The Bible
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 50, No. 1 – Fall 2007
Managing Editor: Malcolm B. Yarnell III
By John Douglas Morrison. The Evangelical Theological Society Monograph Series, volume 5. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2006. 306 + xiv pages. Softcover, $30.00
Is God mute? Is the Creator of this world incapable of communicating with his creatures using meaningful, content-filled human language? Unfortunately, since the time of the Enlightenment, many theologians and biblical scholars would answer these questions in the affirmative. However, until recently the overwhelming consensus of the church has been that the Old Testament and New Testament Scriptures are the very Word of God. This “identity thesis,” the belief that these texts as texts are also truly the Word of God which bears “contentful” communication from God (5), had been central to the church’s understanding of Scripture from the very beginning. What has caused many within the churches and the academy to alter their stance on this all-important doctrine? In Has God Said? Scripture, the Word of God, and the Crisis of Theological Authority, John Douglas Morrison seeks to identify the primary forces responsible for the rejection of the identity thesis and seeks to find a way in which contemporary churches can reaffirm this all important theological position.
Morrison correctly attributes the rejection of the identity thesis to an intellectual shift that occurred as a result of the writings of thinkers such as Baruch de Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, and Sir Isaac Newton (chapters 2–3). The shift in the intellectual climate led to what Morrison describes as destructive cosmological and epistemological dualisms. These destructive dualisms, which are neither grounded in nor required by the teachings of Scripture itself, nevertheless led many to conclude that there could be no meaningful congress between God and his creation. Kant’s division of reality into the knowable phenomenal world and the noumenal world which is unknowable by pure reason is not only representative of but also furthered this intellectual shift (ch. 3). Add to this shift in thinking the recognition that there is a decidedly human element within Scripture and it became increasingly difficult for scholars to affirm that the Scriptures are truly the Word of God.
Morrison’s analysis of the forces behind the rejection of the identity thesis is both thorough and insightful. He is able to demonstrate how one or both of these destructive dualisms lay at the heart of many modern theological discussions of the nature of Scripture. This is true not only of liberals such as Friedrich Schleiermacher but also evangelicals such as Donald Bloesch and Clark Pinnock. Morrison’s work does not end simply with an analysis of the destructive forces that led to the rejection of the identity thesis; he also seeks to suggest a new way in which the Church can envision how this very human text can also be the very Word of God.
Borrowing insights from Albert Einstein, Thomas F. Torrance, and John Calvin, Morrison proposes what he calls a “Christocentric, Multi- leveled, Interactive model of Scripture as the written Word of God” (221). Agreeing with one of Karl Barth’s central emphases that Jesus Christ is truly and uniquely the Word of God (224), Morrison asks how we can also think of Scripture as the Word of God. Rejecting the Newtonian, dualistic view of reality that has been so destructive for theology over the past several centuries, Morrison favors a more unified view of reality as exemplified in the work of Albert Einstein. Einstein found what can only be described as a miraculous “correlation between human thought and the independent empirical world” (226). Our understanding of the world around us opens us upward to higher “levels of rationality” (226). The very intelligibility of the universe leads us necessarily to recognize that there are higher levels of intelligibility that actually ground our knowledge of the world around us. This multileveled, unified view of the world, in which the intelligibility of the lower levels points to, opens us “up” to, and is ultimately grounded in higher levels of intelligibility, differs significantly from Newton’s disjunc- tive, dualistic view of reality.
In his use of Einstein, Morrison is not appealing to some sort of natural theology. Rather, he uses Einstein’s multileveled view of reality analogically in order to present a more biblical, and specifically more Hebraic, way of describing how the historical text of Scripture can be seen to participate in and be grounded in God’s revelation in Jesus Christ (234–235).
The very fact that Jesus Christ, the Word of God, has broken into history in the incarnation opens up and includes the Scriptures within God’s rev- elation of himself in Christ. This is so because these texts make up part of that very history of incarnation in that they preceded, pointed to, and later interpreted the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Word of God. However, the Scriptures are more than mere witnesses to this event. They are truly the Word of God because they derive their being as the Word of God, by the Spirit, from the higher level of reality, the eternal Word of God. The Scriptures are a crucial historical aspect of God’s larger redemptive revelation centered in Jesus Christ and flow from God “in, under, of and from the Word-Act of God at the higher level, Jesus Christ” (237). Through the process of revelation and inspiration the Scriptures are truly the Word of God because they derive their being and status as “Word of God” from their participation in this higher level of reality, the eternal Word of God (236). Morrison includes John Calvin in this discussion because Calvin exemplifies the model of Scripture that Morrison envisions, in that Calvin understood Scripture actually to “be the word of God in and as an aspect of the larger action of God in revelation as ‘inspired’ interaction, response, witness and interpretation” (235).
Has God Said? is a significant contribution to the discussion of the nature of Holy Scripture. It is carefully researched and compellingly argued. Morrison’s insightful analysis of the theological landscape and the philosophical forces at work behind the scenes that have shaped that land- scape is enough to recommend this book. Add to this a somewhat daring, though perhaps not universally accessible, suggestion for re-envisioning how we might understand the relationship between the Word of God as text and the Word of God incarnate in Jesus Christ, and we have a helpful resource for believers who wish to stand alongside the church’s long tradition of affirming that the Scriptures truly are the very Word of God.
