Faithful readers may remember my short-lived Bible commentating plan from earlier in the year. Here and here I began my project of reading through Scripture in search of “Obligation.” That project petered out due to the time-demands of the semester and—probably—methodological confusion with regard to what constituted an obligation. As the new year approaches, and with it a much freer semester ahead, I am going to take the project up again—with some modifications.
Rather than a “topical study”—which I found too indeterminate, and therefore too open to my own preconceptions—I am going to consider my attempt a “hypothetical theological reading.” In other words, I am going to read through the Bible with reference to what is, for me, a very powerful theological hypothesis. This thesis has to do with the relation of creation and redemption. As I have previously indicated in other posts, my driving theological intuition is that the glory of God is most fully expressed in the cross—self-sacrifice is the paradigm of God’s interaction with man and with creation, and the pattern for man’s interaction with the world and with fellow men. At the same time, I want to resist the temptation to fall into a simple historical-redemptive approach that deals in “types and shadows” as the way to interpret scripture with reference to the cross. Instead, I want to free up the Old Testament to speak on its own terms about God’s way of relating to his creation—a relating characterized by self-sacrifice in other ways than just with reference to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus (though Jesus remains the fullest revelation of God’s self-sacrificing relation).
So the focus of this theological-hypothetical reading will still involve obligation—specifically God’s obligating himself to creation, and what that means for man’s ethical god-likeness—as well as other self-sacrificial acts and words of God and human imitations of them. My hypothetical argument will be that this self-sacrificing characterizes God’s creation structure, his electing love and redemptive actions, such that the historical movement of redemption is actually a development of creation itself—of which sin (whatever our views of its origin) is the occasion. I expect that (what seems to me to be) the audacity of this hypothesis will become apparent as I trace its implications for the interpretation of the whole body of Scripture.
