Ian W. Scott, Paul’s Way of Knowing: Story, Experience, and the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 368 pages, ISBN 9780801036095.

There have been a number of studies published recently on Paul’s epistemology – several of them trying to show that Paul’s epistemology was somehow “narratival”. The notion of a narrative epistemology is not that easy to grasp and is often confusing, especially since different people mean different things by it.

Ian Scott’s Paul’s Way of Knowing belongs squarely within this turn toward a narrative epistemology. Although there are problems with this position, it must be said that Scott avoids the gravest pitfalls. This is especially because he generally avoids confusing the issue of knowing with the issue of truth (a pitfall that mars a recent book by Andre Munzinger). Once in a while, however, a tendency toward the wilder side of the turn to narrative shows through, as in Scott’s confusion about where “meaning” lies (pp. 116-17), and it certainly doesn’t help Scott’s case that he uses Hans Frei as a support.

I should point out, however, that this book is less about narrative than the title implies. In fact, it was originally published by Mohr Siebeck under the title Implicit Epistemology in the Letters of Paul, which is a better title, as it more accurately relates the contents of the book. I say that because the current subtitle “Story, Experience, and the Spirit” does not describe much of the contents of the book, including, perhaps, its main points. One wonders whether the folks at Baker were just trying to capitalize on the current narrative craze.

A lot of what this book deals with are issues of central importance for the study of Paul, and readers can learn a lot about the present state of Pauline studies from this book. Scott’s judgments are refreshingly level-headed, and at times he makes welcome departure from problematic trends. For example, on pp. 183-85, he bucks the trend by rejecting the reading of pistis Iesous Christou as a subjective genitive.

This is a book for serious students of Paul. Its language is accessible to a wide range of readers, and I certainly recommend it for seminary students, but I fear the importance of its subject matter might escape most lay readers.

Reviewed by John C. Poirier

Preview Paul’s Way of Knowing: books.google.com/books?id=m96VFOxBKlkC

Tony Jones, “Inhabiting the Biblical Narrative: How I Learned to Stop Doing Bible Studies and Start Loving the Bible Again” Youthworker (May/Jun 2004, Vol 20, No 5), pages 30-34.

In the midst of serving other people and the details of life, it can be easy to forget that there is one large story of humanity. No other book captures the truth and circumstances of humans better than the Bible. It is the history of the world from family to family to family – the story of the One True God who acted within the timeline of humanity to accomplish His purposes. However, it remains all too easy to concentrate on the minutia of scripture and miss the main story that life is all about.

When you look beyond the rigid study of individual words in the Bible, you come to appreciate how God relates to people. Life is about relationships; living is about people. It really helps to read the Bible with this in mind.

Tony Jones, from tonyj.net

Tony tells us that his adventure into the story of the Bible started when the high school students he discipled did not want to study a Christian pop-culture book. They wanted to really get to know the Bible, even though they feared that, as had happened before, they would fail to grasp the relevance of the Bible for their lives. The students knew that they should be reading and understanding the Bible, and felt guiltily for not making the connection.

Yet, the Bible is the only book that can feed the soul. It is the only book that comforts, that loves, that challenges, that raises questions, and answers the question of why we are here. All of these benefits can be lost when we allow the story that God is telling to stop affecting who we are and what we do.

I’d become a scientist in a lab coat. I’d been taught to take a piece of God’s story and put it in a Petri dish, then to put it under a microscope and get it down to its smallest part, from selection to sentence to phrase to word to syllable. When I read this, I realized the same had been true of me. We forget to think about what culture was like when we read scripture. We forget to think about the smells, the armies, the dress code, the food, and everything else that helps us remember the stories of our ancestors as being real and not a dusty fairy tale wearing a religious mask. Being more serious about the overall narrative will hopefully give us real and vivid images of God’s movement in history to replace the trinkets and bumper stickers that often trivialize the history of God and man.

Differing with Walston, classical Pentecostal Robert Graves writes that the doctrine of initial evidence and the subsequence of the baptism in the Holy Spirit are taught by scripture.

 Editor Introduction

Rick Walston, The Speaking in Tongues Controversy: The Initial, Physical Evidence of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit (Fairfax, VA: Xulon Press, 2003), 235 pages.

The thrust of Rick Walston’s book The Speaking in Tongues Controversy: The Initial, Physical Evidence of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit is that the two major distinctive doctrines of Pentecostal theology—the initial evidence of tongues and the separability/subsequence of Spirit-baptism—are wrong. In his own words, Walston is “attempting to lead the reader to the obvious conclusion that Luke does not intend to establish tongues-as-evidence as a doctrine or as a paradigm” (85); the same can be said for the doctrine of separability and subsequence, though he devotes a scant eight paragraphs to it (141-144).

Walston’s endeavor to disprove these aspects of Pentecostal theology relies on a number of strategies. First, he attempts to show that whereas Pentecostals believe Luke’s theology is predominantly pneumatological, it is in fact more soteriological. For Walston, this entails (1) accepting Acts 2:38-41 as the paradigmatic passage of Acts, (2) statistically comparing the occurrences of pneumatological and soteriological passages in Acts, and (3) redefining the baptism in the Holy Spirit as a salvific event. Second, he constructs an anti-Pentecostal interpretation of Acts using the hermeneutical principle of authorial intent as a singular, over-arching, controlling interpretive canon. This entails building a massive construct upon what Luke does not say at opportune times.

In this chapter from the Rightly Understanding God’s Word series, Craig S. Keener investigates the question, what can we really learn from the narratives in the Bible?

As appearing in Pneuma Review Spring 2005.

Take a course on biblical interpretation with New Testament scholar, Professor Craig S. Keener.

Introduction to Context of Genre

Although we have surveyed and illustrated many of the most important general rules for interpretation, we must now note that some interpretation skills depend on the kinds of writing in the Bible one is studying. For example, Revelation is prophetic (and probably apocalyptic) literature, which is full of symbols; if interpreters today debate how literal some of Revelation’s images are, no one doubts that much of Revelation (for instance, the prostitute and the bride) are each symbols representing something other than what they would mean literally (Babylon and New Jerusalem versus two literal women). The Psalms are poetry, and also often employ graphic images. Poetry involved poetic license; when Job claims that his steps were “bathed in butter” (Job 29:6), he means that he was prosperous, not that his hallways were packed with butter up to his ankles. One could provide hundreds of examples; those who deny the use of symbolism in some parts of the Bible (especially poetic portions) have simply not read the Bible very thoroughly.

On the other hand, narratives are not full of symbols. One should not read the story of David and Goliath and think, “What does Goliath stand for? What do the smooth stones stand for?” These accounts are intended as literal historical stories, and we seek to learn morals from these accounts the same way we would seek to learn them from our experiences or accounts of others’ experiences today. (The difference between biblical experiences and modern experiences is that the biblical ones more often come with clues to the proper interpretation from God’s perfect perspective.) We may apply what we learn from Goliath to other challenges that we face, but Goliath does not “symbolize” those challenges; he is simply one example of a challenge.

Narrative

Narrative is the most common genre in the Bible. Narrative simply means a “story,” whether a true story like history or biography (most of the Bible’s narratives) or a story meant to communicate truth by fictional analogy, like a parable. A basic rule of interpretation for a story is that we should ask, “What is the moral of this story?” Or to put it differently, “What lessons can we learn from this story?”

Avoid Allegory