Inspiration

Robert Jenson admits in a 2004 essay that in most of his theological writing he tried to do without the claim that Scripture is inspired. Historically, inspiration has been used to justify the authority of Scripture, but Jenson doesn’t believe that use of inspiration is necessary. It’s simply obvious that Scripture is authoritative in the church, and “if the existence of the church is willed by God then so is the Bible’s authority within it” (393).

The article, though, is a “second thought” about inspiration, and presents a brief brief in favor of the doctrine as a ground for the church’s Christological reading of Scripture. The problem he addresses is that the Christological reading of the Old Testament seems to be an imposition on the text’s original meaning:

“When it is proposed that Old Testament texts have a christological or ecclesial sense, many scholars will now agree, but this sense will then promptly be contrasted with another sense which the texts are supposed to have ‘in themselves’ or ‘originally’ or ‘for their own time’ — unless of course we are in so post-modern a conversation that the distinction is held to be meaningless. These days, the official exegetes will not often simply brush off proposals of christological and ecclesial reading of the Old Testament. But they will still quickly say, ‘On the other hand, we must not override their original sense’ or something to that effect; and all of us will automatically resonate to the point. The trouble is: when reading Old Testament texts christologically or ecclesially is contrasted with another reading which is said to take them ‘in themselves,’ or in their ‘original’ sense, the churchly reading inevitably appears as an imposition on the texts, even if an allowable one. Christological or ecclesial readings will be tolerated for homiletic purposes, or for such faintly suspect enterprises as systematic theology, but are not quite the real thing” (395).

That instinct, he argues, is a phenomenological mistake: “an author’s intention or a community of first readers’ reading is not identical with the texts ‘themselves’ or an ‘original’ import. An author constantly interprets her own writing, before, during and after formulating text. We are not the only ones with a particular hermeneutic and with resultant interpretations of the texts an author produces; he has his own, and these are no more identical with those texts than are ours. Moreover, first readers are just that and no more: they are not pure receivers of meaning but first readers, which is to say, the first to have a chance to impose their hermeneutical prejudices.” The choices are not “christological v. original reading” but “christological v. author/first readers’s reading” (395). And neither of these is identical to the texts themselves. The question is, which best captures the texts “in themselves”?

Jenson concedes in a footnote that these phenomenological considerations leave Christian interpreters “with Derrida and company” (395, fn. 4). But the church doesn’t stay in the company of Derrida, and it doesn’t because of the Spirit’s inspiration of Scripture: “a function of the old doctrine of inspiration5 to trump the created author and first readers with a prior agent, the Spirit, and prior readers, the whole diachronic people of God, preserved as one people through time by that same Spirit. And then we may very well take the christological-ecclesial sense of Old Testament texts as ‘original’ as their entity ‘in themselves,’ if we have grounds to suppose that it responds to the intention and reception of this primary agent and these primary readers” (396). 

Without inspiration, the Old Testament isn’t legitimately used as the church’s Scripture, and then it is reduced to “religious ‘background’ for the New Testament” (396), “the real Christianity is the pusilanimous religiosity of ‘mainline’ denominationalism” or one of the “late-modern appropriations of Christian language by some ‘theory’” (397). With inspiration, the church is justified in its christocentric, figural reading and use of the Bible.

I don’t believe we need to pose an either-or on this point. Inspiration underwrites both the authority of Scripture and its unity as a narrative of the Christ. One might use Jenson’s own logic: If the church exists by God’s will, the Bible’s authority in the church does too; therefore, the Bible’s authority is by God’s will, and that is precisely what the traditional doctrine of inspiration asserted. Still, Jenson is write to highlight the somewhat neglected hermeneutical import of inspiration.

(Jenson, “Second Thoughts on Inspiration,” Pro Ecclesia 13:4 [2004] 393-8.)