Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis

This, in my estimation, is the most important book in the area of theology and/or biblical hermeneutics to have been published in years. In it, Carter demonstrates the useful vitality of a self-conscious Trinitarian metaphysic involved with interpreting Scripture (i.e., Christian Platonism) and provides the counter-narrative to the naive metaphysical bias (i.e., Epicurean naturalism; Hellenization theory) at root in hermeneutical approaches that prioritize human authorial intent over against the supernatural unity of the Bible as a literary collection that testifies to the person and work of Jesus from beginning to end. Opting for a "sacramental-historical" view of Scripture, this work serves as a paradigmatic answer to both liberal theology and conservative biblicism. Worthy of the highest recommendation.

Now that postmodernism has thoroughly destroyed the Enlightenment’s confidence that the human mind can attain to objective knowledge, the relatively few Christians who are aware of the problem are desperately searching for a solution. Some have simply doubled down on postmodernism’s failed project of letting your interpretive community decide what truth is for you. Others have turned back the clock, trying to revive Romanticism’s search for God in the human imagination. Some have gone back even further, including the author here, and look to Plato to save Christianity.The author proclaims that the cure to our postmodern woes is a return to premodern Platonism. While recognizing that much of secular philosophy is contrary to Christianity, including many Platonic principles, he nevertheless claims that Platonism is one peg of the three legged stool that props up Christianity, along with “Nicene dogma” and “spiritual exegesis.” (p. 111.) If you are a Christian, you had better be a Platonist too for to reject Christian Platonism, says the author, is “to set oneself in opposition to reason, the moral law, and natural science.” (p. 82.)Yes, the Platonists believed in a spiritual realm, and absolute good, and the reality of universals but so what? You can get all that from the first two chapters of Genesis without all the error of Platonism such as the divinity of the human soul, unmediated communion with the Divine, and polytheism. The Christian Platonist has to make too many excuses for Platonism, as the author does throughout this book, and its all unnecessary. Platonism offers nothing to Christianity that could not already be reasonably derived from Scripture alone.The author claims that Platonism provides Christianity with the key to knowing God with what he calls “sacramental ontology.” It is a bizarre twist on Transubstantiation. According the author, the “real presence” of Jesus exists in the written words of Scripture so that when one properly contemplates those words, they can directly “participate” in the life of the real Jesus. It all sounds more like Neoplatonism wherein the platonic form of Jesus, his “real presence”, mystically exists in the earthly realm, hidden within the words of Scripture, and with the proper mental abstraction techniques (“spiritual exegesis”), individual humans may directly partake in the eternal, perfect, platonic form of Jesus’s presence.Jesus himself put this nonsense to rest when he chided his religious adversaries: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me; and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life.” John 5: 39-40. The Scriptures describe Jesus and eternal life, but Jesus does not dwell within the words of Scripture, and neither his “real presence” nor eternal life is to be found there.The epistemology of Scripture is unique and distinct from any speculative metaphysics to be found in Platonism or any other man-made philosophy. The Scriptures are propositional statements that provide a rational understanding of spiritual realities. Experiential knowledge of those realities is communicated directly by the Holy Spirit. That is how the human mind can touch and comprehend objective reality. That is how we know God and his Son. No amount of contemplating or spiritual exegesis of the Bible will ever produce experiential knowledge of the spiritual realities it describes. The church used to know this. John Owen and Jonathan Edwards explained it as clearly as it could be explained. But that knowledge, for the most part, has been buried and forgotten, even by today’s custodians of the Reformed theology of Owen and Edwards, including this author.It is only by the supernatural illumination of the Holy Spirit that one partakes in Jesus’s own life, and it does not come by Platonism or any other speculative metaphysics. Said Edwards: "This light, and this only, has its fruit in universal holiness of life. No merely notional or speculative understanding of the doctrines of religion will ever bring to this.” Owen likewise wrote that the direct, intuitive illumination by the Holy Spirit has in it "a transforming power to change the whole soul into an obedient frame towards God" and "is the only means whereby we actually derive from Christ the benefits of our union with him." See Pneumatologia - Enhanced Version at 242, 403.Attempts to recast Christianity in Platonic categories, or any other secular philosophy, simply obfuscate the Gospel and impede access to eternal life, which is to know by the Holy Spirit the one true God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. John 17:3.

Great book. Not an easy read but the author steps the reader through the material carefully.

This is just another attempt to blend a commitment to Protestant confessionalism about inerrant, plenary-verbal inspiration of the Protestant canon with Boersma’s Christian platonic synthesis.Boersma’s works are exponentially more helpful, primarily because he doesn’t preface his works in the essentials of Protestant confessionalism.As far as I’m concerned, the only variant of Protestant confessionalism that comports with boersma’s synthesis is, ironically, Anglo-Catholicism, which is only, by historical-linguistic technicalities, “Protestant”. It’s tradition is actually reliant on Catholic schools of metaphysics, thereby distinguishing its view of Scripture differently than all other Protestant confessional hermeneutics.This book is not bad, per se. It’s a good attempt at producing a *new* book as though its reviving an old trend. I consider it to be a necessary subject to discuss among Protestants. It all seems so desperate, though, like it’s the new fad to cling upon in order to be “traditional” AND Protestant.

This book's publication is timely and welcome. A thought-provoking read, it is a valuable and challenging contribution to current discussion on reading and interpreting Scripture. However it is not without problems. One criticism would be that it doesn't give due weight to the disctinctively differenct hermeneutics employed by the Reformers which either challenged the earlier traditions, or moved the "Great Tradition" forward, according to your perspective. Thus it could be said it does not so much offer a cogently Protestant response to the modern historical-critical approach as it does revert to earlier pre-critical approaches or Catholic ones. For this reason, I would recommend reading Iain Provan's book The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture  The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture  in conjunction with this one. That said, whilst you may not agree with everything Dr Carter says, this book is likely to inspire you to delve into pre-Modern exegesis and commentary, and for that alone it is well worth the price. Take up and read! The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture