It is hard to avoid the conclusion that contemporary Western Christianity is suffering from a crisis of biblical authority. The Bible – that collection of ancient Hebrew and early Christian texts which was preserved by the Church as the written record of God’s dealings with humanity and the human response to God – is no longer the dominant cultural force that once shaped the language, discourse and worldview of Western society but instead is viewed increasingly as the product of a primitive age with little bearing on our contemporary situation. The scriptural texts have been relegated in the common consciousness to the category of mythic narrative (though narrative makes up only part of this diverse anthology), equal in standing to the epics of Homer and Virgil, the plays of Aeschylus and Seneca, and all other sources of ethical and philosophical wisdom which vie for attention in the pluralist marketplace of ideas. Alongside this relativizing of the biblical account of things, the postmodern distrust of metanarratives has called into question the universal claims which Christianity makes and to which the scriptural canon bears witness, focusing instead on the historical and cultural context (and shortcomings) to which those claims are and have been subject.
All this has resulted, on one hand, in churches and pastors trying to ‘explain away’ the biblical text, subordinating its claims to those of the prevailing political and moral climate; and, on the other, in an unyielding fundamentalism that elevates the bare text to a place unprecedented in Christian thought or in the worshipping and devotional life of the Church. Both of these – admittedly extreme, yet widespread – approaches reflect a lack of confidence among contemporary church leaders in the authority and power of Scripture, and have further contributed to the perceived irrelevance of the Bible in the Western consciousness. With irrelevance comes ignorance, and the vicious circle is complete when even regular churchgoers lack familiarity in the major biblical story-cycles and motifs and in the canonical structure and unity of its text. By all these means, the role of Scripture as the central teaching tool of the Christian faith has been severely undermined.
And yet, it has been suggested that this process of marginalization presents a golden opportunity for churches to proclaim the biblical message to a Western audience with a fresh voice and renewed vigour. In an article entitled ‘Preaching Scripture Faithfully in a post-Christendom Church’, Christine McSpadden acknowledges the unsettling effect which the decline of Christianity in the West has had upon church leaders and congregations, but considers this less a crisis of biblical authority than of the cultural edifice constructed around the Bible in the post-Reformation Anglophone world.Footnote 2 Churches can no longer depend upon those who come through their doors to have even a basic knowledge of the biblical text or of its overarching story of creation and redemption; yet it is this very strangeness and unfamiliarity which allows the Bible to present a compelling alternative message to the dominant ideology, a narrative which speaks to our deepest existential concerns where promises of material prosperity and seemingly limitless individual freedom fail to convince.Footnote 3
Faithful Preaching: An Anglican and Ancient Approach?
Key to this, says McSpadden, is the role of the preacher, who through exploring and reflecting on the biblical text is able to draw out wider themes and patterns across the breadth of Scripture, and is given authority to rearticulate its meaning in a way that connects with the lives and circumstances of his or her audience. Indeed, McSpadden presents something of a manifesto for preaching in a contemporary Western setting, calling on preachers to have confidence in the power of the biblical message to speak to a postmodern world fraught with anxiety, fragmentation and bewildering change. She describes preaching as a ‘holy act’: a particular form of public speaking set aside by the Church to serve God’s saving purposes.Footnote 4 Preachers are therefore to approach the biblical text faithfully, open to its ability to challenge and transform our behaviour and preconceptions.Footnote 5 Faithful biblical preaching gets to the very heart of the authority of Scripture in the life of the Church, recognizing the Bible not simply as one source of material for theological reflection (or, at the other extreme, a document whose form is sacrosanct and which admits of only one inflexible meaning and rule) but as a living and holy text through which has communicated the saving message of the kerygma – the proclamation that Jesus is Lord and Saviour – through successive generations and with undiminished potency since the apostolic era.Footnote 6
There is something distinctively Anglican about McSpadden’s approach, as she – an Episcopal priest at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco – constructs her model for preaching on the triple foundation of Anglican theological method: Scripture, tradition and reason.Footnote 7 Indeed, central to her model is the need to approach the Bible as Scripture – that is, as a single theological corpus which, though composed of disparate elements written over the course of centuries, is unified by its proclamation of God’s relationship with and promise to humanity as out-worked in history.Footnote 8 McSpadden therefore calls on preachers to draw on the breadth and richness of the biblical canon in order to represent God most faithfully.Footnote 9 However, she challenges the view that the biblical text is exhaustive of God’s revelation to humanity and so determines its own rules of interpretation. This is where tradition comes in, as McSpadden looks to those extra-biblical expressions of the kerygma, preserved in the ancient creeds and doctrinal statements of the Church, which reflect and illuminate the truth contained in Scripture.Footnote 10 The Bible is a living text because it forms part of the living faith of the Church and so the preacher is to be a dedicated student of that faith in both its scriptural and doctrinal expressions, immersing him or herself in its imagery and motifs. Only then will he or she be equipped to use reason and personal experience to reflect on how God speaks through the imagery and motifs of the present moment, to articulate and make sense of the faith of the universal Church in this particular time and place.Footnote 11
Yet there is something else underlying this: an even firmer bedrock on which Scripture, tradition and reason are grounded, and which saves McSpadden’s method from being simply a clever intellectual and rhetorical exercise. That is the impact of faith on the preacher’s own life, the sense of personal encounter with the living and life-changing God who speaks through the words of Scripture as he does through the belief and practice of the Church. It is this, McSpadden declares, which brings confidence in the truth of the kerygma over the plurality of competing beliefs and in its ability to offer the only sufficient response to the hopes and fears of those in the congregation.Footnote 12 What is more, it brings something of the wonder and attraction of the preacher’s own faith-experience into the act of communication, and serves as a powerful corrective to subjective readings of Scripture by acknowledging the proper source of God’s truth beyond the individual.Footnote 13 In these several ways, faith in God’s ongoing activity in the world transforms the act of preaching from ‘a mere moralizing exhortation’ into ‘a call to conversion’, a single crystalline moment in that eternal divine activity addressed through the words of the preacher to the lives of those present.Footnote 14 It may seem obvious that a predisposition to faith in the congregation is also necessary for the act of preaching to be received in this way, and indeed McSpadden does acknowledge this; though she considers it enough for the preacher to see in those who attend church a desire for a better understanding of themselves and the world, and so to approach God on their behalf to find the words which help make sense of it all.Footnote 15
It is a heavy, if deeply rewarding, responsibility which McSpadden places on the preacher. Against a secularized Western mindset which views the historical accuracy of the biblical canon and the integrity of its proclamation with extreme scepticism, McSpadden’s preacher is called to prayerfully and courageously approach Scripture as a place of encounter with the living God who has fulfilled his promise of salvation through Christ and who continues to guide his people as that promise comes to fruition over the course of history. The crisis in biblical authority as seen in the West today may be a relatively recent phenomenon but it is not without precedent in Christian history, and indeed the origins of the faith precipitated a radical rethinking of how biblical texts were to be used and interpreted. The earliest Christians retained the Hebrew Scriptures – what were to become known as the Old Testament – as authority for the teachings of Jesus and for the prophecies which were believed to have been fulfilled in his life, death and resurrection. This was done by using interpretive techniques that were already prevalent in contemporary Judaism and which sought to apply the rules of the Torah to emerging situations not directly addressed in the text.Footnote 16 Yet even as the early Christian texts that would eventually form the New Testament show these techniques in action, they also reflect the ongoing tensions which the Christian kerygma brought to interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures.
These tensions are most apparent in the New Testament treatment of the Torah, the Jewish moral and ceremonial law embodied in the first five books of the Bible. It was Paul who most prominently and decisively proclaimed Christ’s lordship as having done away with the Torah as the means to salvation, the primary dispute between Jewish and Gentile believers in the first Christian communities. Where Paul blazed a trail in the intellectual debate, historical events soon caught up when the Jerusalem Temple – the heart of the Jewish faith and its sacrificial system – was destroyed along with the rest of the city by Roman forces in 70 ce. So, even as Jesus is depicted to varying degrees by the evangelists as a teacher and interpreter of the Torah, all four gospels record his prediction of the Temple’s destruction; and whereas it is one thing to ‘update’ prophetic texts to make Jesus their subject, it is quite another to ascribe ongoing authority to cultic writings which Jesus himself, and the beliefs that quickly grew up around him, call into doubt. In this environment, we could be forgiven for thinking that the Temple system’s collapse would have rendered vast swathes of the Hebrew Scriptures obsolete in the Christian mindset – not only Leviticus and Deuteronomy, but the second half of Exodus and even large portions of the historical and prophetic books. And this raises a more fundamental question: beyond showing that Jesus was the subject of prophecy and explaining the background and basis of his teachings, did the Hebrew Scriptures really deserve any special status within Christian belief? Had the kerygma, and the writings which grew out of it, not taken their place as the source of authority and religious truth?
Here was the first crisis in biblical authority, but we already know how it would end – the Hebrew Scriptures were received in their entirety into the Christian Bible and have been instrumental in shaping the Christian faith and imagination through the centuries. In their many and various ways, the books of the Old Testament were seen to speak to the truth revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, and retained authority as a living witness to God’s unfolding plan for history even as events seemed to overtake their original context. Nowhere in the New Testament is this understanding of Scripture more extensively or creatively explored that in the Epistle to the Hebrews. The epistle draws on a wide selection of Old Testament passages as material for an extended reflection on Christ’s priestly role and the sacrificial effect of his death, and what this means for the Christian life of faith. Its unique biblical portrait of Christ as High Priest after the order of Melchizedek is all the more remarkable for its likely dating in the late first century ce, after the destruction of the Temple.Footnote 17 For Auctor,Footnote 18 this catastrophic event was no reason to abandon the Hebrew Scriptures but was rather a call to uncover their deeper significance, in the full assurance that they remained an authoritative part of God’s self-disclosure to humanity. The result is a rich exegetical treatment which portrays Hebrews’ audience as the direct descendants and inheritors-in-faith of ancient Israel, while considering the radical implications for that faith brought about by the life and death of Christ.
Importantly, Auctor’s treatment of the Old Testament is not some arid intellectual exercise or disinterested piece of biblical commentary, but is offered to his audience as a ‘word of encouragement’:Footnote 19 a call to hold onto the faith they had lately received in the face of persecution and despondency. Hebrews is therefore not only the product of Auctor’s belief in the continuing authority of Scripture but also of the problems and anxieties felt by a living faith community which he feels it is his responsibility to address.Footnote 20 It is this which infuses the epistle with a sense of urgency and vitality, though the richness and depth of Auctor’s reflections have given it value far beyond its immediate context and secured its place in the nascent Christian canon as a work which itself witnesses to how God continues to reveal himself through the text of Scripture, even after he has fully revealed himself in the life and work of Christ.Footnote 21
A fertile imagination shaped by a profound faith; an unwavering confidence in the power of Scripture to reveal God to his people; and a determination to bring that revelation to bear on the present circumstances of the faithful – Auctor’s approach to the Old Testament has close affinities with McSpadden’s vision of faithful biblical preaching. In fact, it is my contention that Hebrews’ hermeneutic method is fully compatible with McSpadden’s approach, and that reading her manifesto in light of Auctor’s understanding of Scripture will give it added breadth and depth as a response to the present crisis in biblical authority. I will explore these assertions through the remainder of this article, and consider how Hebrews’ use of the Old Testament can further equip and assist preachers to have renewed confidence in using Scripture to proclaim the Christian faith in a secularized Western setting. It will become clear that for both Auctor and McSpadden the biblical text retains authority as a place for encountering the Word of God, the fullness of divine truth which reveals itself in history for the encouragement and guidance of humanity. We will also consider the conditions which Auctor applies for ‘right’ interpretation of the Word of God as it speaks through the text to a particular situation, and how this compares to McSpadden’s criteria for approaching Scripture faithfully. Before all this, however, we should turn to the text of Hebrews itself, its use of Old Testament citations, and the exegetical method which these reveal.
The Epistle to the Hebrews and the Old Testament
Richard Longenecker, in his study of early Christian exegesis, identifies 38 instances of direct Old Testament quotations in Hebrews, along with a further 55 scriptural allusions, ‘reminiscences of Septuagintal phraseology, and references to biblical history’, though the fact is it weaves these citations into its text and argument so seamlessly that there is dispute over the exact number.Footnote 22 Indeed, the epistle’s extended focus on the Old Testament has contributed to its unsettled history in Christian thought. On one hand, the cultic lens through which it seeks to explain Christ’s death, and its focus on the mysterious figure of Melchizedek, creates a sense of distance from the other New Testament epistles which some have regarded as a backward step in Christian theology.Footnote 23 On the other, its portrayal of a perfected, heavenly sanctuary contrasted with the historic tabernacle has been said to betray a Platonic or even gnostic worldview which renders Hebrews ‘an intruder from a thought-world which is far from the mainstream of the Christian tradition’.Footnote 24
There is no doubt that Hebrews’ approach to biblical exegesis is unique to the New Testament, but the current consensus is that its methods are in continuity with both contemporary Jewish exegetical practice and early Christian tradition.Footnote 25 Auctor’s respect for the Old Testament text is obvious from his extensive use of citations to prove and illustrate his argument, as it is from the form of the citations used, which most textual critics now agree conform to genuine manuscript variants of the Septuagint.Footnote 26 Longenecker states that this reflects contemporary Jewish understanding of Scripture as ‘the very words of God’ and the role of the exegete to make God’s address to humanity meaningful in the contemporary situation.Footnote 27 He also identifies a number of common exegetical techniques used within Hebrews which indicate that, while Auctor sought a deeper significance underlying the biblical texts, he took the surface meaning of the citations equally seriously in his interpretive method.Footnote 28 Meanwhile, that deeper significance is grounded not in Gnosticism or Platonic idealism but in an apocalyptic mindset common among contemporary Christians – the belief that God had revealed himself in a unique and complete way in Jesus Christ.Footnote 29 As such, Auctor sets up a creative tension as he reflects on the ‘many and various ways’ in which God spoke to his people through history, to find a clearer understanding of the definitive act of divine communication in the person of the Son (1.1-2). Here we approach that crisis of authority which the life and teaching of Jesus could have had on the Hebrew Scriptures, and yet Auctor embraces those texts enthusiastically as the ‘living and active’ Word of God which retain a revelatory function in the history of divine address (4.12). Contrasting themes of continuity and discontinuity, old and new, contingent and perfected abound – summarized in the epistle’s description of the Torah as ‘a shadow of the good things to come’ (10.1) – as Hebrews draws out the full force of the scriptural message in light of Christ’s work, while simultaneously delving into the texts to produce fresh insights into the meaning of God’s revelation in Christ.
Hebrews, Scripture and the Word of God
Graham Hughes has considered in detail the creative tension which drove Auctor as he worked to defend the authority of the Hebrews Scriptures against the historical impact of the kerygma and the collapse of the Temple cult.Footnote 30 For Hughes, this tension builds through the first seven chapters of Hebrews as it sets up a strong discontinuity between Scripture and the Son as two forms of God’s address to humanity.Footnote 31 And yet, this discontinuity reflects not an irresolvable confrontation between these modes of divine communication, but rather a relationship of dialectical continuity, as preliminary and final forms of God’s revealed Word.Footnote 32 Developing this idea, Harold Attridge highlights the common promise made by God to Abraham and Israel and that made and fulfilled in the Son, reflected in the Old Testament citations which are themselves the very words and intentions of God towards his people.Footnote 33 Ken Schenck, meanwhile, posits that Auctor regarded the Scriptures as one subset of the ‘many and various ways’ in which God spoke to humanity before his ‘Word’ took definitive form in the Son, but that it is the eternal truth of that Word which allows Scripture to retain its truthfulness and value.Footnote 34 And as John Webster states, Auctor can be confident that the authority of Scripture is preserved following the appearance of the Son because it is God who is the ‘single speaking subject in the history of revelation’.Footnote 35 Hughes determines that this remains unaffected even by the eschatological impact of Christ’s life and work, for both forms of revelation retain the character of promise within history in light of their divine origins beyond history and thus embody something which will only be fulfilled at the coming of eternity.Footnote 36
Now we may begin to understand Hebrews’ prominent and unparalleled use of cultic imagery drawn from the Old Testament. Barnabas Lindars argues that, even as the preliminary manifestation of God’s purposes brought to fulfilment in Christ, Auctor regarded the Old Testament text as reflecting heavenly realities beyond the bounds of any historical context. So, while historical developments meant that the cultic texts had lost their surface impact as an effective means to approach God, Auctor saw enduring value in them as defining the nature of atonement and establishing the standard to which Christ’s life and sacrifice had to conform in order to fulfil God’s salvific work.Footnote 37 For Susanne Lehne, the creative tension of Hebrews is most prominent when engaging with these texts, as old covenant ceremonial is imaginatively reinterpreted to set the events of the kerygma in continuity with the heritage of Israel, even as Christ is heralded as the culmination of that same heritage: ‘the pioneer and perfecter of our faith’ (12.2).Footnote 38 In this, Lehne is concerned that Hughes overplays Hebrews’ sense of historical continuity at the expense of the real metaphysical differences which Auctor perceived between the anticipatory covenant and Christ’s covenant of ‘perfection’.Footnote 39 Yet Hughes does acknowledge the perfected and eternal qualities of the new covenant in contrast to the old,Footnote 40 while concluding that they are both rooted in the same structures of ‘priesthood, cultus and sacrifice’ and the same eschatological promise which enables the Old Testament text to speak as God’s Word in new and emerging historical situations.Footnote 41
This notion that the Old Testament still has something important to say is central to what Hughes terms Auctor’s ‘theology of the Word of God’.Footnote 42 According to this, the biblical revelation had not been superseded by Christ but rather now needed to be interpreted in light of his life and work as the latest and definitive expression of God’s address to humanity. This is why Auctor feels able, perhaps even compelled, to engage with the cultic texts in the way he does – as Scripture is part of that same divine address spoken through the Son, none of it remains untouched by the new Christian situation. And the identity of signification between Scripture and the Son also enables these creative insights to flow in the other direction, as Auctor uses his speculations on the cultic framework and the figure of Melchizedek to explore the meaning of Christ’s atoning sacrifice and eternal priesthood.Footnote 43 Another key aspect of this theology of the Word of God is the aforementioned historical relationship between the old and new covenants. It is this relationship which, Hughes argues, serves to protect Auctor’s novel interpretations from arbitrariness and undue subjectivity, and helps to define the limits of legitimate exegesis. It flows directly from Auctor’s understanding that God has chosen to reveal Himself within history, anchoring his interpretive method in the events of the scriptural narrative and of the traditions surrounding the life of Jesus.Footnote 44 This ensures proper weight is given to the actual text of Scripture and contents of the kerygma, the conformity between the two, and the interpretive traditions which surround both.Footnote 45
Then there is the role of faith, which not only underpins but is an active component in Auctor’s method. It is faith which convinced Auctor that God had spoken to humanity both through the events of Christ’s life and through the Hebrew Scriptures, and faith which further convinced him that these two sources of tradition formed one and the same ongoing act of divine communication. By enabling the disparate elements of Scripture’s ‘many and various ways’ to be ordered meaningfully and to be read in continuity with the kerygma, faith freed the Old Testament texts from their immediate context and allowed Auctor to interpret them in new and striking ways.Footnote 46 Yet faith is also the rule and marker of right interpretation, as Auctor repeatedly acknowledges God and the Holy Spirit as the source of his exegetical insights as they speak to him through the text (e.g., 3.7; 4.3; 8.8-12; 10.16-17). Like the factual reality of the text itself and the events of the kerygma, locating the source of meaning beyond himself saved Auctor from unfounded and spurious interpretations. What is more, as the criticism of his audience’s lack of faith shows (5.11), those who listen to Auctor’s words must approach them from a position of faith and be open to the power of the Spirit to speak God’s Word and apply it to the particular circumstances of their own lives.Footnote 47
Old Story, Told New
To summarize: Hebrews is a unique example of scriptural interpretation from the New Testament era which reveals a sophisticated understanding of the place and function of the Old Testament in the history of divine self-disclosure, and of its continuing revelatory role in the time following the life of Jesus. As part of his spiritual heritage, Auctor accepted the Old Testament text and the Jewish understanding of the history of salvation which his Christian belief convinced him had come to fulfilment in the life and work of the Son. Yet this fulfilment did not lead him to discard the scriptural text, nor even those cultic provisions which had been rendered practicably obsolete by the destruction of the Temple; for his faith was that the events of the kerygma gave new and deeper meaning to the text, and that God continues to speak through Scripture as the implications of his eschatological promise unfold through history. Hebrews is certainly the product of a skilled imagination, but its exegesis is grounded firmly in the historical continuity between Scripture and the kerygma, and in Auctor’s belief that the Holy Spirit had called and inspired him to address the Word of God to the situation of his community in the most effective and encouraging manner.
Now we are ready to reconsider McSpadden’s call for a renewed confidence in scriptural authority among preachers operating in a secularized Western setting. Though she makes no mention in her manifesto of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the affinities between her understanding of the nature and purpose of the Bible and that of Auctor are striking. Like Auctor, she sees the Bible not as some historical artefact but as a fundamental and living witness to the Christian faith through the ages.Footnote 48 Similar to the idea that the coming of Christ and the destruction of the Temple had diminished the value of the Hebrew Scriptures, the (post-)modern questioning of the ‘truth’ of biblical texts is directly challenged by the conviction that these texts form part of an ongoing divine address that received fullest expression in the one whom the Church worships as the second Person of the Trinity.
For McSpadden, approaching the Bible ‘as Scripture’ frees it from the shortcomings of those common responses to the crisis of biblical authority which we raised at the start of this article – the historical-critical approach which seeks to uncover the original context of individual books and biblical passages, but then risks confining them to that context and destroying any sense of canonical unity; and the fundamentalist approach which valorizes the text to the point of reducing all scope for interpretation as such, while imposing one fixed meaning that often seems to owe more to confessional biases than to a real respect and understanding of scriptural authority.Footnote 49 We can safely speculate that Auctor would follow McSpadden in this analysis, as his christological approach to the cultic texts takes them far from their immediate historical setting and surface meaning; a radical rendering of Scripture which nonetheless is grounded in its treatment as an ongoing and authoritative mode of divine address. Then, McSpadden’s appeal to the ancient creeds and doctrinal statements of the Church as a guide to interpreting Scripture conforms to Auctor’s belief in the kerygma as a new but related form of the God’s self-disclosure to humanity. They both understand the manner in which meaning unfolds from the text as Scripture interacts with the faith of the Church, and as both of these are brought to bear on ever-changing historical circumstances. And the novel interpretations which this produces are not ‘new’ as such, but are the application of God’s one and eternal truth to the present moment, not only in the act of interpreting and preaching but in the act of receiving the words of the preacher or exegete as well. To be a genuine act of interpretation therefore requires faith on the part of both preacher and audience – faith that in the text of Scripture we can still encounter the living Word of God, and faith that this Word always has something meaningful to say to the situation of the world and of our individual lives. It may be a word of encouragement, often it is a word of challenge – but always it is part of God’s self-disclosure whereby he reveals something more of himself to us and seeks to transform our lives and understanding as a result.
I said earlier that McSpadden has placed a heavy, yet deeply rewarding, responsibility on the shoulders of the preacher. They are to stand in the gap between God and his people, to immerse themselves in the learning of Scripture and the kerygma so as to enable God’s Word to speak to those who approach in faith in the present day. And their words can only carry authority as an act of right interpretation if they themselves approach the biblical text prayerfully and with faith, ready to hear the Word speaking to their own lives and prepared to be changed in the process. Though she may not have realized it, Auctor is the model of McSpadden’s faithful preacher: one who humbly studies Scripture to find what God is saying to his or her community in the present moment, and who uses all their exegetical and creative skill to proclaim that Word in a way which captures the imagination and speaks to the needs and yearnings of his or her audience.
It has been my contention that Hebrews’ hermeneutic method is fully compatible with McSpadden’s manifesto for faithful biblical preaching, and the above exploration has shown how this is conclusively the case. I then said that applying Auctor’s understanding of Scripture to her interpretive approach would give it added breadth and depth as a response to the present crisis in biblical authority. I see this happening in three main ways. The first concerns the relationship between Scripture and tradition in the act of interpretation. McSpadden affirms that an understanding of the creeds and other doctrinal statements of the Church is essential for right interpretation of Scripture and, as we discovered, her method is in keeping with the Anglican approach of Scripture and tradition informing one another alongside reason; yet at no point does she directly consider the extent to which interpretive insights from the biblical text can bring new understanding of the doctrines of the Church. When we think, however, of the enduring image of Christ as eternal High Priest, derived from Hebrews’ reflection on the Old Testament cultic texts and references to Melchizedek, we can see just how fundamentally biblical interpretation can impact on Christian theology and worship.
Some may argue that such an impact was only possible in those first few centuries of the Christian era when the doctrinal implications of the kerygma were yet to be fully worked out, but for Graham Hughes this is an integral part of the theology of the Word of God which even today permits of a high level of creative freedom in both directions.Footnote 50 What is more, this is a cumulative process as successive interpretations of Scripture shaped by the kerygma inform and rework those same traditions, which in turn adds to the deposit of imagery and insights available to future interpreters. It is the open and evolving nature of this process which makes the safeguards of legitimate interpretation so important, grounded in the bare words of the biblical text and the events of the kerygma to ensure the Word of God is allowed to continue to speak through both.Footnote 51 McSpadden’s preacher can therefore follow suit and boldly trace new paths through Scripture and tradition in ways which, while remaining faithful to its ancient formulae and the biblical witness, fully engage with the spirit of the age and ‘make sense’ of the contemporary issues facing his or her community. Such boldness must be balanced, once again, by a humble and prayerful approach to interpretation, acknowledging the importance of consistency with God’s unfolding historical revelation to humanity, and attentive to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, which is the source and vehicle of all truth and authority.
The second way Hebrews’ approach to the Old Testament complements the work of McSpadden is that it identifies her manifesto with a tradition of the greatest Christian antiquity. McSpadden cites both Athanasius and Augustine as inspirations for her method,Footnote 52 but we now know that its origins reach even further back to a time when the continuing relevance of the Hebrew Scriptures really did hang in the balance. The events of Christ’s life, and the beliefs which quickly grew up around them, precipitated the first and ultimate crisis of biblical authority, and the work and insight of Auctor not only answered this crisis but provided the fundamental statement of how Scripture and the kerygma work together to tell us something of the truth of God. McSpadden’s manifesto, then, is not some cynical adoption of postmodern literary techniques that detach form from sense to make the Bible relevant or attractive to contemporary Western modes of thought – or even just a contemporary repackaging of the Anglican approach to religious authority – but rather reflects the Church’s basic understanding of Scripture and how the faithful are meant to derive meaning and encouragement from its text.
The third and final element which Hebrews brings to McSpadden’s manifesto flows from the second, and is that her approach is not just suitable for use in a secularized Western setting, but is indeed the means to faithful and compelling biblical preaching in any environment. The authority of Scripture is undermined as much by its use by fundamentalist groups and repressive regimes, by its association with past colonial structures and exploitative ethical systems, as it is by Western scepticism. In all these cases the Bible is treated simply as ‘text’, the meaning of which can be manipulated to fit the ends of whichever group wishes to claim its support at that particular moment. Auctor and McSpadden’s approach works against this by grounding scriptural authority not in the bare text but in the Word of God which speaks through it. The meaning of the text is thus seen to flow from a source beyond mere human reason, which is then rightly apprehended by reason through faith and the work of the Holy Spirit. Coupled with the unfolding historical character of the one, eternally true act of divine speech – captured in Auctor’s association of the many and various forms of scriptural revelation with the definitive revelation of the Son – this understanding of biblical authority provides universal scope to McSpadden’s views on the importance of preaching and the role of preachers, to use their own faithful encounter with God in Scripture and the knowledge of the needs of their communities to enable his Word to speak in and for the particular moment.
Now we can appreciate the full breadth and depth of McSpadden’s manifesto. She acknowledges in its development ancient wisdom as far back as the fourth century ce, and it has clearly been influenced by the Anglican tripartite dynamic of Scripture, tradition and reason; yet even more fundamentally, her approach to reading and interpreting the Bible follows one of the earliest and most radical Christian exegetes, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Of all the New Testament, it is the thought and work of Auctor that most clearly articulates the conviction that God continues to speak through the whole of Scripture, despite the coming of Christ and the end of the Temple cult – indeed, speaks in ways which reveal ever-new depths to the meaning of Christ’s saving work. This conviction, and the dialectical continuity that it sets up between Scripture and kerygma, in turn ensured the primitive Church’s reception of the biblical canon as the ground of faith and a living witness to God’s promises in Christ as history continued to unfold before it. Even if done unintentionally, McSpadden has adopted Auctor’s theology of the Word of God and repackaged it for a modern Western audience – an act of reinterpretation worthy of the Epistle to the Hebrews itself. And by following in this eminent and powerful tradition, the merits of her manifesto go far beyond inspiring preachers in one specific cultural setting, and provide an effective response to questions of biblical authority and the faithful interpretation of Scripture in all times and places.
