Against Theological Retrieval as Resource Gathering

A few years after its 1998 publication, theologian John Webster republished his Scottish Journal of Theology article “Hermeneutics in Modern Theology” as part of an essay collection titled Word and Church: Essays in Christian Dogmatics (T&T Clark, 2001). Much of the text remained untouched, but the new version offered an expanded conclusion in the subsection “Reader and Church.” Because the article itself ends on a series of quotes from Augustine in lieu of a proper conclusion, these additions are the final words we hear from Webster himself in the piece:

Christian theology will want to lay emphasis on the sheerly intrusive character of God’s Word, which is not tameable by socialization. At least one of the functions of the doctrine of sola scriptura is to erect a barrier against the drift of an ecclesial culture of reading into a hardness of heart. In short: the church, if it reads well, always reads against itself.

Webster is correct. We must take seriously how interpreting Scripture shapes us. As Webster suggests throughout the article, our natural inclination is to treat the interpretation of Scripture as a private act or a merely intellectual activity. The problem with this, of course, is that Scripture is a unique book: God is its author, and spiritual transformation is its end.

Webster says it this way: 

The constellation of dispositions and skills which are deployed by the wise Christian reader cannot be grasped apart from the life and practices of the Christian community, for they are drawn from public stores of accumulated knowledge and experience, and they take the form as ruled behavior.

There is an inextricable link between the opening of God’s Word and the cultivation of a fruitful spiritual life grounded in the Spirit’s work within us. The more we read Scripture, the more Scripture itself shapes the readers we become. To read Christianly is to read incisively, for the word of God is living and active and sharper than any double-edged sword, penetrating as far as the separation of soul and spirit, joints and marrow (Heb. 4:12). In this sense, Scripture reads us more than we read its text, for it exposes the fruit we bear and beckons us to holiness. This is what it means for the church to always be reading Scripture “against itself.” Every time we open the Scriptures, we are confronted with the same hermeneutical stakes: human readers of God’s Word require judgment, correction, and sanctification.

This image is one that can serve us well as we consider theological retrieval. By “theological retrieval,” I mean something like the deliberate recovery, reception, and use of earlier Christian theology and practice in the life of today’s church. Retrieval has now secured a sizable place in evangelical theology. (Webster himself even wrote about it.) I think, however, evangelicals today would be well served to conceptualize theological retrieval not merely as a dogmatic mode, a theological method, or a hermeneutical tool, but as a way of life—a means of reckoning with our own sinful hearts, of confronting ourselves with Christian practice as passed down through the ages, of sacrificing our self-image for the image of Christ into which we are being transformed.

Or, more succinctly: the church, if it retrieves well, always retrieves against itself.

Retrieval as Resource, Retrieval as Discipline

The language and practice of contemporary retrieval often treat the Christian tradition as a treasury or storehouse. In this vision of retrieval, the church of the present has received a common inheritance from which she can withdraw doctrines, arguments, practices, and exegetical tools for today. We retrieve from this common inheritance as a resource.

There is something to the image: the Christian faith is received (not invented), and Scripture itself speaks of a “good deposit” of the gospel being entrusted to the church. We are accountable, however, to what we guard. Taken by itself, a vision of theological retrieval as resource risks placing the theologian in control of the whole operation: it is the theologian of the present who opens the vault, selects a resource, puts it to work, and locks the door once the work is done. The saints of the past supply; the saints of the present adjudicate. Such a model leaves little room for confrontation. It reflects nothing of the reality that the church has not yet arrived—little acknowledgment that our modern judgments, habits, and desires themselves need correction, or that the church of the past may well have seen things more clearly than we do today.

Therein lies the issue: “retrieval as resource” alone cannot bear the full weight that theological retrieval requires. If we want theological retrieval to become a way of life, we have to find a model that moves beyond instrumentality: “retrieval as discipline,” or askesis. The spiritual life has always been a life of discipline. Retrieval is properly ascetical because receiving the tradition requires the formation of a reader who is corrected by it. As John Behr writes in his study of asceticism and anthropology in Irenaeus and Clement, “Christians are to acquire and practise the virtues by following the pedagogy of Christ . . . and through this exercise be prepared for the reception of grace.” From its earliest centuries, the church has understood the Christian life as a disciplined life. 

If retrieval as resource asks what the riches of the Christian past can offer us, retrieval as discipline asks what the riches of the Christian past require of us. The vision of retrieval as discipline places a burden on us to be transformed in light of what we encounter in church history. If we want to build a barrier against hardness of heart in contemporary conversations around retrieval, we must retrieve against ourselves—and when we retrieve against ourselves, we must expect the Christian tradition to act upon us in real ways. We must, in other words, shift the question from, “What should I retrieve?” to “What kind of person must I become in order to retrieve faithfully?”

The distinction between these two models is also visible in the questions we ask of old texts. If we were to open Augustine’s Confessions, retrieval as resource might ask, “How might Augustine refine my theology of X?” Retrieval as discipline, by contrast, would ask, “What does Augustine expose about my own spiritual or theological deficiencies?” Retrieval as discipline might encounter patristic habits of Scripture memorization and slow down enough to ask if our doctrine of Scripture might have somehow eclipsed our actual attentiveness to the text of Scripture itself.

When we open a book like Basil’s Sermon to the Rich, it is not enough to treat the hoarded stores of food as interpretive background—we must, instead, ask ourselves where excess and greed have taken root within our own hearts. This is what it means to retrieve retrieval against itself: to allow our historical understandings to place us beneath the weight of judgment. A retrieval of Augustine should hold our lusts and vainglories before the mirror of Scripture. A retrieval of patristic spirituality should move beyond theory into the habits and practices of prayer, fasting, service, and communion. And, in turn, a retrieval of Basil should confront our own avarice, not just within an ecclesial system or culture but within our lives.

Sheerly Intrusive Retrieval

Theological retrieval that only produces a bibliography, terminological precision, or a new ecclesial identity without a corresponding transformation of the soul and body has failed to live up to its own aspirations. What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have theological retrieval but does not have spiritual renewal? Can such retrieval save him? The Christian Scriptures are “sheerly intrusive” in Webster’s words. In a derivative sense, this description is an apt one for the communion of saints. Church history exposes our habits, our desires, and our ultimate need for a Savior, Christ the great philanthropist who heals us of our sin. We need a sheerly intrusive theological retrieval that not only recovers what may be obscured by the passing of time but also opens a new horizon of spiritual practice before us.

Because the Scriptures are sheerly intrusive, however, they are also capable of cutting against tradition. Sola scriptura does not just safeguard us from hardness of heart; it also safeguards us from idolizing the past as a time of long-gone perfection (what has elsewhere been called “repristination”). Reenvisioning retrieval against itself must also include retrieving the tradition against the tradition. To treat theological retrieval as a discipline includes the expectation that we will be corrected by the past’s interpretation of Scripture and the expectation that the past will be judged by Scripture.

We must, then, surrender our assumption that either our contemporary instincts or our inherited Christian traditions possess the final position from which judgment is rendered. That position belongs, instead, to Holy Scripture, which is wholly “inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16–17).

Alongside Webster, then, let us lay emphasis on the sheerly intrusive character of God’s Word as it has been received through the ages. The church, if it retrieves well, always retrieves against itself—and this, we hope, is the aspiration of any contemporary turn to the Christian past: the formation of particular habits of mind, ways of living, and embodied Christian practices through which the church is equipped for every good work.