Abstract
It was a blustery autumn day. It was a noisy college common room. There was a prodigiously bright undergraduate student, a tutor, a warm fire, and cups of orange-brown tea. There was an argument about theology—Hauerwas and Hays, in fact. Didn’t we think, someone asked, that there was something to say for their idea of biblical interpretation and preaching as the language of theology? Yes, someone said—I think it might have been me—but what would that idea look like in practice? After all, there are many scholars who think preaching is the soul of theology and the Bible the soul of preaching, but when conference season arrives nobody is lining up to preach their academic papers to the massed ranks of academic exegetes and religion professors. Maybe the idea would turn out to be more than a frustrated lament if someone were to model a pattern of academic delivery that showed what a principled nonconformity of style in this area might resemble. It wouldn’t have to be anything too off-the-wall, just an attempt to write as if how one writes is congruent with what one writes.
Enter Brian Brock and Bernd Wannenwetsch. The present work is the first in a two-volume commentary on 1 Corinthians, the second volume of which presents the ‘Therapy’ to this volume’s ‘Malady’. Eschewing the customary delineation of an interpretative method, the authors observe that their work differs from both standard critical commentaries and from those works that seek to escape the barrenness of certain types of critical scholarship by ‘attempt[ing] to merge the “two horizons” of theology and modern biblical criticism’ (p. xiii). Both the critical commentary and the homiletical commentary evince the rule-bound character of modern biblical engagement, the former obviously so, but the latter somewhat in relief.
None of that, of course, is to advance the idea that there is an arbitrary irrationality lurking in the approach of this book. In eschewing formal methodological self-identification, Brock and Wannenwetsch hint that scriptural reading is a kind of phenomenology of the text, a ‘stance’, an ‘ethos of non-evasion’ (p. xiv) by which the text discloses itself to its willing, yet restrained and intentionally modest, readers, rather than having overdetermined meanings ground out mechanically from it, like sausage meat from a meat grinder. The result is a reading of Paul that purports to be ‘empty hands’ (p. xv), but which is anything but naïve. One of the authors’ principal claims is that the factionalism and discord in Corinth are characteristic of ecclesial identity in every age, and that we are therefore justified in seeing ourselves as members of the set of Paul’s intended recipients, albeit by extension (pp. xx–xxi). Paradoxically, for such a community reading is a collaborative venture, which highlights the role of encouragement and mutual support in interpretation (pp. xxi–xxii).
The commentary itself—this volume is on 1 Corinthians chapters 1–9 and the second on chapters 10–16—is far too substantial to address in its entirety in a review of this length. Nevertheless, the following discussions are especially worthwhile and illustrate both the merits and some of the shortcomings of the volume.
The comment on 1 Corinthians 3 is a fine theological exposition of the problem of factionalism construed from different standpoints. ‘Factionalism as Immaturity and Starvation’ (pp. 63–64) captures the essence of Paul’s rhetoric in 1 Cor. 3:1-4, and has some useful, but restrained, comment on Patristic readings of this material. ‘Factionalism as Façade’ (pp. 65–70) contains some very useful discussion of the complexity of 1 Cor. 3:5-15, in which multiple metaphors are at play. The highlight of this section is the way in which Brock and Wannenwetsch move seamlessly between acknowledgement of some of the major theological and doctrinal debates this passage has informed and the crux of the passage itself, namely the substance of Christian moral reflection. By way of illustration of this, they utilise Bonhoeffer’s critique of German Christianity (p. 70). ‘Factionalism as the Abominating Sacrilege’ (pp. 70–71) presents an insightful reading of the temple metaphor in 1 Cor. 3:16, suggesting that factions effectively raise up leaders as de facto idols in God’s Temple. One of the shortcomings of this discussion is that it misses the way that the Temple metaphor constitutes the community as morally and cultically bounded, thereby omitting to show how some of Paul’s discussions in this part of the epistle set the scene for subsequent chapters on sexual, marital and dietary matters. ‘Factionalism as Self-Deception’ (pp. 71–72) and ‘Factionalism as Parochialism’ (pp. 72–75) conclude this section of comment and draw together the themes in the first three chapters of the epistle.
1 Corinthians 5 begins Paul’s response to the sexual, moral and ritual matters that predominate in the central section of the epistle. Brock and Wannenwetsch do not, in my view, identify sufficiently clearly the complexity of the problem referred to in 1 Cor. 5:1. That is to say, the way Paul raises the issue couches it in the conceptuality of the prohibited degrees violations of the Levitical code, yet Paul resolutely avoids actually quoting Leviticus. This suggests that the basic problem turns on confusion regarding whether Torah non-observance entails freedom to live in a differently bounded moral universe, as is also illustrated by the boasting of 1 Cor. 5:2. This is not a line of comment that the authors of the present volume pursue in sufficient depth (there is superficial comment on Lev. 18:8 on p. 94), yet without such digging it is difficult to decode the situation to which the text refers or to bring it aptly to bear upon modern moral debate. Apart from this, comment on the chapter is characteristically rich in theological and doctrinal debate. There is a useful discussion of Augustine on Christian mourning (pp. 95–96). The excommunication materials (1 Cor. 5:3-5, pp. 97–102) offer an effective exposition of the passage, though this might have been strengthened by some comparative reflection upon the delegated nature of the binding and loosing that occurs here and what it says about Paul’s understanding of apostolic charism.
By way of summary comment, the present volume is both exhilarating and frustrating, perhaps in equal measure. On the one hand, it genuinely is a worked example of the theological, homiletical and ecclesial commitments of its authors. Nestled amongst doctrinal and ethical comments are some genuine exegetical gems, and in places it reads like the very best sort of theological sermon. On the other hand, however, its methodological reserve is frustrating, for multiple reasons. Explicit methodologies are not merely straitjackets that constrain a commentator’s movements, they are structures along which a commentator might grow and be fruitful. There were occasions at which it was evident, to me at least, that the authors’ interests had overshadowed key parts of the argument of the text. To a certain degree, this is a perennial issue in any commentary activity, but an explicit methodology at least gives some criteria by which this problem might be identified. This is related to my final critical comment in relation to the project, namely that the disciplinary role of method is not untheological. One of the crucial issues in biblical interpretation is, in my view, the question of the interpretative will to power. We all project our desires and biases onto Scripture in the act of reading. Methodological discipline can be a preliminary move in the spiritual quest for a reading that is something other than a projection. To return to the reported conversation with which this review article began, I think I might now say to my younger self and my undergraduate student interlocutor, ‘Be careful what you wish for; it is usually worse and far better than you might anticipate’. I look forward to reading Brock and Wannenwetsch’s next volume.