Richard Bauckham, The Bible in Politics: How to Read the Bible Politically
Louisville, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989.
Summary: A thoughtful establishment of a hermeneutical process for developing biblical application of the Bible to modern politics and ethics.
The process looks like this:
Identify what the text meant to the initial audience.
Determine the differences between the initial audience and believers today.
Develop universal principles from the text.
Correlate the principle with New Testament teaching.
Apply the modified universal principle to life today.
(The process summary is drawn from Tidball, The Message of Leviticus, 29).
Bauckham exhibits the outcome of this system in meditations on, Leviticus 19, Proverbs 31:1-9, Psalm 10 and 126, Jesus on taxes (Matt. 17, Mark 11-12), Exodus Revelation 18, the Book of Esther, and the Genesis Flood.
The risen Jesus is our future. He beckons us forward to the goal of creation and gives all Christian activity the character of hopeful movement into the future which God has promised. Not that we ourselves can achieve that future. Resurrection makes that clear: we who ourselves end in death cannot achieve the new creation out of death. The Kingdom in its final glory lies beyond the reach of our history, in the hand of the God who interrupted our history by raising Jesus from death. This transcendence of the Kingdom beyond our achievement must be remembered. But in Jesus God has given us the Kingdom not only as hope for the final future but also to anticipate in the present. As the vision of God’s perfect will for his creation it is the inspiration of all Christian efforts to change the world for the better. In relation to our political activity, it is a double-edged sword, cutting through both our pretensions and our excuses. On the one hand, as the goal we do not reach, it passes judgment on all our political projects and achievements, forbids us the dangerous utopian illusions of having paradise within our grasp, keeps us human, realistic, humble and dissatisfied. On the other hand, as the goal we anticipate, it lures us on beyond all our political achievements, forbids us disillusioned resignation to the status quo, keeps us dissatisfied, hopeful, imaginative, and open to new possibilities (150).
Benefits: Politics is a subcategory of the wider study of ethics, and thus Bauckham’s work is useful for all of ethics. He engagingly challenges his readers to read the Bible carefully, think rigorously, and apply the Bible wisely to politics, for the purpose of worshiping God. I know of no better example of how to do this well.
Detriments: Interpreting the Bible is dependent on the hermeneutical process and the belief policies of the reader. For example, the reader who comes to the text rejecting the possibility of divine revelation will make little effort to harmonize the different human authors’ perspectives or grant the Bible any authority outside of its agreement with “nature.”
In the case of Bauckham, he has a high view of man’s sin against man, but a low view of man’s rebellion against God. He has a lowish view of Scripture, which we might summarize with “inspired, but. . .”, and he’s got an egalitarian streak. Because ethics is the application of God’s Word to man, Bauckham’s anthropology and his understanding of God (theology proper) influences his interpretation and application of the text.
Here’s a example where his theological presuppositions are exposed: “On the contrary, [Jesus’] loving concern reached all the people around him as he hung dying, his fellow victims on the crosses beside him, his mother in her grief, even his executioners, for whom he prayed forgiveness” (148).
The problem with this statement is the criminals on the crosses with Christ were not victims (cf. Luke 23:40-41) in the same sense that Christ was. The thief that was saved admitted both his guilt and the justice of the sentence. Bauckham’s first premises of interpretation require a degree of egalitarianism that is rejected by the Bible. And a consistent application of Jesus’ identifying “himself unequivocally and finally with the victims” (148) will lead to unmitigated theological and political disaster.
Yet, I highly recommend this book because Bauckham’s egalitarian and anthropocentric tendencies are often corrected by how carefully and intelligently he handles the text and an apparent love for Christ and humanity. When the text overrules his bad theology, he’s brilliant and incredibly edifying, but he can mislead the perplexed by promoting anthropocentric and egalitarian applications and theology.