A new essay collection by such a reliably high calibre thinker as Miroslav Volf is always a welcome addition to a body of work. Collections like these enable the reader to see the ‘working out in the margins’ of the manuscripts that become the author's books. Observing the development and exploration of ideas is both fascinating and informative as a lesson in the pursuing and structuring compelling work. This is a summary collection of previously published essays which, by being united under one title, will hopefully reach a wider audience. The final essay was written exclusively for this collection (and is markedly relevant given that its topic is economics) and there is a lengthy discursive introduction which argues the case for why Scripture should be read theologically.
It is possible that on first glance some readers may be misled by the book's title (which is borrowed from a Luther quotation used in the introduction). This is not a book concerned with Scriptural interpretation in the manner one might expect from a biblical scholar. What is at stake, as far as this publication is concerned, is the life and health of the Christian community. According to Volf, the purpose of theology is to feed a living community of faith with a vision of the shape of Christian life for today, a vision which is founded on God's relationship with human beings throughout our history as recoded in Scripture. If theologians do not read Scripture theologically then they read it (if at all) in ways that ignore its present relationship to a living and dynamic community. If this happens, then theology will be irrelevant to the life of Christian communities shaped by Scripture. Volf devotes eight pages of his introduction to narrating how this was precisely the situation for a large portion of the twentieth century. Stale and infertile theology is no use to Christian communities, he argues. Rather, what is required is for theology to act as a practical science to help create a compellingly Christian shape not only to their own lives, but also to economic, governmental, administrative systems or to their relations to others not like them.
For some twenty years at least, there has been a growing trend for books to consider the importance of a theological reading of Scripture. Volf's contribution departs from many of these in being a less concerned with technical method and more focused on providing examples of responses that allow Scripture to comment on specific situations in our world. Volf sees this enterprise explicitly as part of a much older tradition, going back all the way to Fathers and including Augustine, Thomas, Luther and Barth to name a few. Those in this tradition saw themselves primarily as commentators on Scripture rather than ecclesiastical historians or textual critics.
Furthermore, Volf is not so much interested in the nature and shape of specific practices in the Church, a fashionable and bourgeoning area of research in itself, but rather that the Church should be reminded to read Scripture as a living body which is relevant to the lives of believers and the shape of this world. Indeed, he suggests ‘practices…are Christian insofar as they are “resonances” of God's engagement with the world.’(p.57). This idea is explored further in his essay ‘Theology for a Way of Life’ in which he argues that practices are shaped by beliefs. This being the case, our beliefs about God and Scripture as living realities matter a great deal because they affect how we live our lives in relation to God and his creation. This essay is followed by ‘Soft Difference: Church and Culture in 1 Peter’ which provides a particularly strong example of Volf's extended discussion of a specific area of Scripture drawing in diverse dialogue partners with a view to informing a contemporary issue. In particular, this discussion explores how the Church can contribute meaningfully to modern pluralistic societies without aggressively separating or becoming subsumed. To this end, the essay goes into great detail about the context of the Petrine community and the intentions of the letter but it does so only to develop an informed perspective on what kind of society the Church is. Similarly, ‘Hunger for Infinity: Christian Faith and the Dynamics of Economic Progress’ employs Ecclesiastes extensively to reveal what is natural about the insatiable nature of human desires and what is a peculiarly modern adaptation of this. This allows Volf to demonstrate that the perversion of creation that capitalism, and particularly consumerism, create cannot be wholly thrown out because it is predicated on something which is natural; the inexhaustible desire of human beings for God. These issues are determinatively theological questions.
Across all these essays, Volf's underlying point is not only that a theological reading of Scripture is the most useful way of approaching it, rather it is that Scripture is already bound up with our world and the questions it presents for Christians. So one does not read Scripture to throw light on external problems in the manner that a, perhaps oblique, Marxist reading of Karl Barth's work might throw up useful insights for understanding both a particular type of Marxism and Karl Barth's ethics. Scripture as a living body is necessarily bound up with present concerns and we read it but order that we come to contemporary issues with an understanding of the reality of God's action in this world.
Volf is well versed not only in the Scriptures, the theological and philosophical tradition (as one would hope from Yale's Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology) but also contemporary writing in the fields of economics, sociology and psychology to name just a few. Consequently, his detailed footnotes send the reader to new and fascinating places to explore. In addition, the variety of Scriptural sources employed across a wealth of contemporary topics, including economics, inter-religious relations and political society is evidence of the relevance of the Bible today that Volf argues for.
Resurgence in the theological reading of Scripture is underway in contemporary theology and it is to be hoped that this short collection, which touches many topics that affect modern life, will encourage more work in every area of theology to read Scripture as a the site of God's revelation to current issues today. Beyond academic theology, hopefully this collection of powerful essays will be testament enough to the contemporary relevance of scriptural thinking that the Word of God will be opened up to new hearers.
