Educating Kings
The quadriga and biblical pedagogy
This paper was first delivered as a lecture in various locations in 2011.
One of the much-discussed books of the past year has been Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible, a critique of what Smith describes as “Biblicism.” Smith, a Notre Dame sociologist and recent convert to the Roman Catholic church, isolates ten assumptions of Biblicism. It involves a particular view of the origin and nature of the text (Scripture is “identical with God’s very own words”), its clarity (intelligent people can understand its plain meaning by taking the text in the “most obvious, literal sense”), its internal coherence, and its comprehensiveness. The upshot of Biblicism is to read the Bible as a “handbook or textbook for Christian belief and living.”1 Biblicism is evident in the proliferation of Christian books purporting to give the biblical view of nearly everything – health, work, femininity, business, friendship, marriage, education, dress codes, on and on.2 Smith refutes Biblicism by pointing to the “pervasive interpretive pluralism” evident among Christians who hold something close to a Biblicist view of Scripture. If there is so pervasive disagreement on so many topics, then the authority of Scripture is practically neutralized. What difference do convictions of Scripture’s comprehensiveness and authority make if we can come to no agreement about what it actually teaches?
As an alternative to Biblicism, Smith advocates a Christocentric hermeneutic that accepts the complexities and ambiguities of Scripture without embarrassment. This is the truly Evangelical hermeneutic that Biblicism is not. When the Bible is read Christocentrically, we find in it a gospel that “shakes loose from us every misguided and idolatrous preconception about everything, literally everything that we thought we knew, and then begins to rebuild us in the light of the singularly radical fact of who God really is.”3 Though the gospel has universal effect, the Bible itself does not speak directly to every question, or give us the kind of information Biblicists want it to give.
I have many objections to Smith’s book. One is that, whatever our hermeneutical theory, it needs to accommodate itself to the actual contents of the Bible. I quite agree that Scripture is Christ-centered and should be read as such. But when I open the Bible I find that it talks about a lot of other things too. It is being Christ-centered when it describes the creation of the world and of human beings, when it recounts the history of the patriarchs of the exodus, when it records the political intrigue of David’s court, when its prophets denounce the injustices perpetuated by the rich and powerful against the weak and poor, when its sages give advice about money and work and etiquette. I do not have the right to pre-determine what Scripture is going to talk about before I even look at it. Otherwise, Christocentric method becomes just another mechanism for muzzling the Bible. We can put it theologically: Scripture is Christ-centered, but the Christ on which it centers is the One in whom all things hold together. Scripture comes to us in a Christic form, centered, but comprehensive. That is the approach to Scripture that I assume in this lecture. Call it “Christocentric Biblicism” if you like.
But that leaves a host of hermeneutical questions unanswered. This is another objection to Smith’s book: He thinks he refutes “Biblicism” entirely, but his argument is actually successful only on a much narrower point, on the hermeneutical assumptions of Biblicism. For a “Biblicism” that affirms the Bible is God’s own words and that it is comprehensive, but does not expect it always to communicate its wisdom “clearly” or “literally” or according to a “plain” hermeneutic, then the fact of interpretive pluralism made nary a dent. If the Bible is God’s Word, we might conclude it is going to be a forest of symbols, both difficult and time-consuming to hack through. We might even conclude that God’s intention is to give us a wreck of a book precisely to train us to solve riddles and untie knots. More on this a bit later.
For now, the question is, what hermeneutical approach enables us both to a) stick close to Christ and b) honor the comprehensiveness of the actual contents of Scripture? What hermeneutical approach focuses on Christ and the gospel but also affirms Van Til’s claim that Scripture speaks, directly or indirectly, about everything. Grasping either of these without the other is hermeneutically flawed, practically undesirable, and, more importantly, Christologically questionable. Unfortunately, such a hermeneutic is largely unavailable to Protestants, Reformed Protestants included. Some Reformed exegetes, for instance, so focus on redemptive-historical that they have nothing specific to say; some pluck a text from just anywhere and insist that it be added to the US Constitution. Not only in the church but also in the academy, we live today with the shards and fragments of what was once a comprehensive and coherent hermeneutical outlook, known in medieval biblical studies as the quadriga.
In this paper, I give a brief description of the quadriga and explain its theo-logic. I hope to show that the quadriga keeps our various hermeneutical goals together: Through this lens, we see Christ everywhere in Scripture but at the same time find everywhere instruction and insight into our duties before God. Having briefly described the system, I want to apply it in two ways: First, I will examine a biblical text in such a way as to show how a quadrigized text might be useful for a particular academic discipline, in this case political theory. Second, and more speculatively, I apply the framework of the quadriga to the interpretation of extra-biblical and even extra-textual texts.
One last introductory comment: This lecture is not really about pedagogy, about which I understand almost nothing, though I trust that some of you will be able to point me to important pedagogical implications.