There’s a video of John Piper doing the rounds as I write; Piper offers some cautions for Biblical theology during a panel discussion. You can watch it here.
Piper reflects on James Hamilton and others showing him connections all across the Psalter, and other parts of the Bible, that he’d never seen before. He’s delighted by that but cautions the audience that he doesn’t think him not having seen this before is a problem and that not everyone needs to do the wide cross-canon work that someone like Hamilton does. He wants to encourage people, which is laudable.
He also references doing his work primarily in paragraphs. I’ll return to that.
Piper then gives a caution against speculation in the pulpit, saying that ‘as speculation increases, authority decreases.’ Essentially, he is wary that if a preacher starts pulling on lots of biblical theological threads across the canon then they’ll say a lot of maybe, which doesn’t do their congregation a lot of good. He’s careful to highlight that all preachers have some level of ‘maybe’ as they aren’t omniscient but wants a solidity to preaching.
I love the broad sweep of the canon. I want to notice big biblical themes stretching across the Bible. I want people to be excited when they notice Temple language somewhere or spot a tree or find bread along with wine. I’m open to reading in two (three?) dimensions (story and symbol, arranged orthogonally) in a way that I’m not sure Piper would be. So, Piper’s caution is, perhaps, aimed at me.
It’s a helpful one: speculation isn’t what you’re doing when you’re preaching. It’s not a lecture or an apologetics seminar, nor are we musing on connections. In preaching, you offer Christ to the people from the passage for their food. You preach with an expectation of encounter, assuming that the gospel is a glass of water in a parched land to all the Christians in your congregation: we all desperately need the balm of Jesus’ work in his death-resurrection-ascension-gift of the Spirit, every week.
I don’t speculate about connections when preaching. I occasionally offer a maybe that enhances a main point that’s not a maybe. At Harvest Church we have a monthly Bible Study, as part of a wider formation strategy, but it does give the opportunity for those conversations where reading the text together is play. Speculation is a delight in those settings, as long as it follows the grain of the text. I get to write some more fleshed out ideas here at my blog, and the bonkers stuff can live in occasional conversations (why is the fruit of the Spirit singular? I’ve got a moderately mad proposal I’m chewing on that I might write up one day).
However, all of that said, I don’t think Piper’s criticism really lands. It might caution someone drunk on too much James Jordan from splurting it all at an unsuspecting conversation, but the problem there is the drunkenness rather than the ‘spirit.’ Careful discernment and slow sipping in moderation is the wise way to drink whisky. The same principle applies.
The reason Piper’s caution doesn’t land is that all Hamilton is doing is the same thing Piper does with a paragraph. Small work is not different to big work. Hamilton mines the canon while Piper mines sentences. The possibility for speculation is not lowered when reading one sentence to the next just because they’re next to each other. The rules of logic and linguistics are still vital; the ‘rule of faith’ still rules our reading; story still provides the framework within which to read symbols.
That challenge is only increased by the fading of reading cultures and the demise of literacy. People struggle to fathom the logic of Paul’s letters mostly because their English reading comprehension has decreased. Plenty of people read paragraphs in ways that aren’t in harmony with the other paragraphs around them or indeed the whole of the canon of scripture. In this sense the challenge could even be reversed: there is a danger of speculation in reading a paragraph in isolation from the canon’s context.
The reversed challenge isn’t the same thing as the wonders Hamilton can pull from the Psalms, the solution doesn’t require seeing linguistic Hebrew connections it simply calls for a deep knowledge of the Bible’s story and allowing interpretation to flow along the grain of it.
You could put together an equally wrong argument that contained a grain of truth by suggesting that people who mine paragraphs miss the wood for the trees, very interested in specific sentence construction but not understanding the big themes being dealt with. The New Testament is, among other things, a commentary on the Old Testament. Jesus and the New Testament authors teach us how to read the Old Testament as Christian scripture; they’re quoting it often and alluding to it constantly. Everything is connected to everything else in layers of meaning.
It’s the glory of God to conceal a thing and the glory of kings to search it out (Proverbs 25.2). Not all of the Bible reveals its wonder at once. That’s deliberate. The scriptures are given for mature Christians in a mature church. That takes time in a human life and millennia, it seems, for the church herself. While we read along with the breeze of the centuries, tethered by the rule of faith, we also anticipate new vistas that are not at odds with what we already know to open themselves in the text as the church matures over the centuries. The work of revealing what God has hidden is good work, it’s hard work, but it’s deeply worthwhile.
Do you bring all of this out when you preach? Absolutely not, in the average sermon you couldn’t do the groundwork for understanding even if it was helpful or appropriate. What you do is two things, you make sure you read along the grain of the canon and you connect things enough to the big story to whet the church’s appetite for the fact that there is a bigger story at all.
When we’re reading the Bible together though, don’t be afraid of play. When partnered with some epistemic humility, play becomes the disposition of joy that’s going to open up vistas of wonder in the text.
Image: American Eagle, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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