Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Pre-Modern Exegesis, by Craig A. Carter. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018, xxiii + 279 pages, $29.00, paper.

This provocative book has gained much traction over the past several years. Hermeneutics, which we know as principles of interpretation, is lately often enveloped in communication theory of how others understand us and how we understand them. As such, it has become a massive area of debate in contemporary philosophy, biblical theology, and systematic theology. Within Christianity, this debate pulls in questions about how one sees Christ in the Old Testament, whether the New Testament use of the Old Testament is a model for biblical interpretation, what the role of church tradition is in interpreting the Bible, whether reading communities transform the meaning of the texts that they read, whether exegeting texts in historical contexts adequately reflects the divine authorship of Scripture, and many more. Hovering around these topics is the question of whether to read the Bible like any other book, or in a special way because it is divine inspiration.

Craig Carter adds his voice to this debate by effectively throwing down the gauntlet, challenging readers not to play by expected rules. His main contention is that pre-modern exegesis is superior to post-Enlightenment exegesis, because it recognizes divine transcendence, divine authorship, and divine action in the church through biblical texts. While other authors, like his mentor John Webster, have pressed such themes, Carter’s no holds barred assault on modern academic biblical interpretation draws a line in the sand: either we stand on the side of pre-critical exegesis with what he calls the “Christian Platonism” of the “Great Tradition,” or we stand with the atheistic (even Epicurean) rationalism of post-Enlightenment thinking. In doing so he has, as it were, ripped the lid off Pandora’s box. Critiquing historical-critical exegesis and its influences on Evangelical grammatical-historical exegesis brings the fear of chaos and disorder. Yet like Pandora’s box, hope comes out of the box as well, restoring divine action through biblical texts to its primary place. The main contention of this review is that while Carter places his finger appropriately on a sore spot in modern biblical interpretation, his unusual (though memorable!) catch phrases and concrete examples leave readers with work to do as they hope for a path forward. Following this evaluation, I append some comments targeting ministers in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.[1]

Carter’s eight chapters follow a broad two-step line of argumentation. First, the church needs to recover a theological hermeneutic, placing divine action through Scripture first in biblical interpretation (chs. 2–4). Second, pre-critical exegesis is the best model for putting theological hermeneutic into practice (chs. 5–7). Bracketing this material, his first and final chapters illustrate his proposed problem and solution by demonstrating the inadequacies of mere grammatical-historical exegesis in preaching through Christ as the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53.

The introduction will likely hook readers, especially pastors, who will sympathize with Carter’s painful experience of preaching through this text. Christians know, especially in light of apostolic use of this chapter, that they must find Christ there. Yet pastors regularly find that plowing through piles of commentaries on Isaiah, while pulling them well through grammatical and contextual issues, do not adequately prepare them to preach Christ from the text, apply it to their congregations, and present their material in gripping and engaging ways that do not merely feel like a running Bible commentary.

Such a common pastoral trial led Carter to question whether something was wrong with current evangelical assumptions about how to handle biblical exegesis. He could not be more right in recognizing that readers and preachers must respect divine intention through texts, seeking divine action in those who read and hear them. His solution is to approach the Bible starting with a proper theology of Scripture (ch. 2), moving next to a “theological metaphysics” related to the God behind the text and working through it (ch. 3), and then searching through Christian history for alternatives to modern approaches (ch. 4). What he learns from doing so is reading Scripture as a unity centered on Jesus Christ (ch. 5), rooting the “spiritual sense” of Scripture in its literal sense (ch. 5), and learning to see and hear Christ in the Old Testament (ch. 7; “the climax of the book,” 191). Challenging the assumptions of most modern evangelical readers, especially the undertext that the church missed the boat for most of its history, is well-placed. We need to read the Bible seeking God, being changed by the Spirit and renewed in Christ’s image as we do so, all while listening to voices from the Christian tradition.

One overarching strength of the book is that, unlike his mentor Webster, who often stressed the vital centrality of exegesis in theology without doing much of it, Carter’s work is filled with careful reflection of concrete texts of Scripture. This makes his advancement of Webster’s otherwise outstanding work a significant move forward, enabling Carter to strike a nerve with Evangelicals more directly.

Despite the great value of Carter’s aims, the path still needs some clearing to reach his goals adequately. We can see this best by looking at his eccentric (and eclectic) use of terms, by singling out his reliance on John Calvin as a model for biblical interpretation and teaching, and by evaluating his example of how to preach Isaiah 53.

First, Carter’s ultimatum is to recover what he calls “Christian Platonism.” Most readers, like myself, might not react favorably to this term initially. Yet Carter envelops five main ideas under “Christian Platonism”: anti-materialism, anti-mechanism, anti-nominalism, anti-relativism, and anti-skepticism (79–80). One overarching concern here is to maintain divine transcendence (46–48), wedded to divine providence governing and working through all things, including God’s work through biblical texts. However, Carter makes too much hinge on his peculiar terminology—for instance, when he asserts that opposing Christian Platonism is “to oppose philosophy itself” (82). This is theological and philosophical overreaching (82).

Referring to “Thomas Aquinas’ Christian Platonism” (65, fn., 6) illustrates well my reservations about the term “Christian Platonism.” Aquinas wove together elements of Aristotelian and neo-Platonic thought (especially, but not only, via Pseudo-Dionysius), which served as vehicles to carry his Christian philosophy and theology. Like Aquinas, most medieval and post-Reformation scholastics were too eclectic to meaningfully label them “Christian Platonist.” Carter’s ascription of Christian Platonism to C. S. Lewis is closer to the mark (89, fn., 59), since Lewis would have owned up to the title.

What Carter is getting at is valuable, in that he seeks to demonstrate that the Triune God is ontologically transcendent, working imminently in creation and providence. However, Christian Platonism is an unfortunate way of summarizing the “Great Tradition.” Traditional Platonism, as he notes at points, has liabilities. Relegating ideal forms to a mental world potentially subjected “god” himself to these ideal forms. Alternatively, by placing forms in real things, Aristotle had the advantage of enabling people to study individual things (like human beings) as having their own forms, making them distinct and individual rather than mere shadowy reflections of a world of perfect ideas. Arguably, this latter option proved to be an easier path for late medieval and early modern Reformed theologians to place God in his own category, giving form, material, efficient causation, and purpose to all created things. Of course, Carter solves this dilemma by encompassing Aristotle under Platonism (78–79). It seems, however, that the answer to Carter’s concern is not ultimately Christian Platonism as much as it is his dogged assertion of the Creator/creature distinction and relationship.

Carter fills his book with other subordinate, semi-ambiguous catch phrases as well. For instance, he presses Hans Boersma’s language of “sacramental ontology” (57). What he means is that Scripture mediates Christ to us (59). However, while sacramental language aims to incorporate divine presence and action in everything, many have questioned whether this is the right way to put things. If everything is a sacrament, then effectively nothing is a sacrament. Yet Carter moves towards equating “Christian Platonism” with Boersma’s “sacramental ontology” and Webster’s “domain of the Word” (59). Though he later notes Kevin Vanhoozer’s reservations about such terminology, preferring “covenantal ontology” instead (248), Carter pulls him too under the shield of Christian Platonism. It is questionable as well whether his appeal to sensus plenior really conveys the idea of divine intent behind biblical texts. Sensus plenior is elastic and ill-defined, though Carter seems to mean that the divine author intended more than the human authors of the text. If we tether this notion to the actual words of the text, reading passages in light of the completed canon, then it admits a good sense, but sensus plenior sometimes transgresses these bounds.

What he is really defending is multiple meanings or “senses” of Scripture (e.g., 183). However, he seems in the end to want only two senses: the literal meaning of the text and its Christological “spiritual sense” (98, 164, 176, 181, and the appendix). We will see below that this is what he does in practice by way of illustration. While such catch phrases and others like them are memorable, they do not reflect the diversity of thought in Christian history well, which Carter presents as mostly monolithic before the Enlightenment (e. g., 85). However, as he concedes near the end, “As we have seen throughout this book, terminology is extremely varied and difficult to pin down” (222).

Second, perhaps the most implausible move, stretching the bounds of credulity, lies in chapter six. Carter strangely associates authors from Origen up through John Calvin as all belonging to the same Great Tradition. Particularly, he says things like, “Calvin was aware of the truth contained in the medieval fourfold sense of Scripture” (183) and that his “ritual castigation” of Origen (184) was not meant to rule out allegorical exegesis. Calvin did not press a spiritual sense rooted in the literal sense, as Carter argues. Instead, Carter’s so-called spiritual sense was merely the proper application of the text. Moreover, using Calvin’s exegesis of Galatians 4:24 is a dubious example (184), due to the unique nature of the passage as a rare reference to “allegory.” Carter’s wildest assertion is that Calvin “shows no interest whatsoever in arguing for a single-meaning theory as the Enlightenment does” (186). This is hard to fathom given Calvin’s context, assertions, and actual exegetical practices. Calvin adhered so strictly to the literal-historical sense of Scripture that, during and after his lifetime, Lutherans were even accused of “Judaizing” by not finding Christ and the Trinity often enough in his commentaries. Even Carter later acknowledges that Calvin “makes little use of the spiritual sense (or allegory)” (222). Yet he concludes, “I have made Calvin the hero of my narrative of the development of the Great Tradition” (250). Later Reformed and Lutheran controversies over Calvin’s exegetical methods introduce a significant complication with Carter’s approach. Again, he presents a rather naively monolithic view of the Great Tradition, using divine transcendence as its common thread (“Christian Platonism”) while flattening out the vast diversity present in the pre-critical Christian tradition. This is revisionist history at best, failing to allow historical figures to speak with their own voices in their own contexts. Yet how can we listen to them if we cannot hear them clearly first?

Third, his model for drawing from the Great Tradition, a sample sermon on Isaiah 53, lacks many key characteristics of historical Christian exegesis and preaching. In the end, I am not convinced that Carter fully puts preachers in a better position to preach Isaiah 53 like he depicts in his introductory chapter. Though he gives readers a written summary of his sermon on the text (239–44), his example neither matches historical-critical exegesis nor the Great Tradition. After his iconoclastic attack on modern exegetical methodology, one would expect a clear use of allegory and application, for instance. He instead gives a didactic summary of how the passage is a prophecy of Christ’s death and resurrection as our high priest. Absent is the doxological rhetorical flair and searching questions of Gregory, Augustine, Aquinas, and even Calvin. The intro is purely contextual and canonical, and non-experimental in tone. There is also no application within the points, with only implicit application at the end. He does not really illustrate how to use the primary tools of the Great Tradition, especially the four senses of the quadriga. Doing so would have told us what the text said and pointed us to Christ, both of which he does, while also engaging the hearts of believers in the church with application (tropology) and directing them to the beatific vision (anagogy). His note that his sermon is “not loaded with illustrations or stories” (244) certainly stands in contrast to authors like Gregory Nazianzen and John Chrysostom, to name two only. Readers are left with a dry hollowed out exegesis that looks neither like the Great Tradition nor like post-Enlightenment hermeneutics. Despite his salutary challenges to contemporary hermeneutics, marked by some rhetorical eccentricities, he leaves readers a bit rudderless in the end.

What lessons then can we gather from the above? There is no golden age in church history. The Spirit used flawed people like us to fumble through preserving the truth, employing more or less successful methods. Radical differences exist between pre and post-Enlightenment exegesis, yet there is no monolithic Great Tradition. There is a broad Christian tradition, always obsessed with the Trinity, Jesus Christ, and the Bible, which, by God’s grace, continues into the modern period. Many in the Great Tradition got to the right ideas in the wrong ways, while many in the modern (and post-modern) period stress right ways, though often built on wrong ideas. Eclipsing the Trinity and Jesus Christ in favor of an objective, historically contextualized text is bad (even devastatingly terrible), but leading us to grasp the thought of biblical books in their own grammar, contexts, and thought processes is good. Yet the wild allegorizing of some in the Great Tradition is less than helpful in understanding Scripture, though the Trinitarian and Christological ideas conveyed through these allegories are often true, breathtaking, and soul-enrapturing. The Spirit preserves the church’s text-centered Trinitarian and Christological tradition through flawed people influenced both by pre and post-Enlightenment exegesis. Thankfully, the Spirit is raising people today aiming to place the Triune God back at the heart of theology, with the Christ-glorifying Spirit becoming once again front and center in hermeneutics.

In short, we have something to take and something to ditch from every century of church history, including both the Great Tradition and our own. The sobering fact, however, is that it is far easier to pull exegetical specks out of our brother’s eyes than it is to see the logs in our own. We are too close to our times to have proper perspective, but we should be chastened, humbled listeners, attending both to the Spirit’s voice in Scripture and to his continued work through the Great Tradition, of which we hope we remain a part. Carter’s challenge is well placed, generating conversations that the church needs to have as she looks back while searching for a path ahead.

More pointedly, what benefits does Carter’s material offer ministers in the OPC? We should remember that preaching is more than exegesis and biblical theological technique. Colossians 1:28–29 gives us an agenda for preaching, which aspects of Carter’s Great Tradition can help us pursue: “Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.” While our Confession of Faith well states that “the full sense of any Scripture . . . is not manifold but one” (Westminster Confesstion of Faith 1.9), preaching entails more than merely presenting what the Bible means. We must preach Christ, applying him to everyone’s consciences, preparing them to meet Christ in glory. The medieval quadriga, or fourfold sense, may be off base in terms of seeking multiple senses in a given text, yet something true remains. What if our goals in preaching were to tell people what the text says, how it directs them to Christ, what the church should do in light of it, and how it directs them to see Christ in glory? Retaining the single sense of Scripture makes our exegesis better, but shifting the quadriga into goals would likely make our preaching even better. Whether or not Carter achieves his aims adequately in challenging modern hermeneutics and promoting the Great Tradition, he reminds us of something important. Even where the Christian tradition has been flawed, the Spirit often instilled a good instinct in his people. This book usefully spurs us towards reflecting on ways that he has done so.

Endnote

[1] This review is thus a modified version of Ryan M. McGraw, “A Review of Craig A. Carter, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Pre-Modern Exegesis,” in Books at a Glance, 2024.

Ryan M. McGraw is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church serving as a professor of systematic theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Greenville, South Carolina. Ordained Servant Online, August–September, 2024.