Gary T Meadors, general editor (Professor of Greek and NT at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan), notes that “moving beyond the Bible” is based on I. Howard Marshall’s Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology.
1. The goal of I. Howard Marshall:
Marshall pondered how scholars come to different conclusions regarding a woman’s place in the home and ministry. In his book, Marshall seeks to find “a principled way of moving from the ancient, authoritative text to its modern application?”[1] and “to explore how the principles can be established from scripture itself, whether explicitly in terms of what the Bible itself has to say about how to understand the divine Word or implicitly in terms of how the biblical actors and writers actually understand the sources that were at their disposal.”[2]
2. The method I. Howard Marshall:
Marshall states “that all of us do in fact go beyond Scripture in our doctrine. There is such a thing as development in doctrine.’”[3]
3. Examples of I. Howard Marshall:
OT genocide, even though commanded by God was “intrinsically wrong in view of the broader biblical teaching.”[4] According to Marshall, we must go beyond the imagery used by Jesus to accommodate his audience, such as, the rich man “in agony in this fire,” “in this place of torment” (Luke 16:25, 28).[5] Marshall adds that even though Jesus used this kind of imagery “I suspect that the people of his day were not as aware of the unacceptability of such imagery as we, hopefully, are today.”[6]
4. The critiques of I. Howard Marshalls:
Vanhoozer states that “Marshall wants Christians to get ‘beyond’ genocide. So do I.But I am not prepared to say God’s judgment on the world, or of nations, is ‘intrinsically wrong’ if it involves killing people.... this way of going beyond the Scripture has more of Marcion than of Marshall....Finally, if we are shocked by images of judgment, what are we to make of the cross?”[7] Vanhoozer adds, “Some developments do more than clarify; they revise or even discard biblical teaching and go onto postulate something that is not even implicitly in Scripture. How can we go beyond without going too far, without going beyond the pale?”[8]
Meadors states that the “use of ‘beyond’ merely represents a theological construct that cannot claim a biblical context that directly teaches the point scored.” Meadors states that “when you shake someone’s hand at church rather than greeting him or her with a holy kiss (1 Thess. 5:26), you have gone ‘beyond the Bible.’” Some other examples he gives are slavery which is nowhere explicitly commanded to be ended or explicit statements about the Trinity. Even though there are verses that hint at these doctrines, one goes beyond the actual words of the text to come to these theological conclusions.[9] Meadors writes that “if we fail to find a specific biblical context that addresses an issue of current concern, we do not assume the Bible has nothing to say, but we make a ‘beyond’ judgment on the basis of our theological understanding.”[10] This book gives four views of how theology relates to current culture.
In our next post, we will examine the first view in Chapter One: A Principlizing Model by Walter C. Kaiser, Jr.
[1] I. Howard Marshall. Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic) 2004, 7.
[2] Ibid., 9.
[3] Ibid., 42.
[4] Ibid., 35.
[5] I. Howard Marshall. Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology (2004), 66.
[6] Ibid., 67.
[7] Ibid., 85.
[8] Ibid., 89.
[9] Gary T. Meadors. “Introduction” in Four Views on Moving Beyond the Bible to Theology ed. Gary T. Meadors (Grand Rapids: Zondervan) 2009, 9.
[10] Ibid., 12.