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Biblical Reasoning: Christological and Trinitarian Rules for Exegesis
R. B. Jamieson & Tyler Wittman
Baker Academic (2022). 320 pp.
At the end of his high priestly prayer, Jesus prays on behalf of all his disciples throughout the ages, “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24, ESV). The telos of redeemed humanity is to behold the glory of the triune God. And the aim of the pastor in the present age is to point his flock to this divine glory week in and week out as he opens the Scriptures and directs the faith-filled gaze of his congregants to the wonders of this God’s redemptive work through the incarnation of the Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit. This is the motivation which lies behind R. B. Jamieson’s and Tyler R. Wittman’s recent work on dogmatic exegesis. Their argument is straightforward: “Beholding Christ by faith requires that we hear and obey Christ’s teaching. In order to understand Christ’s teaching, we must reason both exegetically and dogmatically” (235).
The claim they present and defend throughout the book is that these two types of reasoning (exegetical and dogmatic) do not take place apart from each other but are mutually reinforcing and informing. Following John Webster’s essay on biblical reasoning, they say that exegetical reasoning follows the text of Scripture (in all its grammatical, canonical, and socio-historical context) while dogmatic reasoning “attends to the theological claims of the text, looking along and with the text to discern the ultimate reality to which it bears witness” (xviii). The one cannot be complete without the other. If exegetical reasoning helps one understand what the text says, dogmatic reasoning leads one to understand what the text means. Their goal is to demonstrate that there is “two-way traffic” between exegesis and dogmatics (or systematic theology) (xix). Careful exegesis of biblical texts reveals a theological grammar (to use a term that recurs frequently in their book) that in turn guides faithful exegesis.
To show the necessity of this symbiotic relationship, they turn to theology proper and Christology, showing that the witness of Scripture requires that readers adhere to certain principles and rules (taught and practiced by pro-Nicene pastor theologians) that guide and inform their exegetical conclusions. A helpful table summarizing these rules can be found in the appendix (239–40).
With this work Jamieson and Wittman help answer the question concerning the relationship between exegesis and theology. They demonstrate, through careful exegesis, that the conclusions of systematic theology are not some superstructure forced upon the witness of Scripture, but are in fact the very foundation which provides it’s coherence. As they write, “Proper dogmatic reasoning moves not away from Scripture to a final resting place in theological construction but stays within Scripture, moves within Scripture, and delves deeper into the inexhaustible riches of the mysteries declared in Scripture” (233). Thus the interplay between exegesis and theology is a circle, not a line. The two mutually inform and strengthen each other, drawing the exegetical theologian to behold the triune, redeeming God in all his beauty.
Though it is not a polemical work, their project does reveal the deficiencies of a strict biblicism which is reticent to acknowledge the positive role of the historical witness of the church as a ministerial authority to biblical interpretation. Instead, through careful interaction with Scripture and patristic sources, they show how the theological consensus of the pro-Nicene era opens trinitarian and Christological riches which otherwise may remain hidden to contemporary exegetes untrained in patristic theology.
The effect of the work, which is written for pastors, scholars, students, and thoughtful lay readers, is a call for a more theologically robust reading of Scripture. Recently, after a sermon which heralded the beauty of the Trinity, a pastor confessed to me that he thought the sermon deficient due to its lack of practical application. If by practical application he meant how a parent might address their child’s reticence to pick up his room that afternoon, he may have been right. But if practical application can mean heralding our God such that our people are filled with wonder and worship, he was quite wrong. Biblical Reasoning is both an invitation and a challenge: an invitation to wrestle with Scripture, refusing to let go until the Spirit blesses with a vision of the Reality behind the text; and a challenge to hold up to scrutiny one’s assumptions about how to approach, interpret, and herald the text, assumptions which may need to return, in the spirit of the Reformation, to wisdom from the past.
Seth Porch is the Marketing and Media Coordinator for the Center for Pastor Theologians. He holds a ThM from Bethlehem College & Seminary.
