Evangelicals and Tradition: Heiser or Hooker?
Earlier this year I read The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible by Michael S. Heiser (Lexham Press, 2015). Since one of my own goals as a scholar has been to help Christians recover a sense of God’s supernatural work in the world, I received this book with great interest. Early in the work, however, Heiser makes his methodological commitments clear, and I immediately began to have concerns. To make a long story short, he first removes Scripture from the church’s orthodox interpretive metanarrative (the creedal tradition), and then offers a competing metanarrative for Christian interpretation of the Bible. As I hope to make clear, Heiser’s novel approach is unrealistic and ultimately leads to interpretive error. We are far better off reading Scripture with the time-honored wisdom of the church catholic. For those of us in the Protestant tradition, one of our finest models for so doing is the sixteenth-century Anglican theologian Richard Hooker.
Unfiltered exegesis
I first began to feel squeamish while reading Heiser’s discussion of what he calls “filtering the text.”
Filters are used to eliminate things in order to achieve a desired result. When we use them in cooking, the unwanted elements are dredged, strained, and discarded. When used in our cars, they prevent particles from interfering with performance. When we use them in email, they weed out what (or whom) we don’t want to read. What’s left is what we use--what contributes to our meal, our engine, our sanity (14).
Heiser recounts that most of his education was conducted with certain “filters” in place. No one intended to do anything wrong, he says, but the filters were there nonetheless. “The content I learned was filtered through certain presumptions and traditions that ordered the material for me, that put it into a system that made sense to my modern mind. Verses that didn’t quite work with my tradition were ‘problem passages’ that were either filtered out or consigned to the periphery of unimportance” (14).
Heiser himself read the Bible through these same filters until a particularly close reading of Psalm 82 “broke” his filter. “More importantly, it alerted me to the fact that I’d been using one.” He continues, “Our traditions, however honorable, are not intrinsic to the Bible. They are systems we invent to organize the Bible. They are artificial. They are filters” (15, italics original).
Now, here comes the really interesting part: “Once I’d been awakened to this, it struck me as faithless to use a filter. But throwing away my filters cost me the systems with which I’d ordered Scripture and doctrine in my mind. I was left with lots of fragments. It didn’t feel like it at the time, but that was the best thing that could have happened” (15). Thus in this book he sets out to provide an unfiltered reading of the Bible, particularly with regard to the heavenly council that we occasionally run across in Scripture and the supernatural world it implies.
So, one might ask, is this not appropriate? Shouldn’t we allow the text to speak “on its own terms”? There certainly have been many attempts to do so since the time of the Enlightenment. Success in this area, however, has consistently eluded us. Most scholars today would admit that there are always filters. The only question is which ones we want to use. Perhaps in the tradition in which Heiser was educated it was indeed the general practice to filter out passages that appeared incongruous with important doctrinal claims. His current approach, however, involves filtering out the interpretive wisdom of the community that is Scripture’s proper setting. In other words, he filters out the voice of tradition as an interpretive framework for reading Scripture. He has not constructed a filter-free interpretive method, but exchanged one filter for another.
We may find some help here in the ideas of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who spoke of a “fusion of horizons.” A horizon is similar to a worldview. Each of us sees the world in light of a particular horizon. One’s horizon may expand or change over time based in part upon one’s encounters with the horizons of other people. The modern biblical interpreter has a horizon. So did the biblical authors and editors. When we engage biblical texts, there is a “fusing” of horizons that involves both the interpreter and the writer. Heiser brings an impressive working knowledge of the languages and literature of the ancient Near East. Properly understood, however, this does not create some “filterless” reading of biblical texts, but helps him to reconstruct the horizon of the biblical writers more fully than most other readers.
As Christians, part of the horizon we bring to these texts involves our formation in the church. Should we attempt to divest ourselves of our ecclesiastical formation when we come to the biblical texts? To do so is to set up an opposition between the Bible and the church, which, I suggest, is an utterly inappropriate bifurcation.
It was the church that created the two-Testament canon, and it did so for the purpose of teaching the apostolic faith. To attempt to study the canon apart from the faith and community that gave rise to it is like studying the human heart with no reference to the rest of the body to which it is organically connected. Sure, you could learn something about the heart in this way, but there’s so much more you could learn otherwise.
Inspiration and tradition
Certainly not all Christians see things this way. Recall Heiser’s statement quoted above: “Our traditions, however honorable, are not intrinsic to the Bible. They are systems we invent to organize the Bible. They are artificial.” At another point, Heiser notes that our creeds are “not inspired” (16).
In statements like these, Heiser shows himself to be the product of a particular kind of evangelical formation. As someone formed in a different branch of the church, I had numerous questions about his theological and methodological commitments: What does it mean for a tradition to be “artificial”? Does he mean that these traditions are entirely of human invention? Didn’t God play some role in helping us to shape tradition? Is it true that the creeds, while helpful, are not inspired? And while we’re at it, which creeds are we talking about?
The term “inspiration” means different things in different communities. Some Christians, when they use this term, specifically mean plenary verbal inspiration: the exact words of the entire Bible were given by God (usually in the original manuscripts). Often these Christians hold that it is only appropriate to speak of divine inspiration in relationship to Scripture. Other Christians understand this term in different ways. Some will say that while God is most certainly behind the writings of Scripture, we need not understand inspiration as “verbal.” God has spoken to us through human agents, but the humanity of those agents does come to bear on the shape and content of the writings.
Indeed, many Christians would say that God’s direction for the church is not confined to Scripture. Rather, it is also visible in tradition, and particularly the church’s ecumenical, conciliar decisions (e.g., Nicaea, Constantinople, Chalcedon). Christians even today may receive inspiration from God for the purpose of leading the church into grace and truth. One finds variations of this perspective in the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Methodist traditions, among others. Pentecostals may place less emphasis on the ecumenical councils, but they certainly affirm the ongoing inspiration of believers.
It is important to note here that while we may affirm ongoing inspiration, almost all Christians would acknowledge that not all inspiration is equal. Christians properly affirm the primacy of Scripture and its place as a canon for the church. It is the rule or measuring rod against which we judge all other theological claims. Yet it does not function in isolation. To return to a metaphor I used above, the body cannot survive without the heart, but the heart must function in concert with the other parts of the body.
Guidance of an English divine
Richard Hooker, one of the great figures of the English Reformation, provides important guidance regarding the relationship between Scripture and tradition. Hooker’s writings are in large part a response to English Puritans. Among the Puritans were vocal proponents of the idea that Scripture was the best source of knowledge about… well… everything. We don’t need creeds, councils, or other extrabiblical assistance because Scripture contains everything we need. Hooker, however, insisted that over the centuries the Holy Spirit had provided wisdom through the church that helps us as biblical interpreters. He insisted on Scripture’s primacy and most certainly did not consider Scripture and tradition to be of equal importance. Nevertheless, he rightly pointed out that tradition matters. The great creeds and other conciliar decisions of the church, he held, represent the church’s Spirit-guided reason.
Hooker affirmed sola scriptura in a qualified sense, as do many Christians today. This position is more accurately described, however, as prima scriptura. Scripture is primary, but it does not function in isolation from human reason expressed through both individuals and the church.
Daniel Eppley describes Hooker’s approach to Scripture as follows:
From Hooker’s perspective, the Puritan understanding of sola scriptura, with its promise that in the hands of the godly the Bible alone, read under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, leads directly to certain knowledge regarding all facets of God’s will, is both unrealistic and dangerous. By seeking to derive all religious insight from the Bible alone, what Puritans really do is allow a dangerously disproportionate influence to the one extrabiblical source of belief that cannot be eliminated from reading, the subjectivity of the reader—the unique experiences, hopes, fears, expectations, assumptions, biases, and prejudices that are part and parcel of the human condition (Reading the Bible with Richard Hooker, Fortress, 2016, 113-14).
In other words, for Hooker, private interpretation carried out in isolation from the wisdom of the church is likely to lead to idiosyncratic and skewed conclusions.
Scripture and the narrative of salvation
Unfortunately, this is where Heiser’s methodology ultimately leads. He does not just provide interesting and helpful exegetical insights in The Unseen Realm. He provides a new metanarrative according to which he thinks we should understand the entire canon. The notion of a divine council, found in passages such as Job 1:6 and Psalm 82:1, provides the hermeneutical key for understanding the Bible’s overarching story. Heiser finds evidence of the divine council or its effects in many places throughout the Bible, and other parts of Scripture fall into place in support of the narrative crafted around the divine council.
A full summary of Heiser’s complex schema is beyond the scope of this essay. For those interested, there are numerous summaries online. (The most thorough I have come across is here, but in fairness I’ll note that this summary is part of a rather negative review.) Suffice it to say, by creating a new metanarrative for Scripture, Heiser comes up with a vision of God in some ways inconsistent with the classical Christian understanding. For example, this God, who lacks omniscience, launched a plan to redeem humanity through Israel, but this plan failed. Christ is apparently Plan B. God had to keep this plan a secret, moreover, lest the evil and rebellious spiritual powers foil it before it could unfold. These are just a few of the idiosyncratic conclusions Heiser draws.
The metanarrative Heiser provides, moreover, filters out not only the wisdom of the church’s creedal tradition, but numerous passages of Scripture. For example, passages that speak of God’s omniscience (e.g., Psalm 139:1-12; Jeremiah 23:24; Hebrews 4:13) and omnipotence (e.g., Job 42:2; Psalm 115:3; Jeremiah 32:27; Rom 1:20), or those that convey Christ’s authority over the spiritual forces of evil (e.g., Mark 1:21-28; 5:1-20) militate against his conclusions. It is hard to reconcile Heiser’s schema with the overall vision of the Gospel of John, in which Jesus is open about his identity and saving power from early on and appears to orchestrate the events surrounding his death. Passages inconsistent with Heiser’s metanarrative subvert the ostensible reason for the exegetical investigation that gave rise to the book in the first place: to read without filters.
As readers of Scripture, we always approach the text from certain angles. We pay more attention to some texts than to others. We adopt certain perspectives in the Bible as normative for the life of faith and regard others as more peripheral. We come with presuppositions and methodological assumptions, some openly acknowledged and some of which we are unaware. We don’t have to do this on our own, though. One of the great gifts the church has given us is a body of wisdom for understanding these sacred texts. Rather than adopt such a novel perspective as Heiser proposes, it is prudent to allow ourselves to follow the guiding wisdom provided by our spiritual fathers and mothers through the centuries. Understanding the religions and cultures of the ancient Near East will undoubtedly enhance our understanding of the biblical texts, but it must not displace the Spirit-guided reflection of the faithful seeking God over the centuries.
Ireneaus made a similar point in the late second century in his famous “mosaic” analogy (Against Heresies, 1.8.1). He argued that we need the Rule of Faith--basically an early creed--to help us interpret Scripture, lest its various parts be construed in such a way as to give us a false picture of God and his saving work through Jesus Christ.
For Hooker, the church’s guidance is not a hindrance in interpreting Scripture. Rather, the church helps us to reason properly when it comes to matters of faith. As he writes:
What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next where-unto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth. That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think and define to be true or good, must in congruity of reason overrule all other inferior judgments whatsoever (Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 5.8.2).
His theological construal of law is important here. Any human law, he would say, should be an outworking of the laws of God. Proper reason, likewise, involves thinking in ways that are consistent with the various laws by which God has ordered all things. The church itself has gone about reasoning through important theological questions, and it has sought the assistance of God in so doing. What we today call the Great Tradition of Christian faith represents the church’s reason carried out under the guidance of God. Bradford Littlejohn puts the matter this way: “To be authoritative and reliable, reason must usually have a corporate dimension, reflecting the shared wisdom of the leaders of the church or state; ‘tradition,’ then, is simply the ongoing deposit of such corporate reason, exercised over centuries of Christian reflection, and requiring creative appropriation in every new generation” (Richard Hooker: A Companion to His Life and Work, Cascade, 113).
I recognize that the “tradition” Heiser wishes to dispense with is likely a confessional tradition far more specific than the broad, ecumenical, creedal faith of the church catholic. Unfortunately, he throws the orthodox baby out with his denominational bathwater. He sacrifices too much in the interest of freeing the text from the interpretive confines of the tradition in which he was educated.
Many evangelicals could find comfort in adopting a vision of Scripture and tradition more in line with Hooker’s. Scripture does not exist in a vacuum. It exists as a vital organ in the body of Christ. It works properly only in concert with the rest of the body. This includes the sanctified reason of those who have gone before us.
In conclusion, I’ll note that Methodists and Anglicans make rather strange evangelicals. The more conservative among us share much in common with other evangelicals, but nevertheless we don’t quite fit. Thanks in part to Hooker, it comes naturally for us to acknowledge the value of the body of wisdom we call “tradition.” I consider this not a weakness but a strength. Perhaps in time our recognition of the church’s sanctified reason will become part of our contribution to the larger body of Protestantism.
Dr. David F. Watson serves as Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. He is also Lead Editor for Firebrand.