In defense of original exegesis

Against novelty, for imaginativeness.

I saw a comment recently from a brother who was told in seminary, “You will never have an original thought.” He was making a lighthearted point, but it struck me as a succinct summary of one of the ditches of ecclesiological modernity.

It is a reaction against the cult of the academy, where the only way to gain recognition is through innovation and novelty. This leads inevitably to what David Ogilvy once described in a different context—at least as quoted by Drayton Bird—as “skidding about helplessly on the slippery surface of irrelevant creative brilliance.” It places the focus entirely on the originality of the exegete, on what he can say about the word, rather than on the word itself, and what God is saying in it. Scripture then becomes little more than a cipher in which to find inspiration for your own thoughts and theories. The word is occluded by the exegete, and the measure of success becomes coming up with ideas that no one has come up with before.

But the other ditch is no better. Here, the focus is placed entirely on the word, on what God is saying in it, rather than on the interplay between God’s thoughts and the thoughts of the exegete as a unique image of him. It sounds very pious to “exclude” the exegete, because we have been carefully catechized in our own worthlessness and wickedness; that there is nothing we can add to God, nothing we can bring to his word to improve it, and so forth. This is true in a critical sense, and so we naturally think it sounds very dangerous that the exegete really plays an essential and exclusive role in expressing the word—that he has something of his own to bring to it, so what he says is original, new, in any way.

But this really ends up tacitly denying at least two articles of our faith:

Firstly, it denies the doctrine of the incarnation. All Christians are called to incarnate Christ through his Spirit, and each of us embodies the Spirit, expresses the Spirit, in a way that is unique; in a way nobody else can—in a way that is original and new. The exegete is not a mere mechanical repeater of the word, nor just an analyst who divides it into parts small enough to put under a magnifying glass so we can examine them better, and see how they fit together with greater clarity. The exegete takes the word in, and then breathes it back out in his own words. He draws it out from the past and breathes it into the present; from the done into the doing and the do, from the Hebrew into the English, from the historical into the spiritual, from the us into the you and the I. The word of God is living and active not through print on a page, but through the Spirit planting and watering and growing it in each man’s heart. And out of the heart, the mouth speaks; hence Christ says,

every scribe having been discipled to the kingdom of the heavens is like to a man, a householder, who bringeth forth from his treasure things new and old. (Matthew 13:52)

An exegete who truly has nothing new to bring forth is an exegete undiscipled in the kingdom, who would be better off keeping silent. Unfortunately, my experience is that most Reformed sermons are like this: they merely restate the text for 45 minutes, bringing forth nothing really new. As Lewis might say, the preacher engages the text with his mind, so as to relay its truth—but he appears unwilling or unable to engage it with his imagination, so as to convey its meaning.

Related to this, a second problem is that the rejection of “originality” (broadly speaking) is a denial of the doctrine of sanctification. Sanctification vitally includes growth in wisdom, and in the capacity to discern what we previously could not. In this way, each of us is progressively sanctified—but so is the church. Therefore, a church that is unable to distinguish and discover new things in its treasure is a church which is not being sanctified. And an exegetical philosophy that treats with suspicion the very idea of discovering new things in scripture, of desiring to plumb it to new depths that no one has reached before, is an approach that diminishes how sufficient God’s word truly is, even for unprecedented times; how marvelous his grace is; how wonderful his Spirit is—it teeters on blasphemy. (These issues also bear on other key articles of the faith: pneumatology, bibliology, eschatology; but I leave it to you to follow those threads.)

So is it true that “you will never have an original thought” about God’s words? It is true that the Spirit did not breathe out his words to inspire you to bring forth your own new treasures. But it is also true that the Spirit inspires you to “rebreathe” his words in order to bring forth new treasures from them.