scriptural.

This (anti-/neo-)positivism seems to be the corollary to a defect in the book’s assessment of the main challenge to Christian faith in our own time. Gordon repeats all throughout the book the motto of understanding and communicating “the intelligibility of Christian faith in their own time” (21), of going beyond historical rules and creed “to address unique questions and concerns that have arisen in recent times” (81) and “to recognize the historical diversity of concrete instantiations of Scripture“ (251), etc. And this could (or should) have led to confronting more directly what, in my opinion, is the main challenge to any belief today: both the oblivion of language and its dialectic consequence, linguistic deconstruction. Though it has yet to be accounted for by dogmatic and systematic theologians, the demotion of language which results from the oblivion into which Greek thought has plunged it, and which prevails in the modern cognitivist or logical approaches to language, is the key challenge to continuing to preach, to celebrate, to think (and systematize about) the incarnation of the Logos.2 By unfolding a universe where language dominates reality, speech action, and verbum esse—from the beginning of Genesis, where God creates the world through/in and by the Word, to the end of Revelation, where God rips out heaven, earth and sea as one tears the page of a book, and passing through its most incandescent point: the historical incarnation of the Word, his diffraction in human words and “inscripturation” in holy writ—the Scriptures do resist our cultural prejudice consisting in reducing words to be transparent signs of reality, our privileging of language as representation over language as power.

Yet Gordon systematically downplays the issue of language. For example, Gordon, citing Charles Hefling, is adamant: “Scripture is not a speaking and acting agent” (italicized, 28, reiterated on 39: “the written text as written, and even as recited from memory, does not ‘speak’”). Though many scriptural passages (duly listed on 29) affirm the contrary, Gordon insists, “our awareness of the drastic historical differences between our own situation and the situations out of which the texts of Scripture emerged and our awareness of the subjectivity involved in all appeals to authority, make it necessary for contemporary Christians to be cautious in our use of language concerning the ‘speaking’ of Christian Scripture” (30).

I wonder if this caution, quite legitimate against any literalism, does not prevent Gordon from recognizing the sacramental/christic dimension of the verbality of Scripture and does not lead him to stay at the “programmatic” level of theological declarations on the work of the Trinity. As he himself nicely asserts on page 80, “The artifacts of Scripture emerge from and are engaged within the time and space of the economic work of the Triune God.” But words, language, writing are essential parts of these “artifacts.” Instead of immediately replacing the striking image of speaking texts or books with an abstract theological reduction (one must “identify the ‘speaker’ of Scriptures as God” (80), or “align[ing]” the diversity of the ways in which God spoke in Scriptures with “the authority of Jesus Christ” (30)), I wonder if one might not linger on the linguistic, verbal dimension inherent in the personification of Scripture. After listing some instances of diverse and competing theologies within the Bible, Gordon states that “we must admit the insufficiency of Scripture alone for comprehensively establishing the content of Christian faith. Scripture itself does not reign in its constitutive plurality and particularity. As I emphasized earlier, it is not an agent capable of doing such work” (34). Yet, is there not a “christographic” movement embedded in Scripture, which eventually was structured artistically and intentionally in confessions of faith already included in Scripture (37)? Could that properly theo-linguistic movement be an instantiation of the “different plane” of existence that Father Benoit, of the Ecole Biblique, was evoking as early as 1977 in the following bold statement? New Testament authors, he wrote, when alluding to Christ’s presence in Scripture before the incarnation “always give the impression that the concrete and historical person of Jesus whom they had met on earth did not wait until that moment to exist in reality, even on a different plane from the earthly one […] The concrete and historical person of Jesus Christ […] was present in the Old Testament acting in the formation of the chosen people and laying the ground work for his coming among us. And it is not simply the second person of the Trinity in his eternal and transcendent existence who gets involved in our history: it is Jesus Christ himself who is already at work.”3

Gordon’s solution to the book’s main question holds in these neat lines: “As determined […], whether finally or provisionally, the words of Scripture, in all of the precise and imprecise particular configurations in which they are extant, always point beyond themselves. Christian Scripture is an instrument of human and divine meaning making in history. […] The diverse concrete historical instantiations of the Old Testament and the New Testament have served as useful, divinely ordered instruments that have mediated the meaning and actuality of the economic work of the Triune God throughout Christian history” (172–73). We would simply add that they point beyond themselves, but from within themselves, and not necessarily to something “out there,” either in historical efficiency or in representative human consciousnesses. Indeed, the relationship between signa and res in Scripture, starting by its words-things instantiation, may be encapsulated in one key word: instrumentality or sacramentality. Now, accounting for instrumental functioning implies exploring the very nature of the instrument, which in this instance is: language, literature, poetics.

By the very end of his book (267–68), Gordon describes the relative necessity of Scripture for Christians, even though Augustine (Doctr. Christ 1.39.43) himself daringly recognized its dispensability for believers confirmed in their faith. But it is the sacramentality of Scripture that Augustine here describes! Christians, Gordon says, “can return to Scripture again and again to grow in their faith, hope, and especially love. Scripture is an eminently useful instrument for such transformative work in human persons. As symbols give rise to thought, so the language of Scripture gives rise to reflection in readers and hearers” (267). Here, while Gordon points to the performativity of Scripture, does he not tend to reduce its function to a hermeneutic/doctrinal task (i.e., passing from symbols to concepts)?

We would rather propose to try and describe the performativity of Scripture linguistically and poetically. Gordon reminds us several times that “Christian thought is not static; it is not dependent on, or the explication of, a univocal ‘already back then real’ deposit of faith entrusted to the saints (Jude 3)” (51). Recognizing the poetic dimension of revelation would help in retrieving a sense of the dynamics presented here. Somehow this is what Gordon does with his astute remarks on the referential nature of the rule, paradoxically implied in the genitive kanôn tês pisteôs, which is epexegetical: the faith itself is the rule and norm for Christian life, even though its form is irreducibly narrative and linguistic despite its claim to spatial-temporal catholicity (51). Christians believe that it is the case.

More precisely, theology must focus on the writenness of Christian Scripture and—beyond the ironic Socratic disdain for writing, often too lightly adopted—must recover it as an indispensable mediation of revelation. Yet in a modern fashion, referring to Walter Ong, Gordon links writing’s function maybe too exclusively to enhancing consciousness: “[to] say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word. Such transformations can be uplifting. Writing heightens consciousness. Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does” (208). Before relating “writing” or “writtenness” globally to interiority and consciousness, I wonder if systematic theology should not undertake to inventory the main devices of divine linguistics and poetics throughout Scriptures that elicit a Christological dynamics not only at the allegorical level, but within the very litera of the Scriptures: does not the famous passage of Origen cited on page 60 mean that the biblical text demands, more precisely than a “spiritual” reception, a Christic-poetic manner of reading?

The medieval hermit Stephen of Muret wrote this about Scripture: “If you are well-intentioned, your first response to God’s word will be to assess yourself according to its measure. Listen with a bad will and you are bound to twist the words around, to exonerate yourself while blaming someone else.” This is more than pietistic advice. There is an entire Scriptural metaphysic wrapped up here, centred on the nature of God’s “now.” Since I am passionately committed to Stephen’s counsel, I am bound to wonder if Joseph Gordon’s rich volume sustains it. It might; I’m just not sure.

Gordon’s marvelous volume begins with a presupposition that is a “matter of faith,” as he puts it: “Christian Scripture results from the divine activity of the Triune God in history.” Then, pressed by the confusions and debates regarding Scripture in our day, he analyzes how this presupposition might work itself out within these unavoidable pressures. After all:

[Scripture] is also the product of human subjective activity. It is the product of specific human persons and communities acting at all levels of consciousness but primarily at the levels of experience and decision. Its original human authors, moved by the Holy Spirit, acted to communicate their experiences, understandings, and judgments about the work of God in their midst through writing. Subsequent communities and individuals have acted at the levels of experience, understanding, judgment, and decision in preserving, redacting, copying, translating, reading aloud, reading in silence, memorizing, interpreting, describing, canonizing, and explaining the material texts of Scripture. Divine providence has operated in all of these activities (165).

Much of Gordon’s book constitutes a detailed examination of the way that God works through the historical particularities of human scriptural composition and reception, so as to further a divinely “transformative pedagogy.” The result is a picture of Scripture as a divine “instrument” for this pedagogy over time and place, bearing witness to and “mediating” the divine history of salvation that is still ongoing (260). Countering both the simplistic (“unnuanced”) deployment of the Bible by the unthinking and unself-aware Christian, as well as a modern despair at ever reasonably asserting the divinely “truthful, unified, and authoritative” character of Scripture, Gordon’s volume represents a massive apologetic for Scripture within a culture of narrowmindedness and doubt.

On a practical and pastoral level, Gordon is convincing. But I worry that his apparatus is unnecessarily complicated. Even more so, I worry that the complications (the “nuances”) risk obscuring the quite concrete realities of Scriptural power and truth, its divine “now,” that Gordon wants to find a way to maintain in the face of modernity’s historical relativism. Is intellectual plausibility enough? While Gordon’s final reliance on a doctrine of divine providence does seem to “save the phenomena” (e.g. historical contingency), it may do so by mitigating the phenomena’s own brute challenge, experientially and morally; and to that degree he risks brushing aside the morally grating elements of Scripture that in fact cohere with much brute experience. Is Gordon’s task simply Sisyphean? Perhaps. In what follows, I will address two of his key concepts, “history” and “providence,” whose burden is hard to carry.

I confess that I no longer really know what the category “history” amounts to. Of course, I use the word all the time; and I reason according to processes that rely on something called “history” to make sense. Much of this is habitual, practically useful in ordering my relations and active navigation through the world, moment by moment. But more and more I sense the fundamental incoherence and lack of usefulness of some integral category called “history.”

Let us call “history” the chronologically-ordered set of causal relationships that determine the “way things are.” But how the world I experience “came to be,” what my past or my parents’ past, or even my church’s past amounts to, or how the artifact of this or that translated Bible in its phenomenal shape has emerged—how any of these processes, in their identification and analysis can make sense of either present or future—all this seems murky at best; and once articulated, misleading at worst. Whatever “history” is—in terms, say, of a temporal metaphysic—it seems less and less like a helpful way to explain matters. Observationally, plus ça change . . . things just are, and it is the “is-ness” of matters, not their dynamic emergence, that cries out for understanding. Perhaps, then, Scripture “just is.” Perhaps, in a substantive way, Scripture does “fall from heaven ready-made” (a view Gordon rejects, 29). Or better, perhaps it is we who fall, pushed by Scripture.

Much of Gordon’s wonderfully synoptic volume (and it is wonderful in its breadth, detail, clarity, and gentle spirit) is aimed at dealing with the elements that make up the challenge of fitting Scripture with something called “history.” He wants to get at Scripture’s “dynamic emergence” on the scene of our experience, trying to pick apart the divine significance and power of this emergence. As I noted, he describes this as an apologetical demand, due to the inescapable claims of modern “historical consciousness” as it now engages the Bible. (“Historical consciousness” presumes something called “history”; but it also presumes that there are other consciousnesses that have gripped human understanding that are not somehow “historical.” This is a bit of a paradox. The very notion of “historical consciousness” as a modern psycho-social phenomenon, informing this or that person, people or circumstance, cries out for analysis. Again, I’m not sure that it stands up as a stable explanatory category.)

The complexities of the purported dynamic of emergence, however, are such that Gordon’s response is to sublate them into the singular and beneficent power of God: “providence.” Scripture is fundamentally historical in Gordon’s view: it has “come to be” through a host of temporal moments, agents, and contexts whose “contingent” character are human and cultural limitations. While these might seem to subvert a confidence in the text’s divine meaning for “us” in this or that time and place, Scripture’s historicity turns out to be the material “instrument” of God’s purposeful and sovereign goals. It is possible to define these goals theologically in a traditional Christologically-ordered “salvation” of humankind and world. Specifically, the movement from a plethora of historical particularities linked through complex chains of causality and influence, which go into the scriptural artifact to form such a coherent theological definition, is what divine providence assures.

What exactly is “providence” in this case? Gordon sticks to certain common-sense categories to frame the concept. There is, first, the category of temporality as a created realm (container, process, ontic order) that defines creaturely existence. There is, second, divine being that works with and within this realm, work that is theologically referred to in terms of divine “missions” and “economies.” Hence, in Gordon’s picture of the Bible, providence refers to the way that temporal or historical aspects of Scripture’s being (in its verbal and written character, a created being) are divinely ordered through the divine work of the Trinitarian persons, who thereby use and move history to its end.

All this makes sense, and also represents the general trend of (mostly orthodox) thinking about Scripture’s authoritative weight, as it has taken shape within the “historical consciousness” that has evolved over the past few centuries. Even if not engaged with the concrete forthrightness of Gordon, providence is the presupposition of most historically-sensitive attempts at maintaining Scriptural authority in our day. Within my own formative milieu, one could see the “canonical” approach of e.g. Childs, as generally reliant on this view of providence’s (often pneumatic) orchestration of historical (and thus humanly authorial and contextual) elements. Gordon’s rich discussion of the Rule of Faith as itself a formative providential template for identifying the purposeful aim of the divine orchestration of both scriptural text and meaning is itself something that the “Yale School” of my own background also embraced. I commend it, as far as it goes.

That said, I have become more sceptical about the compelling value, not of a theory of providence in general with respect to Scripture (and anything else!), but of the elements that define this application of providential purpose, ones that in this case remain themselves too general. If the Holy Spirit is ordering the historical elements that comprise both the Bible’s formation and its meaningful and transformative reception, the particularities of, e.g. the Book of Numbers, fall within this divine orbit centrally and specifically, not generally. The mess of history may get us to the broad claims of the Rule of Faith, and Scripture, in its messiness, may work coherently with both the broad claims and the historical process of their articulation; but alas, the broad claims themselves are not sufficient to order the messiness of human experience itself nor to maintain the pointed particularities of Scripture’s own words. The Rule of Faith is a rule; it is not the world; it is not Scripture itself; it is certainly not God. Numbers 14:33 (to take an almost random example), however, describes the world, is specified by Scripture, and tells us about God; even in God’s own words: “your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your whoredoms, until your carcases be wasted in the wilderness.”

If divine providence, as a category, is to be compelling, it must at least be able to account for every aspect of contingency and of scriptural reference, such that “this” and “that” is of God and for God’s purposes. Gordon is alert to this challenge (as his remarks on 6-7 indicate): the particularities of biblical reference, he says, with their “atrocities” and moral repugnancies, are too hard to attribute very clearly to God. Yet this is a kind of generosity that risks muddling the very commitment to history that Gordon wants to grapple with. Attributing the difficulty to providence is not a mistake; but to do so, one must admit that providence itself is as dark as the historical phenomena the doctrine is meant to explain. The providential God must be just this God of Israel’s desert “carcases.”

Maybe historicity is a red herring in all this. Gordon is adamant up front that Scripture itself is “not an agent, that speaks, commands, admonishes, or rebukes” (P. 29). The world, and the people within it, are historical entities, and that includes the words spoken, heard, written, and reflected upon. We must not confuse historical agents and their artifacts; nor ought we to confuse historical agents with God. So Gordon argues. But is this right? Is not the whole thing—the words of the Bible, their coming-to-be (of which we know little), their hearing, their use, the people who receive and respond—is it not all an expression of “what is” and its explication at once? Numbers lays out the world, displays the world’s God, and, in a telling that reaches us with an utter mystery, makes the world just so. If the Word of God speaks and explicates God (Jn. 1:18), there must be some sense in which “self-testimony” is lodged within Scripture, in this case, such that God the Word and his words, from which derive all things, stand prior, ontologically, to the words that human beings utter, however faithfully. Furthermore, the “set of the world,” if not directly interpreted by, at least displays the meaning of, the text. It is all one big bundle of creation, into which we have fallen. That there is a definable process, patent to our understanding, called “history” that describes this fall into time (in Cioran’s wonderful phrase) is hardly obvious.

Gordon rightly works with the tools of Lonergan to help parse the complicated interplay of human historicity and divine reality: Lonergan was among the most sophisticated and fair-minded students of historicity’s heuristic demands. I just don’t think the attempt is successful: time, things, human “subjectivity” and intentionality are surds, if not intrinsically then at least to our own feeble understandings. I am simply not sure what any “historically” sensitive reading of the Bible—let alone the putatively rigorous disciplines of historical criticism—comes up with that is not basically arbitrary, or at least bound by formal custom but not general rationality. The critical notion that we can disentangle specific words in the biblical text from the whole set of the world—such that this or that word or paragraph or book “occurs”/appears in such and such a year, within just this knot of circumstances and their significant pressures, but distinct from and after the vast series of years that precede the text, and after which follow thousands of new years and their contents, perhaps reshaping the text in the process—seems theoretically plausible (for God), but practically impossible (for us). And, if one takes seriously the divine origin (somehow) of these words and texts, such an attempt at disentanglement is a recipe for misunderstanding. Leibniz may have rightly stated the truth of such a divinely providential calculus; but Voltaire also rightly mocked its human application.

To flip the direction of influence: what is that “set” of the world in which the scriptural texts “appear,” in a way that marks them as having a bearing on that set somehow? Is it the evolutionary pattern of the past four billion years (as we measure them)? Just the last two thousand years (for the New Testament) or three to four thousand for the Old Testament? Or perhaps only just the history of this church or that? Or this century? Or today, here in my small life? From the traditional Christian perspective of Gordon (and of me too), we would want to say “all of it, and in each way this is expressed,” for whatever “is” is that set, however we are able to apprehend or express it, and Scripture, in God’s purpose, “mediates” this whole set of historical realities. The implications of this claim, though, outstrip our historical imaginations as applied to the historical character of Scripture. Divine providence, with respect to the truth-bearing authority of Scripture, must be able to embrace this “all,” with its lost peoples of Central Asia, forgotten slaves in the millions, advancing and retreating ice-caps, dinosaurs, planets, dusts, and dark spaces. The Book of Numbers too, with its redemptive carcases. The fact that we cannot grasp this set even remotely, let alone locate the particularities of the scriptural artifacts—words, paper, books, imagined authors, and intentions—within this set in any way that pretended accuracy, both leaves divine providence intact (if we believe in a creator God) and the biblical text we hear undisturbed in its brute encounter with our varied and variously formed predilections.

I can’t get at the past the way Gordon wants me to. I know virtually nothing about it; and to the degree that I know so little, I really know nothing about “the past” as a category. It is foolishness for me to pretend otherwise. Hence, I realize that I must demur from Gordon’s absolute presupposition: “Christian Scripture results from the divine activity of the Triune God in history.” I do not deny the proposition. But I wonder if Scripture may itself “result” from the activity of God quite apart from history, “prior” to history metaphysically; beyond history; within the recesses of the divine being from which “history”—our opaque but infinitely valuable lives—emerges. History is the result of Scripture, not the other way around. It measures me, ever now, from start to finish.