Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
the poetic language is often not specific ... Christian consensus as to its meaning might not easily emerge. That's why I like to look at the NT examples of scriptural interpretation: why I keep coming back to Peter using Psalm 16 in his Pentecost speech, for example. It gives us an interpretational template...
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Let me put it another way. Peter had spent three incredible years with Jesus the Nazarene; then He was gone. Now they all tried to make sense of it, and to relay the meaning of their experiences to others who were presently incomprehensible.
Thus, the appeal to scripture. How many times in the Gospels do we see "as it was written" or "so that the scripture might be fulfilled"? This is why Peter, attempting to explain the outpoured Spirit to the incredulous throng, referenced Psalms 16 and 110. God had poured out His Holy Spirit, and this Spirit allowed men like Peter to look into scripture and see Jesus. The Spirit allowed men to see Jesus as fulfillment of scriptural type, and the same scripture allowed them to show others “the promised Holy Spirit... which you now see and hear” (Acts 2:33).
It seems to me that WL’s method was different. He was coming from a post-Protestant, post-Bretheren historical viewpoint, and what Peter had thought of his experiences with Christ was not as valuable to WL as God's current speaking "oracle". A hermeneutical template was being created, and the thoughts of Peter and James, who had actually met with Jesus, were not as important to WL's understanding scripture as the new template had become. Where Peter and James (for example) could not be lined up with current exegesis, they were either ignored or pushed aside.
As was much in the OT; for example, since Psalm 34:20, “not one of His bones should be broken” had been cited in the gospel account it was allowed to be valid revelation, while the rest of the psalm, speaking of the same righteous person (!) was dismissed as vain. The current “recovered” interpretation was allowed to over-ride both OT and NT scriptures.
Even Jesus’ gospel “oikonomia” (translated e.g. as “stewardship” in Luke 16) was downplayed, in favor of Paul's epistolary oikonomia, which to WL seemed to entail a lot of shouting of biblically-themed words, which shouting would eventually make us God in life and nature but not in the Godhead. Jesus’ food – “to do the will of My Father” – wasn’t stressed too much. In fact obedience might even be a stumbling if we took it too seriously!
Eventually, years after leaving all of this, I began to ask myself what it might have been like to be David, there in a cave, in a rocky crag, in a battle. The more I felt David’s emotional core, his "spirit", come through his writing, the more I could also feel the heart of Jesus Christ, David's Son of promise. And likewise, the more I pursued John and Peter and James’ subjective experiences (their Christ) as expressed in the text, the more I could make sense of my own experiences. I could see Jesus as they saw him, and
as they saw Him in the scriptures which they all knew so well.
And yes, that certainly includes Paul as well. But Paul’s ministry certainly didn’t render anyone else’s null and void, valued only as a touchstone to “the apostle of the age”. If that was the case, why was John ministering from Patmos, years after Paul had exited the scene? No, the scriptures were bigger than Paul, bigger than John or Peter or James. Only Jesus could fill them all.