Peter Leithart
Baylor University Press, 2009

Deep Exegesis is set up as a defense of a traditional reading of Scripture against two broadly defined approaches. The first is one which does not take the letter seriously, and which seeks to analyze the Word in search of a supposed kernel of Enlightenment rationalism and moralism, retrievable under the husk of the letter. Spinoza is represented as the great example of this method, which would later become normative for Liberal Protestantism (and whose extreme form would be the “Jefferson Bible”).

The presentation of the history of this trend is very brief and very uneven, but the summary of its aims is good, and Leithart as at his best in critiquing it. But this method of (mis)reading doesn’t seem to be his main target.

He seems much more concerned with the second approach, associated with conservative evangelical exegesis. This method the author regards as textually honest, but he suggests that it is, in a sense, taking the letter a little too seriously, so that it becomes a disjointed lexicalism, not a true literalism.

In this method, the overarching narrative of Scripture, and the literary-rhetorical body of that skopos, is at risk of being lost. Unfortunately, the evidence for even the existence of this second problem is spotty – it comes to a very small group of small quotes from Nida, Cotterell, and Turner on the necessity of lexical rigor, as if they somehow meant to exclude a more literary or rhetorical approach.

Worse, this possible straw man seems to be identified with, or at least regarded as the logical result of, the canonical Protestant grammatico-historical method, which he is thus at least implicitly critiquing.¹

Leithart then proposes a method he considers traditional; he seems to want to associate it with the medievals, the Fathers, and most eminently the Apostles.

His method might be called a “literary literalism” (my words, not his). He nowhere really defines it or gives a set of rules for it; but he gives a number of examples of it, all of which are engaging (if not all convincing). His attempts to connect it with older forms of ecclesiastical reading are spotty and unconvincing; it really doesn’t much resemble the method of the late antique Greek commentators, nor is it really a modern example of the medieval quadriga, which he seems to suggest it is².

Leithart gestures reverently toward the patristic and medieval practices of reading as if to claim them as a sort of precedent, without really reviewing them, and where he does give an example, it is of the old exegesis at its worst, which he cites without critique³ .

But Leithart isn’t simply dissatisfied  with what he takes to be the historico-grammatical method as being too unliterary; he also seems haunted by critical claims that the Apostolic reading of the OT cannot be justified historico-grammatically. He seems to think that a great part of the problem with Protestant exegesis is that it looks little like the method of the Apostles or that of the Lord himself as explained by the critics. This is a petitio principii, of course, and thus should not be assumed as a principle⁴.

But assume it he does; and proceeding from what many more traditional evangelicals might take to be a non-problem, he goes on to propose some peculiar answers.

The basic idea he proposes is that words can change meaning, and that reading can even read things into words which objectively weren’t even there at all.⁵ In trying to prove this, Leithart makes three points about words, all of them incontrovertibly true.

First, words in sentences can be troped; second, words change meaning over time or acquire new connotations; third, speech, including divine discourse, is always the “speaker’s meaning”- excessive concern with lexical units can obscure the intention of the speaker, the intention of the whole utterance, and its presence in the parts of the whole utterance. In addition, he rightly asserts that the Scriptures are a coherent literary body whose parts echo each other.

So far so good; all those points are, though Leithart gives the reader almost no sense of this, commonplaces of classical historico-grammatical method. But sticking on that idea of pesher, he goes on to develop a sort of account, or rather a suggestion, of retroactive causality in order to make sense of what he seems to think the Apostles were doing.

His arguments are partially a legitimate explanation of what can happen when the general is specified or the foretold is completed (something the classic method has no trouble handling), but a brief consideration of philosophical discourse about what philosophers often call “scattered events,” and the nuanced problems of speaking about them, would have saved him from having to make claims which don’t really stand up, at least as they are expressed in the book.

Nothing in Leithart’s points about language really tells against the genuine grammatico-historic method. And his argument certainly does not prove real retroactive alteration of the past. Temporal fulfillment of promise or prediction cannot really alter the meaning of the original promise or prediction, or we render divine speech totally unreliable; and subsequent events cannot actually alter prior ones, or we render the world absurd. Events can certainly alter the present effects of prior events – but the original event itself does not and cannot change,⁶ and regarding the event as “text” simply confuses the issue, and confuses it profoundly.

Leithart’s own exegetical work as presented in the book (and elsewhere) is much more interesting and sound than his explanation of it is,⁷ and he makes some excellent points about typology, which is, of course, not at all precluded by the historical-grammatical method. The real predecessors of Leithart’s approach at it best are not the delirious epigones of Alexandria, but modern literary critics such as Northrop Frye, Kenneth Burke, and Austin Farrer, all of whom are spectacular developments from the grammatico-historical method in full form, not escapees from it.

In the end, Deep Exegesis, in trying to show a way out of liberal hermeneutics, seems to be perhaps yet another example of it: it seems to shift the site of the plenitude of Scriptural meaning from  Revelation (that is, from the exalted object of prophetic vision), to the creatively reading community (to a subject of vision), and to shifts the site of truth from event, real being in real time, to meaning (p. 47).

It would have been a much different and much more helpful book had the author undertaken a spirited and scholarly defense of the kind of apostolic reading – their reading of ancient Scripture, and our reading of them – which he gives in his example of Ishmael and Isaac (p. 38). Leithart’s method at its best is still very much the grammatico-historical method. If modern academic evangelical readings of Scripture are over-lexical and under-literary, then what Chesterton said of Christianity can be said of the method: it’s not that it’s been tried and found wanting, it’s rather that it isn’t being tried.

Peter Escalante has a MA in Philosophy, and plans to begin an LLM in Canon Law in the fall. He lives in Northern California, and is a candidate for ordination in the Reformed Evangelical Synod of America. http://RESynod.org

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