The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture

by Iain W. Provan

Publisher:

Baylor University Press

, 2017

Overview

In 1517, Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberg’s castle church. Luther’s seemingly inconsequential act ultimately launched the Reformation, a movement that forever transformed both the Church and Western culture. The repositioning of the Bible as beginning, middle, and end of Christian faith was crucial to the Reformation. Two words alone captured this emphasis on the Bible’s divine inspiration, its abiding authority, and its clarity, efficacy, and sufficiency: sola scriptura.

In the five centuries since the Reformation, the confidence Luther and the Reformers placed in the Bible has slowly eroded. Enlightened modernity came to treat the Bible like any other text, subjecting it to a near endless array of historical-critical methods derived from the sciences and philosophy. The result is that in many quarters of Protestantism today the Bible as word has ceased to be the Word.

In The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture, Iain Provan aims to restore a Reformation-like confidence in the Bible by recovering a Reformation-like reading strategy. To accomplish these aims Provan first acknowledges the value in the Church’s precritical appropriation of the Bible and, then, in a chastened use of modern and postmodern critical methods. But Provan resolutely returns to the Reformers’ affirmation of the centrality of the literal sense of the text, in the Bible’s original languages, for a right-minded biblical interpretation. In the end the volume shows that it is possible to arrive at an approach to biblical interpretation for the twenty-first century that does not simply replicate the Protestant hermeneutics of the sixteenth, but stands in fundamental continuity with them. Such lavish attention to, and importance placed upon, a seriously literal interpretation of Scripture is appropriate to the Christian confession of the word as Word—the one God’s Word for the one world.

Key Features

• Affirms the centrality of the literal sense of the text
• Shows that it is possible to arrive at an approach to biblical interpretation for the twenty-first century
• Aims to restore a Reformation-like confidence in the Bible

Contents

• 1. Introduction: O Little Town of... Wittenberg

Part I. Before There Were Protestants: Long-Standing Questions

• 2. Scripture and Canon in the Early Church: On Chickens and Their Eggs
• 3. The Formation of the Christian Canon: The Pressure of the Twenty-Two
• 4. On the Meaning of Words: The Literal, the Spiritual, and the Plain Confusing
• 5. The Reading of Scripture in the New Testament: All That the Prophets Have Spoken
• 6. Literal Reading, Typology, and Allegory in Paul: A Rose by Any Other Name
• 7. Justin, Irenaeus, and Tertullian: False Economies and Hidden Treasure
• 8. Origen, Theodore, and Augustine: The Fertility of Scripture
• 9. How Shall We Then Read?: The Church Fathers, the Reformers, and Ourselves
• 10. The Septuagint as Christian Scripture: It’s All Greek to Me
• 11. The Vulgate, the Renaissance, and the Reformation: When in Rome...

Part II. Now There Are Protestants: Scripture in a Changing World

• 12. The Perspicuity of Scripture Alone: A Lamp unto My Feet
• 13. The Authority of Scripture: Thy Word Is Truth
• 14. The Bible, the Heavens, and the Earth: The Beginnings of an Eclipse
• 15. The Emergence of Secular History: The Way We (Really) Were
• 16. On Engaging with a Changing World: Fight, Flight, and the Fifth Way

Part III. Still Protesting: Scripture in the (Post)Modern World

• 17. Source and Form Criticism: Behind the Text
• 18. Redaction and Rhetorical Criticism: The Persuasive Text
• 19. Structuralism and Poststructuralism: Texts and Subtexts
• 20. Narrative Criticism: Getting the Story Straight
• 21. Social-Scientific and Feminist Criticism Texts as Social Constructs
• 22. The Canonical Reading of Scripture: The End of Criticism
• 23. Postscript
• Appendix: Modern Developments in Our Understanding of the Biblical Text

Praise for The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture

I’ve been waiting years for a book such as this: a comprehensive treatment of the nature, history, and significance of the Bible’s literal interpretation. Here is a sustained argument for the importance of reading with the Reformers, which in Provan’s account means doing as they say, not exactly as they do. This is a brave book that sails against the prevailing winds of hermeneutical fashion, charting a ‘fifth way’ that avoids reductive historical, expansive postmodern, narrow literalistic, and unregulated spiritual ways of reading the Bible. Read literally, Scripture is not a wax nose that can be turned this way or that, but a divinely inspired, authoritative text with real bite.

—Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Research Professor of Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

This prodigiously well-read, well-written, elegant, and accessible study has a passionate and serious treatise to expound. As its title hints, it is not another book on the history of interpretation, except in the sense that Professor Provan believes that the history of interpretation, especially in the time of the Fathers and the Reformers, has vital significance for the twenty-first century. So, we need to pay attention if we are to get interpretation on the right track five hundred years after Luther posted his theses. Aspects of Professor Provan’s own thesis about literal interpretation are unfashionable and therefore need to be pondered with open minds.

—John Goldingay, David Allan Hubbard Professor of Old Testament, Fuller Theological Seminary

Iain Provan has given us here a vigorous affirmation on how to read the Bible as a Protestant. An important and nuanced argument set in the context of the wider Christian tradition and recent hermeneutical developments, this book stands out among the welter of recent writings on the Reformation.

—Timothy George, Dean, Beeson Divinity School at Samford University and general editor of the Reformation Commentary on Scripture

Product Details

• Title: The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture
• Author: Iain W. Provan
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Print Publication Date: 2017
• Logos Release Date: 2024
• Pages: 712
• Era: era:contemporary
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• Subjects: Bible › Hermeneutics; Bible › Criticism, interpretation, etc; Reformation
• ISBNs: 9781481306089, 9781481306096, 9781481307499, 9781481307505, 9781481306102, 1481306081, 148130609X, 1481307495, 1481307509, 1481306103
• Resource ID: LLS:RFRMTNRGHSCRPTR
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-07-18T01:07:41Z

About Iain W. Provan

Iain Provan has been the Marshall Sheppard Professor of Biblical Studies since 1997. He was born and educated in the UK and retains strong family, academic and church connections with his homeland. He received his MA at Glasgow University in Mediaeval History and Archaeology, his BA from London Bible College in Theology and his PhD from Cambridge, where his thesis focused on the books of Kings, and was subsequently published as Hezekiah and the Books of Kings. His subsequent academic teaching career took him to King’s College London, the University of Wales and the University of Edinburgh, where he was a senior lecturer in Hebrew and Old Testament Studies. He has written numerous essays and articles, and several books including commentaries on Lamentations, 1 and 2 Kings, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs. Most recently he has co-authored with Phil Long and Tremper Longman A Biblical History of Israel. He is an ordained minister of the Church of Scotland; a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge; and the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship. He and his wife, Lynette, have four children. Iain is also a qualified Provincial B Licence soccer coach (BC) and ARA rowing coach (UK).