The Inspiration of Scripture

Has God Said? Scripture, The Word of God, and the
Crisis of Theological Authority
(The Evangelical Theological Society Monograph Series)
By John Douglas Morrison
Pickwick Publications, 2006
(306 pages, $30.00, paperback)

reviewed by S.N.D.

John Morrison is Professor of Theology and Philosophy and Liberty University and Liberty Theological Seminary. Has God Said? originates from several papers he has presented at meetings of the Evangelical Theological Society. It is the fruit of his long-term concern about a trend that has been growing in Christian theology over the last three centuries: "the dualistic separation of 'the Word of God' from the language/text of Holy Scripture." His concern has been deepened by recent works of fellow evangelicals "who, for seemingly inadequate reasons, finally, and often deceptively rejected the classical Scripture principle, the identity thesis that Holy Scripture is, under Christ the Word, the written and authoritatvie Word of God." (xi)

Morrison cites a number of causes for this separation of God's Word from God's words. In the Introduction, he asserts the primary cause, which he elaborates in various ways in subsequent chapters:

. . .Thomas Torrance is surely correct when he points especially to the pervasively injurious effects of the modern re-introduction of cosmological and epistemological dualisms into Western culture as a whole, and notably into the physical sciences, philosophy and, thereby, into Christian theology. (1)

But Morrison cites other causes. In chapter 4 he explores the unbalanced, uncritical acceptance of the methods and conclusions of modern biblical criticism and various author-centered, text-centered, and reader-centered literary-critical approaches to Scripture. In his final chapter he briefly cites even

. . .a squeamish, fastidious, often amorphous but all too pervasive Platonism, which feels that "the divine" will be sullied, contaminated by any empirical participation in history, by any participation in, with and as the human — and by the written forms of communication, the speech acts, produced by them.

In chapter 2 Morrison traces the "modern disjunction of Holy Scripture from the Word of God" from philsophical "headwaters" in the works of the well-known philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), of some of the English Deists, primarily John Locke (1632-1704), and of two lesser-known theologians: Johann Semler (1725-1791) and Johann Gabler (1753-1826).

Most of chapter 3 expands on this key argument:

One's understanding of God, the God-world relation, and so God's providence, is highly influential upon how one will then understand and/or limit what can and should be reckoned as revelation . . . One's view of Scripture is connected to and affected by one's view of God, i.e., there can be no affirmation of Scripture as written Word of God without a corresponding understanding of God's lordly and active providence in the world. (37-38)

To support this thesis Morrison traces the effects of "the cosmological dualism of Newton and the epistemological dualisms of Descarte and Kant" in the views of Holy Scripture espoused by a number of influential theologians (Schleiermacher, Bultmann, Tillich, et. al.) from the Enlightenment through the 20th century.

Chapter 3 ends, however, with a highy favorable overview of the the work of evangelical theologian Kevin Vanhoozer, whose work on Scripture Morrison considers "far and away the best in the field." (xii) Vanhoozer has developed an approach to Scriptural inspiration that applies the speech act theories of philosophers J. L. Austin and John Searle. Morrison summarizes Austin's theory thus:

For Austin language is like a toolbox and his main point is that our saying is also a doing. . .Further, our verbal "doing" has within itself three distinct kinds of linguistic acts. . .(1) the locutionary act: uttering/expressing words; (2) the illocutionary act: what we do in saying something (e.g., commanding); (3) the perlocutionary act: what we effect by our saying something (e.g., persuading). (65)

He finds that both Vanhoozer and Nicholas Wolterstorff develop "remarkable parallels" between speech act theory and the traditional Christian view of God's self-revelation in the words of Holy Scripture. Indeed Vanhoozer develops a fascinating Trinitarian view of divine communication in which the Father's activity corresponds to locution, the Son's to illocution, and the Holy Spirit's to perlocution. Thus

Vanhoozer gives clarity and depth to God's divine verbal communication as text by setting it, as Scripture itself does, in and of the economy of the triune Godhead. (69)

I have briefly descibed the topics of chapter 4 above. In chapter 5 Morrison considers the "Developments Regarding the Nature of Holy Scripture in Modern Roman Catholic Thought." He notes a lot of diversity and "ebbing and flowing" in Cathoic thought about Scripture since the Council of Trent. He reviews in some detail the approach to Scripture of four "progressive" 20th century Catholic theologians and finds, in three of them at least, that "[e]arlier dogmatic statements of the Church, which affirmed Holy Scripture to be directly the inspired Word of God in a strong sense, are typically re-interpreted" in ambiguous ways.

Chapter 6 is entitled "Barth, Barthians, and Evangelicals: Reassessing the Question of the Relation of Holy Scripture to the Word of God." Here, drawing from "the breakthrough work on Barth's thought by Bruce McCormack, an evangelical who is Weyerhauser Professor of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary," Morrison presents an arugment that I would think will raise many evangelical eyebrows: Barth's ontology of Holy Scripture is fundamentally sound (!) when it is thoroughly understood and grounded "within his larger doctrine of revelation," but most of his Barthian successors misinterpreted him. This mere bookworm is no theologian, but I found Morrison's case in this chapter very interesting, theologically detailed, and illuminating. Of course, more expert readers will have to judge to what extent he is correct.

In chapter 7 Morrison reviews six recent formulations of the Scripture-Word of God relationship by evangelical theologians. He finds three wanting and three worthy (those of Packer, Helm, and Wolterstorff).

Finally, in chapter 8, drawing on the ideas of Einstein (yes, Einstein!), Torrance, and Calvin, Morrison proposes a "Christocentric, Mutileveled, Interactive Model of Scripture as the Written Word of God."

Morrson's model is Christocentric because Jesus "was and is the Word of God, absolutely and preeminently. As self-disclosure of the triune God, Jesus stands alone as full, final, distinct and unique (John 1, Hebrews 1)." (224) But even though Jesus is the Word of God, Scripture should still be viewed as "a participative, God-breathed aspect of God's whole self-giving to be redemptively known." (225) The incarnate Word and the written Word must be "'thought together' relationally, interactively, unitarily. . .Jesus Chist the incarnate, ontological Word of God, and Holy Scripture. . .the derivative Word of God." (225)

Morrison deftly uses Einstein's ideas about an interpenetrating hierarchy of "levels of knowledge" in the sciences, and T. F. Torrance's application of these ideas, to illuminate the hierarchical and interactive relation he sees between the incarnate Word and the written Word.

In the final sections of this chapter he examines Calvin's "multileveled approach to Scriptural authority" and the relationship of Christ (through the Holy Spirit), Scripture, and the Church. Here again he finds Christocentric, hierarchical, but interactive relationships:

Thus, the Sprit of the church, which is the Spirit of Christ, is the Spirit of Christ's inscripturated Word, who, level by interrelated level, leads the church into the knowledge of the will of Christ by directing such into the knowledge of Scripture, the Word of Christ.

This end to chapter 8 obviously cries for a further discussion of Scripture, Church, and tradition. And Morrison provides it in a very tantalizing extended appendix that reviews at some length the writings of early church fathers, summarizes quickly the views of Luther and Calvin, and finally considers favorably two recent books on Scripture and tradition: Listening to the Past: The Place of Tradition in Theology by Stephen R. Holmes and Retrieving the Tradition: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants by D. H. Williams.

Has God Said? was a challenging read for a non-scholar, but I found Morrison's amazingly extensive survey, his detailed and subtle analyses, and his proposed model very illuminating and even exciting. And this work leaves me eager to hear more from him on this crucial subject, especially in three ways.

First, I think his multileveled, interactive, unitary model of Christ/Spirit, Scripture, and Church could be helpfully illuminated by some concrete historical and doctrinal examples of the model in action. Theological models, like scientific ones, need to be tested. For example, how might Jesus have exemplified this model in his life and teaching? The Gospels reveal him to both be above Scripture (at least in interpretive authority) and subject to it. And how might the lives and writings of the apostles have exemplified the model?

Second, I hope that someday Morrison can address more extensively the views of Holy Scripture in the early church fathers and also interact with past and current Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox understandings of their views. To what extent were the views of the early fathers about the Holy Spirit, Holy Scripture, and the Church similar and dissimilar to the mutlileveled interactiive model that Morrison describes? And how do Catholic and Orthodox intepretations of the fathers comport with Morrison's model? Obviously I ask these questions as a dilettante, but my correspondence with our next reviewer has given me the impression that Eastern Orthodox theologians interpret the early Church on this subject somewhat differently than Morrison's model. Morrison, following Calvin, describes a hierarchy of Spirit, Scripture, Church. My impression is that Orthodox doctrine sees the hierarchy as more Spirit, Church (including kerygma, tradition and liturgy), Scripture. (But see the review of the Behr title in this issue.) Anyway, I think that Morrison could contribute some highly valuable clarity to orthodox ecumenical discussions on this subject.

Third, I really hope that Morrison, or another like-minded theologian, will distill (very soon) the content of Has God Said? into a shorter work more accessible to the average Christian reader. Many evangelicals, I think, especially in newer generations, urgently need to hear and understand Morrison's arguments, especially his analyses of the many subtle ways that even conservative theologians conceptually detach "the Word of God" from Holy Scripture, and of the ways that the Word and Scripture can, and should be viewed "unitarily."

Until then Has God Said? remains an extremely important study for pastors, theologians, theology students, and even ambitious (perhaps overly ambitious) lay readers.