Biblicism is a tough drug to kick, as recent years in evangelical circles have demonstrated. Arguments have proliferated about traditional understandings of God, his attributes, how to formulate the Trinity, how the unchanging God—as at least classical theists assert—relates to the changing contours of redemptive history, and the nature of authority for creedal theology. Many of these debate points rest on issues of hermeneutics—that is, methods for interpreting Scripture.

The assumption that often underlies the biblicist approach to interpreting Scripture is that we should read God’s Word in a rationalist fashion, as if we can make best sense of it by interpreting without the help of traditional insights. Sometimes this take relates to a grammatical-historical only approach. In this paradigm, the factor of Scripture’s divine author is set aside so that the only layer of meaning of holy Scripture is what the original author could have understood about what he wrote at the human level. Sometimes it is an impulse to reduce God to historical experience. The question here is whether Scripture reveals or even presumes something bigger than the history it records—namely, the transcendent God who stands behind that history—or not.

Matthew Levering’s book Scripture and Metaphysics is a thought-provoking investigation of these issues. He contends that an exegetical approach to Christian doctrine is not at odds with articulating metaphysical considerations. Just because Scripture does not provide us with a fully detailed picture of the study of being, existence, and history’s relation to the transcendent God does not mean that it entirely lacks glimpses of those considerations.

Levering makes his case by using Thomas Aquinas as his lens to consider various issues and objections raised within modern biblical studies. Many of these other conversation partners are at odds with traditional Christian ideas. Even this connection should show us that biblicism ends up being about revisionism. The ultimate authority in biblicism is not the Bible. Rather, the ultimate authority is the interpreter of Scripture, who reads Scripture individualistically with no recourse to what others have understood it to mean through the ages and throughout the church.

Much of Levering’s book is an exposition of Aquinas’s thought on the matters raised. He is in one sense attempting to reestablish Aquinas’s views in the face of recent criticism. In this respect, the work aims to repristinate Aquinas in light of a reductionist approach to biblical interpretation.

In another sense, this book uses Aquinas as a lens through which to consider this problem of the relation of Scripture to the structures of being and ultimate reality. Accordingly, Levering makes the case that Aquinas saw his metaphysical conclusions arising from the biblical text, especially from the full scope of the biblical narrative.

In this second sense, the book’s payoff is less about whether you agree with Thomas Aquinas in every detail of the conclusions cataloged in this book. Rather, the real issue is about recognizing with Aquinas that Scripture is about more than mere history. It is about the true God. It does contain premises that rise above the mere historical religious experiences of its writers. It was inspired by God and has a metaphysical grounding that transcends merely the human authors.

Reformed authors have discussed some of these issues under the heading of principia. The principia essendi is the foundation of being. Why can we exist? God is the principia essendi because he is the reason that any of us can exist. On the other hand, the principia cognoscendi is the foundation of knowing. How can we know something about God? We can know God and ultimate truth because he reveals it to us. Revelation comes as general and special revelation. We know some things by creation as nature itself reveals some divine truth. We know other things because God explicitly makes them plain to his people by speaking supernaturally.

Both general and special revelation presume a supernatural basis, though. Both address supernatural content. Nature itself is loaded with supernatural valence.

Hence, Reformed people can find great profit in reading Levering’s book. It is a reminder that redemptive history is true but not all there is. God stands behind that history. We must give some thought to the relationship of his redemptive history to God himself if we are going to fathom his Word and the God whom it reveals properly.

This book is dense in places and challenging in its content. It dives into various debates and outlines principles of Trinitarian theology. It is not lightweight.

Levering has still written a work that bears fruit as we consider our stance toward Scripture. He asks us to consider if Scripture is merely a human product, or if the triune God stands behind it as its cause. If we rightly come to the latter conclusion, it should then shape how we read Scripture.

©Harrison Perkins. All Rights Reserved.

Matthew Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).

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Post authored by:

• Harrison Perkins

  

  Harrison Perkins (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast; MDiv, Westminster Seminary California) is pastor of Oakland Hills Community Church (OPC), a member of the of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, a Senior Research Fellow at the Craig Center for the Study of the Westminster Standards,  online instructor in church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, a visiting lecturer in systematic theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary, and author of Reformed Covenant Theology: A Systematic Introduction. You can read more from him at Pastor Perks.

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