THE CLARITY OF SCRIPTURE: HISTORY, THEOLOGY AND CONTEMPORARY LITERARY STUDIES

Written by James Callahan Reviewed By David Gibson

Perhaps most readers of this journal would be able to rehearse many of the standard details of the debate over the doctrine of Scripture. Key terms such as inerrancy and infallibility are no strangers to evangelical conversations. But not so the doctrine of the clarity of Scripture.

James Callahan’s detailed and highly competent study of Scripture’s clarity places us in his debt by putting the issue squarely on the table and showing us the many different theological issues that are involved in confessing that Scripture is clear. His thesis is that clarity expresses a three-fold relationship between text, reading and reader. It is the claim that Scripture is clear when read as Scripture, as Christians should read Scripture. Callahan’s aim is to defend a view of the Bible as a privileged text, within a privileged community, understood by a privileged mode of interpretation. The book falls into two parts: Part one examines clarity from a historical-theological perspective and examines early church history, through the middle ages, to the Reformation and all the attendant issues of allegorical, typological, literal and spiritual approaches to Scripture. Part two focuses on the modern era and literary-theological approaches to the Bible with the attendant issues of textuality, intentionality, intertextuality, structuralism and post-structuralism. Running throughout both parts is Callahan’s explanation of the tension between clarity and obscurity and how this has been approached throughout the centuries.

The book has numerous strengths. Callahan shows how the commitment to the clarity of Scripture is actually the result of a number of other theological commitments such as the illumination of the reader by the Spirit; divine rather than simply conventional authority of the text; and characterisation of Scripture as realistically self-evidenced. Some recent historiography on Scripture has mistakenly argued that because the terms ‘infallibility’ or ‘inerrancy’ were absent at certain periods of church history so were the theological commitments which they express. Callahan avoids such an error here—his survey of church history involves not a quest for the term ‘clarity’ but a careful understanding of the events and struggles that gave rise to the need to delineate Scripture’s clarity.

However, this important and extremely valuable book is not the last word on the matter and I suspect many will disagree with certain parts of it. Some general criticisms, as well as one overarching problem, can be offered. Generally it is not so much what Callahan affirms about clarity but what he denies that is problematic throughout the book. Callahan wishes to distance himself from what he regards as false trails in understanding clarity: for instance, a historical approach (distinguishing between what Scripture meant and what Scripture means); historical harmonisation; and authorial intent. In these areas Callahan makes some valid points but in places is guilty of selecting weak representations of the views he rejects. Most serious is his handling of intentionality, rejecting the notion that viewing texts as authored should be a methodological criterion of authentic interpretation. Here his treatment and dismissal of Vanhoozer’s work is cursory at best and on at least one occasion flatly wrong—he attributes a viewpoint of Derrida’s deconstructionism to Vanhoozer (41)! Callahan regards authorial intention as an interpretive theory that is extrinsic to Scripture and to my mind this undermines his treatment of reading as one of the three components involved in clarity.

Indeed, his treatment of reading is part of the most overarching lack in the book. For this reviewer, Callahan does not sufficiently argue for reading as an exercise in biblical theology. His masterly survey of primitive Christian approaches to clarity exposes a thoroughly Christological appreciation of Scripture, yet his own tendency is to privilege philosophical/literary approaches to reading above biblical-theological reading. For instance, in looking at Deuteronomy he argues that the meaning of Deuteronomy resides, at least in part, in things such as our ‘performing’ of the text’s instructions and commands. This is all well and good but what does it mean to ‘perform’ a text such as Deuteronomy 6 in the light of the coming of Christ and this side of the cross and resurrection? Only a biblical theology makes Deuteronomy truly clear and on the whole Callahan has little to offer on Christ and clarity as a valid contemporary position.

This is a very difficult book and probably only postgraduate readers will appreciate Stanley Hauerwas’ jacket endorsement that Callahan ‘has brought remarkable clarity to the question of the clarity of Scripture’. Only those acquainted with some technical issues in the hermeneutical arena will fully follow his argument, and this is unfortunate. The book is handsomely presented but my copy ended abruptly with nothing at all by way of bibliography, or indexes.


David Gibson

David Gibson is the Minister of Trinity Church, Aberdeen, Scotland. He is author of Reading the Decree (T&T Clark, 2009) and co-editor of From Heaven
He Came and Sought Her
(Crossway, 2013).