The book of Isaiah—Theses and Hypotheses - Critical Essay

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Fall, 2003 by J. Clinton McCann, Jr.

   The change of perspectives and the accentuations in the
   course of the prophetic transmission thus should not frighten.
   To the contrary, these perspectives show the dynamic
   nature of God and realistic experience. They also restrain
   doctrinaire one-sidedness [2000: 188].

Again, the contrast and contradiction within the book of Isaiah turn out to be especially important. At the same time that they offer witness to a living God, they commend humility as an essential posture for biblical interpretation and theological reflection. In other words, the danger of positing an "absolute" God is that this God will simply be static; and the accompanying danger is that the people of God may bind themselves to perspectives and courses of action that the living God may have abandoned generations ago!

But if God and God's will are dynamic, the question then arises as to what prevents biblical interpretation from being merely relativistic. In the following quotation, Steck offers a perspective on this question, while he again affirms the time-bound nature of prophetic speech and thus the necessity to discern and articulate God's will as part of an ongoing process of participation in a living tradition:

   If exegetical effort does not just trace time-bound effort, but
   also traces the essential ideas of inner-biblical exegesis, then
   biblical truth cannot be adapted in the philosophical and theological
   reflection of ancient biblical formulations. It can only
   be adapted in living tradition. This living tradition ventures
   to formulate anew and to extend the formulation in
   changed realms of thought, life, and experience. It thus protects
   the fact that speech about God is always time-bound
   speech. To that extent, speech about God is close to history,
   life, and experience. Stated pointedly, one must certainly
   not steadfastly affirm ancient formulations, ancient ways of
   thinking, and ancient experiences in a later time. Rather,
   one should expose earlier perceptual worlds perceived in
   ancient texts in every subsequent period of new testing in
   thought and life [Steck 2000: 190; emphasis added].

The key phrases here are "essential ideas of inner-biblical exegesis" and "earlier perceptual worlds." The challenge of contemporary biblical-theological interpretation, therefore, is first to identify the "essential ideas" or affirmations about God and God's purposes that are found in the book of Isaiah--Isaiah's "perceptual world," if you will--and then to consider how these ideas and affirmations might function in our radically changed and changing contemporary world. This approach amounts to our "new testing" of the book of Isaiah's affirmations about God and God's will in the present world of our own "thought and life."

Steck also describes this approach in slightly different terms, which are also helpful. He speaks of an ancient text's "direction of meaning," which should be discerned and honored by contemporary interpreters to avoid arbitrariness (as well as to avoid the "doctrinaire one-sidedness" mentioned above). As Steck puts it: