I just got done reading an excellent book on exegesis by Walter Kaiser titled, "
Toward an Exegetical Theology," he wrote specifically for sermon and teaching preparation. Knocked it out in one week. I recommend it.
Looks like a good book. I found this:
Richard B. Hays, “Reading the Bible with Eyes of Faith: The Practice of Theological Exegesis,”
What makes exegesis “theological”? Theological exegesis is not a “method.” It is not a set of discrete procedures that could be set alongside, say, textual criticism or redaction criticism. Rather, theological exegesis is a complex practice, a way of approaching Scripture with eyes of faith and seeking to understand it within the community of faith. What are the salient identifying marks of this practice? I propose twelve identifying marks.
(1) Theological exegesis is a practice of and for the church. We lavish our attention on the biblical texts because these texts have been passed on to us by the church’s tradition as the distinctive and irreplaceable testimony to events in which God has acted for our salvation. That is to say, theological exegesis regards these texts as Scripture, not merely as a collection of ancient writings whose content is of historical interest. A bare description of the ideational content of biblical writings (“the theology of Luke” or the like) is therefore not yet theological in the sense meant here. Theological exegesis, as Meeks rightly but disapprovingly notes, seeks to read the Bible as normative for a community.
(2) Theological exegesis is self-involving discourse. Interpreters who read the Bible theologically approach the text with an awareness that we are addressed and claimed by the word of God that is spoken in the text, and we understand ourselves to be answerable to that word. For this reason, exegesis that is authentically theological will frequently contain sentences that employ pronouns in the first and second persons. A strictly third-person form of discourse lends itself to the mode of pure description, in which the author may stand apart, uninvolved in the text’s world. Theological exegesis, however, draws us into the world of the text and demands response. As self-involving confessional acts, theological readings are closely interwoven with the practice of worship.
(3) At the same time, historical study is internal to the practice of theological exegesis. The reasons why this is so are themselves fundamentally theological: God has created the material world, and God has acted for the redemption of that world through the incarnation of the Son in the historical person Jesus of Nazareth. History therefore cannot be either inimical or irrelevant to theology’s affirmations of truth. The more accurately we understand the historical setting of 1st-century Palestine, the more precise and faithful will be our understanding of what the incarnate Word taught, did, and suffered. The more we know about the Mediterranean world of Greco-Roman antiquity, the more nuanced will be our understanding of the ways in which the NT’s epistles summoned their readers to a conversion of the imagination.
(4) Theological exegesis attends to the literary wholeness of the individual scriptural witnesses. This, I would propose, is one of the signature contributions of biblical studies over the past 50 years to the task of theology. The Bible must be read neither as an anthology of disconnected theological sound bites nor, on the other hand, as a single undifferentiated story. Nor can its message be adequately grasped only through excerpts encountered in the church’s liturgy. Rather, the Bible contains a chorus of different voices, and the distinctive integrity of each part in the chorus is essential to its polyphonic performance. This is especially true for texts such as the Gospels, which come to us in the form of cohesive narratives. It matters, as Irenaeus insisted, that we have not a single homogenized Gospel but, rather, a fourfold Gospel, in which the discrete voices of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John can and must be heard. Theological exegesis attends lovingly to the distinctive testimony of each witness.
(5) My fifth point is the dialectical converse of the previous one: theological exegesis can never be content only to describe the theological perspectives of the individual biblical authors; instead, it always presses forward to the synthetic question of canonical coherence. This does not mean, of course, the assimilation of everything to a single doctrinal norm, as has happened sometimes when, for example, justification sola fide is made the single lens for interpreting all biblical texts. But it does mean that theological exegetes will seek the big picture, asking how any particular text fits into the larger biblical story of God’s gracious action. (This is one of the points at which Luke Timothy Johnson and I have consistently differed. He believes we can simply listen to each canonical witness separately and then move directly to contemporary appropriation, whereas I insist that Christian theological exegesis has historically sought to allow the different biblical witnesses to “talk to each other” and to articulate some sort of complex unity.)
(6) Theological exegesis does not focus chiefly on the hypothetical history behind the biblical texts, nor does it attend primarily to the meaning of texts as self-contained works of literature; rather, it focuses on these texts as testimony. This means we need to learn to stand where these witnesses stand and look where they point. Insofar as we do this, we will learn to see as they see; as Minear’s Eyes of Faith promises, we will find our vision trained anew. If we read the texts as testimony, we will find ourselves constantly reminded that the Bible is chiefly about God, not about human religious aspirations and power struggles.
(7) The language of theological exegesis is intratextual in character. In intratextual theological exegesis, our interpretations will remain close to the primary language of the witnesses rather than moving away from the particularity of the biblical testimony to a language of second-order abstraction that seeks to “translate” the biblical imagery into some other conceptual register. Of course, this sort of “translation” project was at the heart of Bultmann’s hermeneutical program; however laudable its intention, it was theologically vacuous and unfruitful. As R. R. Reno complains, many contemporary failed attempts at theological exegesis commit precisely this same “translation” fallacy, without the same hermeneutical sophistication displayed in Bultmann’s work.
(8) Theological exegesis, insofar as it stays close to the language and conceptions of the NT witnesses, will find itself drawn into the Bible’s complex web of intertextuality. The NT insistently cites and alludes to the OT, argues for a narrative continuity between the story of Israel and the story of Jesus, and interprets this continuity through discerning typological correspondences between the two. Consequently, theological exegesis will have to concern itself with tracing and interpreting these complex intertextual correspondences between the testaments.
(9) Theological exegesis thereby is committed to the discovery and exposition of multiple senses in biblical texts. Old Testament texts, when read in conjunction with the story of Jesus, take on new and unexpected resonances as they prefigure events far beyond the historical horizon of their authors and original readers. The NT’s stories of Jesus, when understood as mysterious fulfillments of long-ago promises, assume a depth beyond their literal sense as reports of events of the recent past. Texts have multiple layers of meaning that are disclosed by the Holy Spirit to faithful and patient readers.
(10) Learning to read the text with eyes of faith is a skill for which we are trained by the Christian tradition. Consequently, theological exegesis knows itself to be part of an ancient and lively conversation. We can never approach the Bible as though we are the first ones to read it—or the first to read it appropriately. We know that we have much to learn from the wisdom of the people who have reflected deeply on these texts before us. Consequently, theological exegesis will find hermeneutical aid, not hindrance, in the church’s doctrinal traditions.
(11) Theological exegesis, however, goes beyond repeating traditional interpretations; rather, instructed by the example of traditional readings, theological interpreters will produce fresh readings, new performances of Scripture’s sense that encounter the texts anew with eyes of faith and see the ways that the Holy Spirit continues to speak to the churches through the same ancient texts that the tradition has handed on to us. To put the same point in a slightly different way, the Spirit-led imagination, an imagination converted by the word, is an essential faculty for the work of theological exegesis.
(12) Finally, when we speak of theological exegesis, particularly when we acknowledge the Spirit’s role, we must always remember that we are speaking not chiefly of our own clever readings and constructions of the text but, rather, of the way that God, working through the text, is reshaping us. In his foreword to a recent collection of Minear’s essays, J. Louis Martyn quotes the famous dictum of Johann Albrecht Bengel, “Apply yourself wholly to the text; apply the text wholly to yourself.” Martyn however, proposes that the maxim should be reworded to read, “Apply yourself wholly to the text, and the text will apply itself wholly to you!” If it is true, as we confess with the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, that “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword” (Heb 4:12), then we may indeed expect to be transformed as we read. This means that theological exegesis must always be done from a posture of prayer and humility before the word. In the preface to the English edition of his Romans commentary, Karl Barth asks whom or what his book should serve. Here is how he answers the question: “No doubt it should be of service to those who read it. But, primarily and above all else, it must serve that other Book where Jesus Christ is present in His Church. Theology is ministerium verbi divini. It is nothing more nor less.” If this is true of theology in general, surely it is true a fortiori for theological exegesis.
