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On the
Interpretation and Use of the Bible
With Reflections on experience
Ronald S.Wallace, Wm.B.Eerdmans, 1999
137p
Review by Ray Hoekzema
The publisher suggests that this book is “warm, pastorally oriented
instruction on how to read the Bible” and that it “succeeds on two
levels – the scholarly and the pastoral.” Maybe! But as I began reading
the book, warming to its contents, I also became aware that the
scholarly part was questionable. In fairness to the author, he was
unpretentious in his foreword.
Although I am not an ordained preacher, I have always been interested in
the subject under review and read much about the need for discernment
and the use of techniques in interpreting Scripture.
Wallace, now past his 80th year, was a pastor and for some time taught
at Columbia Theological Seminary. His childhood did not include church
worship, but he attended a Christian school. He tells that it, together
with the fact that he grew up in a Judeo-Christian period, referring to
it as “ethical”, led more easily into a Christian faith. He recalls that
somehow the Biblical stories held together in his mind as having divine
sanction, and therefore a ring of urgency and closeness to real truth.
Elsewhere, he says that we can still use our reason and skill in the
search for its meaning, and that we are encouraged to hope for a
presence of Christ Himself to preside over the interpretation of the
Scriptures.
Wallace says the message cannot be uncovered by mere analysis or
didactic means. To convey the words of God with full force, we have to
take seriously Christ’s promise to be in our midst, not only to
interpret but also to preach what we preach – to re-sound and re-echo
the invitations and commands in words adapted to the modern hearers.
Much of the author’s emphasis in conveying the message is on story
telling. There is a lot to be said for that but to my mind, Wallace got
carried away by this story-telling. In fairness to him, he does stress
that it is important to have the doctrine alongside the story, though
over-emphasis can bring sterility. In that light he refers to the
current Alpha course as a demonstration of how powerful the influence of
the simplest systematic presentation of ‘sound doctrine’ within house
groups can become. He endorses the liberating and rallying role the
doctrinal confessions have played in the Church in order to maintain the
integrity of its witness to Christ and to free itself from false
leadership.
Apart from a few other referees, Wallace is much taken in by Augustine,
Luther but especially Calvin. Considering that, one wonders how things
came unstuck. In a short account of his own experience, and I guess this
is where the subtitle comes in, he intimates that early in his ministry
he found himself in profound disagreement with the then up-to-date
standard critical commentaries and the great majority of the scholars
whom he consulted did not share his aims.
Wallace says that it will be obvious that the use of the word
‘reliability’ to define the standard that we are to expect to find in
the Bible, leaves room within the Church for wide differences of opinion
about what the Bible affirms and teaches. And that the Bible stories
will come home to us all at different times under different
circumstances in different ways.
Noting all of that, it is not so surprising that Wallace has a problem
with the teaching on reprobation and with miracles. He says that by
concentrating simply on the truth they teach about God and the life of
faith, he finds himself inclined to evade the issue of factuality. He
has problems with parts of the Elijah and Elisha accounts, with Jonah
and Job, which he prefers to regard as stories rather than historic
fact. The first chapters of Genesis have impressed him as intending to
be regarded mainly as story.
So, even though there is much in the first part of the book that is
useful for office-bearers and lay members, who like the Bereans are
encouraged to ‘examine the Scriptures for themselves’ in order to ’see
whether these things are so’ (Acts 1711), special discernment is needed
by those deciding to read this book. What started out as encouraging for
me, became saddening – deeply disappointing, to say the least.
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