Altar Hermeneutics

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PNEUMA 38 (2016) 148–159

Altar Hermeneutics

Reflections on Pentecostal Biblical Interpretation

Rickie D. Moore

School of Religion, Lee University, Cleveland, Tennessee

rmoore@leeuniversity.edu

Abstract

This paper attempts to contribute to the current discussion on pentecostal biblical hermeneutics by offering some fresh reflections on the topic that are primarily focused upon one of the most frequently mentioned and distinguishing characteristics of pen- tecostal biblical interpretation, namely, the experience of encountering God through the biblical text.

Keywords

pentecostal biblical hermeneutics – scriptural interpretation

For more than two decades pentecostal biblical scholars have been working to develop distinctively pentecostal approaches to biblical interpretation. They have pursued this work in practice on many particular biblical texts, and they have also stepped back to address in theory what pentecostal biblical interpre- tation is all about.1 In this article I will attempt to make a small contribution to this discussion by offering some of my current reflections on this topic— reflections that are essentially focused upon one of the most frequently men- tioned and, to my mind, distinguishing characteristics of pentecostal biblical

1 See John Christopher Thomas, “Pentecostal Biblical Interpretation,” inOxford Encyclopedia of

Biblical Interpretation, ed. S.L. McKenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Vol. 2, 89–

97, and also his ‘“Where the Spirit Leads’: The Development of Pentecostal Hermeneutics,”

Journal of Beliefs & Values: Studies in Religion & Education 30, no. 3 (December 2009): 289–

302.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-03801004

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interpretation, namely, the experience of encountering God through the bibli- cal text.2

As a starting point, I offer a few comments on the term I have chosen for my title, altar hermeneutics. It was coined and used by one of my seminary students in a course paper that he wrote for one of my seminary faculty col- leagues many years ago. I recently recalled this term as I was gathering my thoughts for this article, but I could not recall the name of the student or even the particular colleague involved, nor have I been able to locate anyone who remembers anything about this phrase, the paper, the student, or the faculty member. So for now, this former student will simply have to remain the anonymous source of what I would gratefully acknowledge as a particu- larly apt term for what I want to focus upon here, namely, how profoundly and deeply biblical interpretation gets changed or altered when it is brought within the place or sacred zone of encounter with God—indeed when it is altared.

My thoughts in this vein are obviously moving in step with and in deep engagement and interaction with what several other pentecostal scholars have recently been proposing regarding how we approach (or should be approach- ing) scriptural interpretation. A good number of scholarly references could be mentioned, but I would like to highlight three in particular, given their very recent appearance and their pointed import for my own thinking.

First, I would note Rob Wall’s recent argument concerning the pentecostal metaphor of “tarrying or waiting on the Holy Spirit,” found in Acts 1:4.3 Build- ing upon Daniel Castelo’s recent probing of the rich theological and ethical implications of this metaphor,4Wall argues that this element of worship, tradi- tionally “used to frame the altar call as the climax of Pentecostal worship,” can helpfully and appropriately be extended to the practice of biblical interpreta- tion.5 Entailed in Wall’s argument is the forthright claim that “the Church, not the academy, is Scripture’s legal address.”6

Then there is the plenary paper of Cheryl Bridges Johns at the sps meeting in 2014—a presentation that was much more than an academic argument.

2 See an acknowledgement and discussion of this point in Allan Anderson, An Introduction to

Pentecostalism(Cambridge,uk: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 225–242.

3 Robert W. Wall, “Waiting on the Holy Spirit (Acts 1.4): Extending a Metaphor to Biblical

Interpretation,” jpt 22, no. 1 (2013), 37–53.

4 Daniel Castelo, “Tarrying on the Lord: Affections, Virtues and Theological Ethics in Pente-

costal Perspective,” jpt 13, no. 1 (2004), 31–56.

5 Wall, “Waiting on the Holy Spirit,” 37.

6 Ibid., 39.

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The published version of it, which now appears in an issue of jpt,7 can in no way capture the event of its presentation that was experienced by those of us who were there. I suspect it would be difficult to find anyone present on that occasion to disagree with the claim that the biblical hermeneutic of “grieving, brooding, and transforming” described and delineated in the paper was subsequently experienced by most throughout the room in the prayer that followed. Higher-level thinking gave way to deep grieving. The hermeneutic that keeps the biblical text as the object of our critical interpretation was flipped, suddenly making us the object of interpretation—interpretation that was far more critical. Indeed our hermeneutics were “altared,” as academic space was transformed into sacred space, and in such a way that no one there had to be told in order to know that the entire auditorium had become an altar of God.

I finally want to lift up the work of Chris Green, whose dissertation and recent spate of articles that, in varying degrees of explicitness, address biblical hermeneutics. Green’s full-length volume, Sanctifying Interpretation: Vocation, Holiness, and Scripture, has recently been published.8 Building upon William Abraham’s sweeping proposal for shifting from an epistemological to a soteri- ological conception of and approach to the biblical text,9 Green has now put forward a robust statement on the theology of Scripture and Scripture-reading practice that makes a compelling case for the idea that biblical interpretation can no longer be restricted to a merely intellectual (Enlightenment) enterprise, insofar as it is inextricably interconnected with our imago Dei-bearing, medi- atorial vocation and ethical mandate. Green understands that our approach to interpretation is never morally neutral but is always answering to some metaphysical commitment and ethical motivation. This reminds me so much of the point made almost thirty years ago by Catholic charismatic theologian Francis Martin in his ground-breaking article “Spirit and Flesh in the Doing of Theology,”10 in which he argued that biblical interpretation that is practiced apart from conscious and intentional submission to the Holy Spirit is a carnal

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Cheryl Bridges Johns, “Grieving, Brooding, and Transforming: The Spirit, the Bible, and Gender,” jpt 22, no. 2 (2014), 141–153.

Chris E.W. Green, Sanctifying Interpretation: Vocation, Holiness, and Scripture (Cleveland, tn: cptPress, 2015).

William J. Abraham, The Bible: Beyond the Impasse (Dallas, tx: Highland Loch Press, 2012).

Francis Martin, “Spirit and Flesh in the Doing of Theology,” jpt 18 (April 2001): 5–31 (see the editorial note on p. 5 acknowledging that a version of this article was first presented as a paper at the 1985 Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Theology).

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endeavor that calls for repentance or, as Chris Green has now put it, sanc- tification. Here again, this poses for me the thought of bringing our biblical interpretation to the altar, as it were, that place that is sanctified and sanctify- ing, so that our interpretive practice itself can become sanctified and sanctify- ing.

Several years ago, in an article that delineated some of the pentecostal lines I had developed through the years in my Old Testament teaching practice,11 I shared how I had often sketched for my students a comparison between the rise of modern, western Enlightenment biblical criticism and the building of the tower of Babel12—a kind of biblical criticism of biblical criticism. Both Babel and Enlightenment criticism were constructive projects that, from their incep- tion, bracketed out any reference to a divine source (as in source criticism), and each conceived upon this foundation a construction of entirely human formu- lation (as in form criticism) with self-assured confidence of having unending access to how all the pieces of the entire project would come together (as in redaction or tradition criticism). From there I would extend the comparison for my students in terms of project outcomes—how in both cases there was a decisive shift in the project as attention first moved to the construction’s final form (as in literary and canonical criticism), only then to give way to a disinte- gration of the terms of labor that had kept the construction union and project together (as in postmodern, reader-oriented criticism and deconstruction). As Babel is the Bible’s primal paradigm for all human-based constructions and Babylon, as its historical derivative, is the prototype for all human kingdoms— kingdoms that, according to Scripture’s apocalyptic vision, will ultimately meet their end in the highest criticism, which is none other than the final judgment of God13—I see the fall of modern biblical criticism not merely in terms of the

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“A Pentecostal Approach to Old Testament Introduction,” a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Theology in March 2007 and later published as chapter 1 in my bookTheSpiritoftheOldTestament(jpts, 35; Leiderdorp, The Netherlands: Deo Publishing, 2011).

Spirit of the Old Testament, 14–18.

Several years ago, in the spirit of such considerations, I composed a second verse to the children’s Sunday School song “Theb-i-b-l-e”:Theb-a-b-e-l, / Now that’s the way to Hell. /You think you’re tall, / But then you fall; /Theb-a-b-e-l, / b’b’b’babel! In my previously referenced article “A Pentecostal Approach to Old Testament Introduction,” I detail my positive valuation of critical methods, the comparison with Babylon notwithstanding. Indeed, Babylon receives positive valuation in the book of Daniel, even though it is judged in the end for exalting itself above the Most High (see Dan 4). Indeed, I appreciate and utilize “higher critical methods” when they are not exalted to the place of ultimate

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rise of postmodern criticism, but ultimately in terms of the inevitable manifes- tation of divine judgment, by which all human kingdoms and constructions, according to Daniel 2:21, have their beginning and end.

My reason for recalling this interpretive paradigm in the present discussion of altar hermeneutics is that I am struck by how the tower of Babel, as a construction that was intended “to reach heaven” (Gen 11:4), surely represents a kind of alternative altar14—alternative certainly to the altars that Abraham began building to Yahweh in the Genesis narrative that immediately follows (Gen 12:7, 8; 13:4). Thus, the tower of Babel is an invalidated altar that ends in a confusion of language that has everything to do with the disintegration of the human capacity for interpretation. And by contrast, the upper room of Acts 2 is a high place of worship that forms the iconic biblical counterpart to Babel, where another divine effusion of languages transmutes human linguistic discord into a hermeneutic of “one accord.”

Thus, among all the things for which the Day of Pentecost serves as a founda- tional matrix for us Pentecostals, including the experience of being filled with the Spirit, the charismatic gift of tongues, empowerment to be witnesses, the inauguration of the multicultural mission of the church, the arrival of Joel’s eschatological vision, the manifestation of “the prophethood of all believers,” andsoon,anothersignificantthingthatneedstobeincludedisthesettingforth of a pneumatic paradigm for hermeneutics and Scripture interpretation—one that is born out of what we would understand as an altar setting of divine- human encounter.

This entire line of thinking that I am following, in step with the pente- costal scholars previously mentioned, involves re-envisioning the context for approaching Scripture and Scripture interpretation—indeed, in terms of what I am calling an altar context. Yet it points to even more—to nothing less than re-envisioning the essence of Scripture itself. It is not just that Scripture needs to be drawn into the zone of sacred space, but also that Scripture itself needs to be recognized as a kind of sacred space that we are graciously invited to enter.15 It is to view Scripture with William Abraham as something primarily soteriological and not epistemological, and yet even more than this: it is to view Scripture sacramentally as a means of grace that facilitates divine-human encounter in a way that is beyond our control, our management, our capacity

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criticism. In effect, my point is not to dismiss these methods but only to challenge their long-accepted status as “higher,” with the question, “Higher than what?”

Indeed, ancient Near Eastern historians and biblical scholars have long made the connec- tion between the tower of Babel and the ziggurats ofanereligions.

Johns, “Grieving,” 149–151, has articulated this most helpfully.

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to manipulate or even fully to understand. Rob Wall’s view of Scripture reading as a practice that entails “tarrying or waiting on the Holy Spirit” implies this. Cheryl Johns’s view of Scripture reading in terms of “grieving, brooding, and transforming” explicitly names this.16Chris Green’s view of Scripture interpre- tation in terms of our holy priestly vocation as human mediators builds upon this. And I would simply add to these sacramental and priestly ways of con- ceptualizing and approaching Scripture what I would see as the concordant terminology of altar hermeneutics.

Seeing Scripture in terms of the metaphor of an altar contrasts sharply, even in a diametrically opposing way, with the metaphor for Scripture proposed by Walter Brueggemann in his book on biblical hermeneutics, Texts Under Negotiation: The Bible and Postmodern Imagination, which he wrote over two decades ago. Here he suggests viewing “the Bible as a compost pile.”17 Though stark, the contrast between our metaphors is not nearly as absolute as appears at first blush. For Brueggemann goes on to explain:

The Bible is the compost pile that provides material for new life. I do not use this figure as an irreverent metaphor to suggest that the Bible is “garbage.” Rather, I use it to suggest that the Bible itself is not the actual place of new growth. Our present life, when we undertake new growth, is often inadequate, arid, or even barren. It needs to be enriched, and for that enrichment, we go back to the deposits of old growth that have been discarded, but that continue to ferment and may contain resources for a way to new life.18

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Ibid., 149: “Inasmuch as the biblical text is Spirit-Word, and inasmuch as it is sanctified vessel, the text becomes an avenue for the emergence of sacred space … This space offers to the reader the real presence of the Triune God. As such, it is sacramental space that has within its borders the efficacious power of transformation. Herein all the factors of the ontological dimensions of Scripture are at play: the text as Spirit-Word, the text as sacred vessel, and the text as sacred space.” And see William Abraham, The Bible: Beyond the Impasse, 44, 64 and 71, who has taken the first step on this point by referring to Scripture as a “means of grace” (cf. also 55–57, where Abraham credits N.T. Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God [London: spck, 2005] and also Donald Dayton, “The Pietist Critique of Biblical Inerrancy,” in Vincent Bacote, Laura C. Miguélez, and Dennis L. Ockholm, eds., Evangelicals & Scripture [Downers Grove, il: InterVarsity Press, 2004], 76–89, in making this point).

Walter Brueggemann, Texts Under Negotiation: The Bible and Postmodern Imagination (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), 61.

Ibid., 61–62.

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My purpose in drawing attention to Brueggemann’s statement here is not so much to contend with his very edgy metaphor but rather to highlight some- thing extremely helpful that I find him saying about biblical hermeneutics in his ensuing discussion that immediately follows this statement. He says this:

Each of us in the practice of texts has a zone of imagination that stands between the input of the text and the outcome of attitude, belief, or behavior. That is, no treatment of a biblical text moves directly from input to outcome. Anyone who imagines a direct move assumes a neat process and a kind of authority that is not in fact available. That zone of imagination is of course in part shaped by the community. But in fact the personal zone of imagination is a protected place of intimacy and interiority that I keep for my very self, and no one else has access to it.

I may on occasion share that interiority with my beloved, my pastor, my therapist, but only rarely and hardly ever fully. It is my quintessential locus where I receive, process, and order all kinds of input, input that heals and assaults, that subverts and transforms, and I take into it and handle what I am able as I am able. It is a place that will not be forced, but works at its own pace. It is that operation of receiving, processing, and ordering that transpires when my mind wonders in listening to a text, a reading, in praying, or in any other time. In that wondrous, liberated moment, I take the material and process it in ways that are useful to me, about which only I know.

About this zone of imagination, I make [the following] observations:

It is not, in the moment of receiving a text, empty and unoccupied. It is already a busy, occupied, teeming place, so that the new stuff of the text must mingle, interact with, and compete against what is already there. What is already there is complex. I suggest three characteristic dimensions of the material already at hand. First, there arepowerfulvested interests of mine, about some of which I know. There is no disinterested reception of a text. I regularly have keen antennae to notice how a text touches my vested interest. Second, my vested interest is laid over mydeep fears, which have long, mostly independent careers. Third, underneath my fears and shaping my interests, are old, deep, unresolved hurts. I do believe that the hurt lies at the bottom of my imaginative apparatus. It can of course be argued that this proposed content of the zone is all negative, and one must lay alongside it the great power of hope and joy. My judgment, however, is that our unresolved negativities exercise a more

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powerful and finally decisive influence upon our capacity to receive and imagine than any positive counterpart.19

I find this tobe the most honest, truthful, insightful, and illuminating statement on hermeneutics in general and biblical hermeneutics in particular that I have ever come across in academic scholarship. And I think Walter Brueggemann, in stating this (or one might say, in confessing this), is acting as something like a whistle blower on the entire industry of modern biblical interpretation. He is acknowledging the deeper sources that have been mostly hidden behind and beneath all of our academic sources and that have been relentlessly and decisively motivating and influencing our interpretive process. As I have long suggested to my students, it is surely one of the enormous ironies of mod- ern biblical criticism that it has been so zealously committed to probing the authorial factors lying behind the biblical text while being so resistant and impervious to the probing of such authorial factors behind our own scholarly texts.

I would like to bring Brueggemann’s brilliant and penetrating insight into my own line of thinking on biblical hermeneutics. In the best of our pente- costal tradition and practice, the altar is the place where we bring the sacri- fice of ourselves and where consequently our selfish interests are exposed and spread before the Lord, who knows all. And it is precisely where our deep- est fears—those that are pulsing, lurking, and being relentlessly suppressed beneath our vested interests—are finally expressed, confessed, and poured out before the Lord, who sees all. And it is also where the hurt, the wounds, and the deepest griefs beneath our fears are laid bare before the Lord, who heals all.

Approaching biblical hermeneutics in this light illuminates the realization that it may not be the biblical text as much as my own self that needs to be inter- preted, that is, that we need Scripture to interpret us more than Scripture needs us to interpret it. We Pentecostals have for some time now been acknowledging this subject/object-reversal idea that Scripture should interpret us and not just the other way around,20 but Brueggemann’s insight sharpens the point, help- ing us more deeply and honestly to admit how we, for God’s sake, need to be

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Ibid., 62–63.

And Pentecostals have not been alone in acknowledging this need. After preparing this article, I was kindly made aware of the article by Presbyterian theologian and minister John B. Rogers, Jr., “The Book That Reads Us,”Interpretation39, no. 4 (October 1985), 388– 401, who reflects brilliantly upon the experienced authority of Scripture in the context of the worshipping community of faith.

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interpreted. And approaching Scripture as we would a sacred altar, in the way I have here proposed, can help provide the contextual grounding for carrying out this idea in practice.

If we see Scripture only as a means to our epistemological ends, then we will continue to be trapped, as we have been, in a hermeneutical process that is constantly hinging on our capacity to explain or to explain away Scripture’s many limitations, tensions, complexities, dissonances, incoherencies, contra- dictions, obscurities, ethical difficulties, and so forth—a hermeneutical pro- cess that will have us ever knowing but never coming to the knowledge of the truth. On the other hand, if God’s goal and end in giving us Scripture is less about conveying knowledge than about facilitating and transacting a salva- tion that surpasses knowledge, then all of the problematics that confront us in Scripture can be seen as intended precisely to do just that—to confront us. And just as in the case of the parables of Jesus, it becomes a confronta- tional encounter that aims to expose our vested interests, the fears beneath them, and the deep, unresolved wounds underlying and underwriting these fears—to expose them so that we will then have the chance to spread them out before the altar of God and give the God of the altar an opportunity to transform us: to transform our bondage to vested interests into the freedom that comes with being crucified with Christ, to deliver us from all of our fears through the fear of the Lord and his perfect love that casts out all fear, and to turn our deepest, most hidden hurts into the scars that bear (and bare!) the testimony that we have been raised with Christ and made to sit with him in heavenly places.21

By way of conclusion, I would like to offer a few reflections on a passage from the New Testament that I think comes close to reflecting the sort of thing that I have been calling altar hermeneutics in this article. This biblical passage might just be the most direct statement from Scripture on the proper interpretation of Scripture. It is found in 2Corinthians 3.

The chapter begins with Paul establishing his credentials (vv. 2–3), not with “letters of recommendation” that are “written with ink” but rather with “the letter of recommendation,” he tells the Corinthian believers, that “you yourselves are,” written “with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of

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Inthe spirit ofthese considerations,I recentlycomposed still another verse(cf. n. 13above) to the children’s song, “The b-i-b-l-e”: The b-i-b-l-e, / The Book that’s reading me! / The Voice that’s heard / Is Spirit-Word! / The b-i-b-l-e! In using the hyphenated term Spirit- Word, I would acknowledge the introduction and discussion of this term by Steven J. Land in his Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom, Journal of Pentecostal Theology Supplement Series 1 (Sheffield,uk: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 74–75.

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stone but on tablets of the human heart”—tablets “to be known and read by everyone.” Thus, the list of publications on Paul’s c.v. is none other than what has been inscribed by the Spirit in the lives and on the hearts of these Corinthian believers. And the hermeneutic for interpreting these publications is aninclusivehermeneutic, since they are “to be known and read by everyone,” and, what’s more, it is a pneumatic hermeneutic, since they are written “with the Spirit of the living God.”

Paul is then quick to add that the ministerial credentials he is claiming are not grounded in his own competence. He says, “Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (3:6). Like the epistles constituted by Paul’s Corinthian disciples, the new covenant and the competence to minister it are essentially not a matter “of the written letter but of the Spirit.” Again, we see something approaching a claim for a pneumatic hermeneutic.

Paul goes on to draw out a contrast between the old covenant and the new, not that the old was only a matter of the written letter, for it too possessed a glory, as shown by the luminous reflection on the face of Moses at the time he mediated it. The difference Paul notes is that the old covenant had a glory that faded, whereas the new covenant has a surpassing glory that does not fade away. And this brings Paul to what we could call his culminating statement on biblical hermeneutics:

Therefore having such a hope, we use great boldness in our speech, and are not like Moses, who used to put a veil over his face so that the children of Israel would not look intently at the end of what was fading away. But their minds were hardened; for until this very day at the reading of the old covenant the same veil remains unlifted, because it is removed in Christ. But to this day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart; but whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.

2Cor. 3:12–18,nasb

In Paul’s statement here, it is clear that he is concerned with biblical hermeneu- tics, about “the reading of the old covenant,” about how “Moses is read.” And it is also clear that the heart of his hermeneutic is focused on the heart, that

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“zone of imagination,” to use Brueggemann’s term, that “protected place of inti- macy and interiority that I keep for my very self,” says Brueggemann. Indeed, as Paul puts it, “a veil lies over the heart.” And Brueggemann adds, “no one has access to it.” However, here is where Paul’s hermeneutic would depart from Brueggemann’s, for at this very point Paul says, “whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.” This is the pivotal point, the turning point of Paul’s hermeneutic of Scripture—“whenever a person turns” (this verb is used throughout Scripture to connote repentance),22indeed “turnsto the Lord” (a phrase used throughout Scripture to connote encounter with God). This place of repentance and divine encounter is also a place of revelation, for the biblical text is revealed and our heart is revealed as the glory of the Lord is revealed. It is the place where the veil is removed—the veil that covers our heart and separates us from the biblical text and keeps us from beholding the glory of God, like the veil in the Temple that barred the people of Israel from entering the Holy of Holies. In Christ, however, this Lord to whom we turn “is the Spirit,” Paul declares, “and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty” (3:17), thus giving us access at the very altar of God, as it were, to something on the order of a pneumatic hermeneutic, whereby we behold the revelation of God’s glory, and then “with unveiled faces” we, like the living epistles that Paul first mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, become a revelation of that glory, no longer just mirroring the image and reflecting the form of our vested interests and hidden fears and unresolved hurts, but “being transformed,” as Paul says, “into the image [of God’s glory] from glory to glory” (3:18).

I want to end my reflections on altar hermeneutics with an image from the prophet Ezekiel of what he, in his final prophetic vision, saw flowing from the altar of God. In 47:1 he says, “I saw water coming out from under the threshold of the temple toward the east (for the temple faced east). The water was coming down from under the south side of the temple, south of the altar” (niv). He goes on to describe how a man in his vision with a measuring rod in his hand goes eastward measuring the depth of the flowing water at various intervals, finding that the flowing water became deeper and wider the further he went until it was a full-fledged river, “deep enough to swim in,” says Ezekiel, “a river that no one could cross” (Ezek 47:5), whereupon the man asks Ezekiel, “Son of man, do you see this?” He goes on to lead the prophet up and then back down the

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The Greek word used here in 2Cor. 3:16 (ἐπιστρέψω) is the same word used by the lxx translators to render “repent” ( שוב ) in the Hebrew Scriptures. I appreciate my nt faculty colleague Bill Simmons for pointing out numerous instances of this for me.

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river, pointing out to Ezekiel that “everywhere the river flows everything will live” (Ezek 47:9), even the Great (that is, the Dead) Sea.

I was drawn to this vision after the 2014 sps meeting, as I was reflecting more specifically on the plenary session in which Cheryl Johns presented her call for a transformed and transforming approach to the Bible and biblical hermeneutics—a call that evoked that remarkable time of prayer mentioned earlier. I woke up the next morning with a song in my heart—a song from my childhood days in Sunday School:

Deep and wide, deep and wide, There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide.

This simple childhood song, which I had not thought about in years, carried me straight to Ezekiel’s vision, which has now become for me an apt picture of the altar hermeneutics I have here attempted to describe—the life-giving word flowing from the altar of God. In the church, particularly in its studious quar- ters, we have reached for a high view of Scripture, but a deep view of Scripture, it seems to me, has scarcely crossed our minds. We have wanted a Scripture that is high enough to give us high authority, but not one that is deep enough to reveal the secrets of our hearts. And in the academy, even in its faith-based precincts, we have championed a critical view of the Bible that emphasizes its broad diversity, but perhaps our broad and critical view of the Bible, in its stress on seeing the hands of multiple authors and the voices of many “others,” has not been nearly broad and diverse and critical enough—broad enough so that “no one [not even we ourselves] can cross it” and diverse enough to host, amid and even beyond all the human “others,” the very otherness of God and critical enough so that it becomes the most searching source of our own self-criticism. Yet, for those of us who find ourselves within both the academy and the church, I see a vision and I hear a call coming from the altar of God, and it’s pouring out the refrain,

Deep and wide, deep and wide, There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide.

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