the scriptural world is not the real, literal, historical world, then what freedom can it give to sinners living in the real historical world? This means that the gospel-centered message of the Bible is inherently tied up with the truth of its history in which God makes his trustworthiness known.
Similarly, to admit that scripture could be untruthful in historical matters would also be to suggest that God’s ultimate promise in the gospel could be an error. Even if we have considerable evidence of the central events of the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ, admitting that scripture can error downgrades the certainty of these events to the level of “probable.” Saying that the biblical documents can be untruthful is to say that their historical claims are to be believed with the same degrees of greater and lesser probability that all secular history possesses. Nevertheless, if we have full assurance of our salvation (as scripture tells us we do, Heb 10:19–20), then the events that underline those promises cannot merely be probable, but absolutely true. Indeed the nature of the faith does not allow Christians to confess that Christ “probably” died for their sins and “probably” rose for their justification. If that were the case, my assurance through Word and sacrament is also merely probable. But these things are not probable, but as Luther repeatedly states in the Catechisms, they are “most certainly true.” They are most certainly true because God makes them known and guarantees them in his truthful written Word. Indeed, as Luther aptly states in the Large Catechism: “Because we know that God does not lie. I and my neighbor and, in short, all men, may err and deceive, but the Word of God cannot err.”7
One could of course claim that only the “essential” facts of scripture need be true.8 But this leaves open the question: how does one decide upon what is essential? Where does one draw the line between the essential and inessential? Furthermore, as we will argue below, if any fact is only meaningful and understandable within an entire narrative framework (in this case, the whole of the history of salvation centering on Jesus) how then can any facts be inessential to the truth of the gospel?9 Indeed, all individual facts contribute to this narrative and for that reason none can be deemed inessential.
In light of this, our method of dealing with scripture in the following work will grow out of the claim that the Old and New Testaments are the utterly truthful, inspired Word of God centering on Jesus Christ as the incarnate eternal Word of God. Because God is the author of scripture, God cannot be thought to contradict himself. Nor does he err.10 Whereas modern liberal biblical scholars break the unity of scripture apart into contradictory traditions, we will read the scripture in a manner consummate with its own claims about itself and with the history of Christian interpretation prior to the Enlightenment.
Because God inspired the scriptures to speak his eternal Word Jesus through human words, we should not in our exposition of scripture shy away from the fact that the Old Testament is to be expounded christologically. This means that typological readings of the Old Testament are therefore completely appropriate. God’s authorial intention expressed through the Old Testament authors was always to point ahead to Jesus Christ.11 In keeping with this, we must also positively assert that the Old Testament is a book of predictive prophecy truly fulfilled in the manifestation of the Savior. Indeed, if Christ were not present in the Old Testament, it would be difficult to say Marcion was not correct after all.12
This does not mean that exegesis should hover somewhere above its concrete historical context. Rather, as we will argue below, it is a question of what contextualizes the history of salvation itself. Just as Jesus Christ is incarnate in the flesh of a particular people and within a particular historical situation, so too the Word of God as it is incarnate in the scriptures is mediated through the thought forms, history, and cultural structures common to the Ancient Near East and the Hellenistic world. If anything, this has been the main contribution of modern critical scholarship. Certain words, for example, mean different things within the context of different historical periods and are frequently used differently by various authors. At the same time, different biblical authors have unique emphases in their theology. Ecclesiastes is not Romans after all! The interpreter of scripture must be sensitive to this, and although some “proof-texting” is not entirely illegitimate, theologians must use it with care to the context of the overall book of scripture.
This means that we will expound the scriptures according to the sensus literalis, that is, the literal sense. This is by no means identical with the “literalism” or, perhaps even better, “letterism” as the Wittenberg Reformers were well aware. In his definition of the literal sense, Thomas Aquinas claimed that the literal sense was the meaning that God intended when he communicated the content of the Bible through the inspired authors.13 Doubtless, the Reformers would not have disagreed with such a sentiment.14
To show how the Reformers understood this intended meaning, we should turn to Luther’s concept of scriptural clarity. Luther spoke about two kinds of clarity, external clarity and inner clarity.15 The external clarity, claimed Luther, was the grammatical and hence historically accessible meaning of the text. Such a meaning was open to anyone. The inner clarity was the meaning of the Bible as it centered on Christ. Since one cannot understand Christ or see the unity of the Bible in him without the Holy Spirit (2 Cor 3) those who read the scripture without faith fail to grasp its true meaning. Conversely, it is also true that one will not understand the scriptures if one does not understand their mode of speaking and grammar, which are of course, historically conditioned.
We can therefore see what the sensus literalis is for Luther in light of Christ.16 On the one hand God communicated himself in the concrete, contextual meaning of the text for the people to whom he addressed it through the prophets and apostles. At the same time, he intended that that meaning might also bear witness to Christ and ultimately drive people to him. Therefore the literal sense is the coming together of the external and internal clarity of the Bible, just as when we refer to the person of Christ in the concrete we speak about the unity of his two natures. The literal sense is not, as modern interpreters have often thought, the meaning of the text as we might want to construe it based on the limited circumstances of certain historical authors.17 Rather, it is the harmony of the literal, grammatical meaning of the words of the Bible, together with the larger narrative of the history of salvation, culminating in and centering in Jesus Christ. This conception of the Bible is consummate with the Lutheran doctrine of the genus majestaticum,18 wherein the divine nature (in analogy to the internal clarity) is not something separate from the human nature (in analogy to the external clarity), but rather communicates the fullness of itself through the external form of the human nature.
Modern liberal biblical scholars have failed to understand this and will doubtless protest that this does violence to the original intention of the authors. Of course, extreme versions of Christian exegesis (beginning with Origen and moving on into the Middle Ages) did do violence to the original meaning of the text by burying it under imaginative and often times fanciful Christian allegory.19 The problem with all this was not that it attempted to read the Bible as a book about Jesus, but that it understood Jesus incorrectly. Allegorical reading tries to strip away the external meaning to find the Spirit hidden within. It gives us a Docetic Bible, in the same way that Protestant Liberalism gives us a Nestorian Bible. In this framework, the Bible effectively becomes a mere steppingstone to God hidden in his majesty, rather than God hidden in concrete
