A. The Rise of Narrative

The works of Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, and Brevard Childs, along with the proliferation of their ideas through what some have identified as a “Yale School” of thought concerning the value of narrative in theology, have had an undeniable impact on the shape of theology in North America and the United Kingdom over the last several decades.Footnote ⁶ Moreover, the emergence of Radical Orthodoxy (RO) in the 1990s has aggressively amplified some important and helpful developments initiated by the Yale School, developments that have invited the reconsideration of various assumptions that have guided scholarship in the twentieth century.Footnote ⁷ Although the work of RO itself has generally centered on historical theology, systematics, and political theology, its influence, even though it might be somewhat oblique, has become more noticeable within biblical circles in recent years. In the mid-1990s, for example, one could easily discern the influence of Radical Orthodoxy in the work of exegetes such as N. T. Wright, Stephen Fowl, and Kevin Vanhoozer, and the last decade has seen a more widespread growth in efforts to recover a larger theological narrative in Scripture that has supposedly been lost or suppressed due to the hegemony of modern critical biblical interpretation.Footnote ⁸

For his part, N. T. Wright has attacked modern biblical criticism for its faulty, positivistic, naturalist, and unimaginative approach to human understanding and knowledge.Footnote ⁹ For Wright, the perception of reality occurs within a prior framework that is best described as a narrative, and it is within narrative that he situates his own approach to human understanding and a “critical realist account of reading in all its parts.”Footnote ¹⁰ Instead of working upward from specific observation of data to intelligent interpretations of the meaning of that data and finally to a judgment about the truthfulness of those interpretations, Wright suggests that such “positivism” ought to be replaced by an account of knowledge as occurring “within the larger framework of the story or worldview which forms the basis of the observer's way of being in relation to the world.”Footnote ¹¹ In such a case, people gain knowledge as they “find things that fit with the particular story or (more likely) stories to which they are accustomed to give allegiance.”Footnote ¹² The truth of a narrative or counter-narrative is to be found in its ability to make better sense than competing stories. Wright's criteria for adjudicating competing stories are as follows: simplicity of outline, elegance in handling details, the inclusion of all parts of the story, and the ability of the story to make sense beyond its immediate subject matter and contribute to a better understanding of other stories.Footnote ¹³

Wright's appropriation of what he terms “critical realism” might be better called “narrative realism” (how “critical” his approach is merits further scrutiny). This “realism” has an echo in the exegetical world where the critique of modern biblical criticism has been accompanied by the birth of biblical projects meant to overcome and marginalize the perceived hegemony of historical criticism. Narrative, literary, and liberationist approaches to Scripture have flourished amid the critique of historical-critical methodologies, as a tour through any meeting of the Catholic Biblical Association or the Society of Biblical Literature will make abundantly clear. But there has also been a robust conservative theological response in recent years, one that seems to eschew historical-critical methodologies more pointedly. Within this context, the Brazos Theological Commentary stands out insofar as many of the volumes have been well received among a diverse group of readers, both exegetes and theologians.Footnote ¹⁴ The series, and others like it, has provided interesting, often ennobling, and even powerful readings of biblical texts.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet many of the prominent theologians featured in the series (both Catholic and Protestant)Footnote ¹⁶ adopt what can rightly be seen as an aggressive reading of the text, that is, a reading informed by a prior commitment to a very specific narrative, one that blends both a theological worldview and cultural engagement—somewhat reminiscent of the thrust of RO itself.Footnote ¹⁷ The editorial preface to the series outlines the qualifications for the authors invited to contribute and, in turn, helps to define its philosophical stance on the matter of exegesis.

This vision of the series signals, in part, a troublesome feature of the so-called theological interpretation of Scripture: an overriding commitment to the sufficiency of Christian doctrine specifically, and the dominance of the Christian narrative more generally. The result has been readings of Scripture that often fail to ponder or even to acknowledge the contradictions, the seams, the biases, and the incoherence of biblical texts.Footnote ¹⁹ Instead, theological clarity provides the narrative thread that ties together an all-too-neat reading with doctrinal perspectives, abandoning much of the dialecticalFootnote ²⁰ and critical function of biblical exegesis, and leaving the Christian tradition rhetorically emboldened but perhaps increasingly stagnant in the face of enormous contemporary challenges.Footnote ²¹

B. Critical Exegesis and Theology: Triumph or Fall?

The concern to recover Christian doctrine as decisive for authentic biblical interpretation has given birth to some interesting work that contextualizes how critical exegesis and modern political theory emerged together. Jeffery Morrow and Scott Hahn, two prominent Catholic allies of TIS, have recently offered insightful and thought-provoking accounts of modern biblical criticism's genesis.Footnote ²² Morrow, for his part, has made good use of the challenging work of William Cavanaugh, who has been associated with the early efforts of the RO group. Cavanaugh highlights the origins of the “secular” as a safe and supposedly neutral space for reasoned discourse and the myths upon which notions of the secular are based. Cavanaugh's work on the emergence of “secular space” in Western culture has generated well-warranted caveats about the politics involved in the recognition of this space.Footnote ²³ Scientism, empiricism, and false accounts of “objectivism” continue to bedevil contemporary culture as well as the academy, and theologians would do well to pay attention to the history and some of the presuppositions that accompanied the rise of modern biblical criticism. Morrow and his allies not only reference Cavanaugh and his critique of secularism, but also document the manner in which historical criticism was cultivated as a cudgel with which to beat down the authority and standing of the church in order to bolster the power of the modern state. Few students of Western culture could safely argue against the basic contours of these arguments, yet one might rightly question whether Morrow's narrative of the competing powers does justice to the complexity of the whole story. In other words, can the narrative really be as binary as it is presented? On the one hand, the divine authority of the church is bolstered by doctrinally grounded theological exegesis, and on the other hand, the secular state is aided in its suspicion of church authority by critical exegesis divorced from all ties to ecclesial life. At its best, this narrative sheds light on the troublesome provenance of modern biblical criticism, but at its worst, it masks important contributions made by critical history to the development of the doctrine of revelation in history.Footnote ²⁴

Accounts of the rise of modern critical scholarship in the United States from an older generation of Catholic biblical scholars run in a decidedly different direction. This older generation heralded critical methods as liberating Catholic exegetes from mindless dogmatism and ideologically masked history. For example, Gerald FogartyFootnote ²⁵ and Donald SeniorFootnote ²⁶ have offered histories of modern biblical criticism and its relevance, especially within American ecumenism, where the emergence of historical-critical method unfolded as part of a story of triumph over narrow ideology, whereas the histories offered by Morrow and Hahn interpret these developments within dramatic narratives of apostasy and the coopting of Scripture by forces hostile to the gospel. A helpful counterexample to the constructs offered by Morrow and Hahn can be found in Senior's recently published account of the late Raymond Brown's well-documented struggles with both the Catholic hierarchy and conservative activists in the decades following the Second Vatican Council. At issue for Brown was the dialectical function of modern biblical scholarship vis-à-vis church doctrine.Footnote ²⁷ Brown believed that “a thoughtful and responsible dialectic between theology and exegesis, or between the Bible and church dogma, would be fruitful and not destructive.”Footnote ²⁸ Yet, for all of his efforts to situate the interpretation of Scripture and the insights of historical-critical methodologies, efforts that were always deeply theological while at the same time critical, Brown continued to suffer at the hands of both ecclesiastical and lay critics even to his last days.

The story of Raymond Brown's harassment by conservative members of the Catholic hierarchy and their allies in the decades after the council, even as he sought to make the teaching of the council more widely known and appreciated, is indicative of the widespread fear of (1) the dynamics of historical progress and (2) theological ambiguity, both of which are still deeply embedded in some powerful corners of the contemporary church.Footnote ²⁹ Even in the present cultural moment, a fundamental dynamic abides within the Catholic Church (and is evident to varying degrees in other Christian churches) such that Christian doctrine is often construed so as to preclude a dialectical engagement with the tradition through a critically informed reading of Scripture.Footnote ³⁰ In other words, a reading of Scripture that challenges claims made by the Christian tradition, or at least the manner in which those claims have been articulated or understood, often continues to be seen as an attack on the tradition itself rather than a contribution to its ongoing progress and clarification.Footnote ³¹ Some advocates of TIS (the movement is certainly richly diverse in both its aims and ecclesial positioning) seem to share these fears and have made TIS a tool for limiting the impact of critical dimensions of biblical interpretation. Perhaps some of this dynamic is generational, a swing of the proverbial pendulum meant to correct the extremes of hypercriticism and a perceived marginalization of theology in biblical interpretation. But if the pendulum swings, it should not then become a wrecking ball that obliterates the gains of critical scholarship, gains that have come at a cost but have contributed mightily to the ongoing enrichment of the church and its mission in and to a critically conscious world.

C. Critical Exegesis and Theology: An Integration

Joseph Gordon has recently reined in some of the extreme claims made by TIS against critical methodologies even as he affirms TIS's basic concerns and trajectory.Footnote ³² Gordon, one of many thoughtful and subtle proponents of TIS, makes use of Bernard Lonergan's twofold approach to theological method and signals the intimate connection between the initial mediated phase of theology (i.e., in Lonergan's functional specialties of research, interpretation, and history) and the necessary role historical-critical exegesis plays as the precondition for an appropriate exercise of the theological interpretation of Scripture on the mediating side of Lonergan's schema. For Gordon, as for Lonergan, authorial intention, context, and original audience need to be addressed in any adequate interpretation of a text, especially a biblical text, and it is here that the critical methodologies under assault find their proper place as a base and precondition for TIS.

Evident within Gordon's presentation is the recognition that with the shift to historical-critical methods, biblical exegesis moved from an approach to Scripture that was primarily ahistorical, typological, and allegorical to an approach that was historical, genetic, and dialectical. In other words, the shift tried to account for the origins of the Christian community through attentiveness to the dynamics of the emerging Christian tradition centered in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, with a view to rendering the biblical texts theologically significant within the contemporary context. Such a move need not abandon wholesale the exegetical tradition of the Christian church; rather, these traditions are chastened even as they contextualize and challenge excessively flattened accounts of the biblical text. Yet, the idea that historical methodologies are, of themselves, to be sublated to “theological approaches” ignores the contention that it is precisely the historicity of the biblical text that is an essential dimension of its authentic (i.e., theological) interpretation.Footnote ³³

Some of the appeal of TIS seems to rest on a fear of a historical criticism that challenges or complicates accepted theological paradigms or doctrines. One might raise a justifiable concern in the face of such a disposition, namely, to what extent are some so-called theological approaches to Scripture simply masking what Bernard Lonergan, for example, termed a “classicist consciousness.”Footnote ³⁴ Such a consciousness operates within the realms of common sense and theory, but it lacks the self-appropriation necessary to distinguish effectively among higher realms of meaning. Historical consciousness, in its most fully operational form, has the ability to distinguish among the kinds of meaning characteristic of common sense, theory, interiority, transcendence, scholarship, and art, and can do so dynamically.Footnote ³⁵ It was precisely the emergence of historical consciousness that became crucial in the revitalization of the Christian theological tradition and its reappropriation of history in the work of so many theologians prior to the Second Vatican Council. For example, the real genius of Aquinas became increasingly apparent precisely as his ideas began to be viewed against the background (and limitations) of his very specific context and by distinguishing his thoughts from those of his interpreters. Chenu, Rahner, Congar, and Lonergan, each in a different way, unlocked the rich depth of Aquinas to address the challenges of modernity, but it was Henri de Lubac's work on Aquinas’ doctrine of grace and the history of its interpretation that created the space and the resources that so many postliberal theologians enjoy today.Footnote ³⁶ Moreover, liturgical studies provide some of the best examples of how historical-critical scholarship, evident in works like Jungmann's Mass of the Roman Rite, paved the way for even richer accounts of the origins and development of eucharistic celebrations and proffered healthy insights into the forms the liturgy will take in the future.Footnote ³⁷ Historical consciousness has thus been a catalyst for theological innovation and has provided for a “traditioning” of Christian faith that a classicist consciousness is quite incapable of, especially within the present cultural moment.Footnote ³⁸ The interpretation of Scripture, when approached from the perspective of a historical consciousness that is attentive to methodological consistency, is able to be more sensitive to the theological richness of biblical texts and the insights they offer while confronting the limitations of exegesis.Footnote ³⁹

Among many (though certainly not all) proponents of TIS there seems to have emerged an inherently “conservative” approach to exegesis and a diminishment of any attention to the dialectical aspects of interpretation, an approach that calls into question various aspects of both the Christian tradition as well as the brief “tradition” of modern biblical interpretation. The gap between the text itself, the historical character of the events it relates, and the vision of the interpreter is made evident in a variety of ways in modern critical exegesis. Attentiveness to that distance necessarily raises questions about the precise relationship of the text to larger narratives, doctrines, and practices of the Christian community and impels the interpreter (1) to engage in a dialectic account of interpretations of the text, (2) to embrace an interpretation that more accurately (or truthfully) captures the intended subject of the text, and (3) to fruitfully respond to that subject through ongoing religious, moral, and even intellectual conversion.Footnote ⁴⁰ This project is, per se, a theological task, a part of any authentic interpretation of the biblical text. Hence, as Gordon's use of Lonergan in constructing a “systematic theology” of Scripture makes clear, historical-critical methodologies are necessary even if, on their own, they are insufficient.Footnote ⁴¹

A. The Value and Limits of Historical Criticism

Like many contemporary exegetes, Schneiders finds the cold calculus and persistent positivism of historical-critical approaches to biblical interpretation to be problematic, especially when the task of exegesis operates solely within the limited horizon of historical inquiry: “To state the matter somewhat dramatically, the hermeneutical presuppositions out of which much current exegesis is done are outmoded, theoretically inadequate, and disjointed.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Schneiders does not, however, find historical-critical approaches without benefit. Indeed, she emphasizes that the clear benefits of such approaches have in some ways hidden their problematic aspects: “The exegetical results of such vastly improved methodology have been sufficiently impressive over the last century to mask the disarray of its hermeneutical foundations, but this disarray is coming to the fore as the method has increasingly been unable to integrate new approaches to the biblical text.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The fact that Schneiders herself joins the growing critique of the historical-critical methodologies demonstrates how frustrated scholars have become with the narrowness of the methods and sterility of their results when presented as the goal of legitimate interpretation. Yet while some aim their critique at the methodologies themselves, claiming that the problem can be adequately addressed by simply bypassing history altogether, Schneiders points to the need for a more adequate hermeneutical foundation within which to situate historical-critical methodologies.

At the methodological level, Schneiders endorses the results of historical-critical scholarship. In fact, she writes, “The result of such [historical] research should commend itself as simply correct to anyone who can follow the presentation of the data. In the enterprise of digging out historical information about the theological positions and actual practices of the early Church, historical-critical exegesis is fully vindicated as an autonomous discipline.”Footnote ⁴⁷ But, for Schneiders, the clarity of the method tends to make it paradigmatic, leaving the results of biblical research not achieved by this methodology suspect. For Schneiders, that suspicion is where the real problem of the method abides.

Schneiders insists that the real task for the exegete of the gospels is to ask fundamental questions concerning the relationship between the text and its subject matter. But in order to address such questions, two facets must be acknowledged at the outset: first, the biblical authors did not intend to give an ancient literary form of a “videotape” of Jesus’ life and ministry; second, the authors did intend to speak truthfully about Jesus.Footnote ⁴⁸ Therefore, the exegete must make some judgments about the historicity of the text's subject matter and the validity of its treatment of that subject matter. Schneiders has argued that the approach to biblical interpretation that privileges authorial intention is rooted in magisterial documents issued over the course of the last century,Footnote ⁴⁹ but that the freeing dimension of this move in the history of Catholic biblical scholarship has reached its limit insofar as authorial intention has remained, at best, an asymptotic goal and one fraught with great difficulty.

Of particular concern for Schneiders is the way the goal of ascertaining authorial intention, when made the indispensable (though not the only) aim of interpretation in Roman Catholic magisterial documents, tends to confine the meaning of the biblical text to the past.Footnote ⁵⁰ For Schneiders, the “ideal meaning” provides the consistent and normative pole for biblical interpretation.Footnote ⁵¹ The “ideal meaning” of the text refers to a semantic structure in the text that is produced by the dynamic confluence of (1) sense and reference, (2) the genre of the text, and (3) the personal style of the author as it provokes the engaged reader who is part of a community of readers. The resulting interpretive “game” unfolds whereby the meaning of the text constantly erupts anew with force and a claim on those who give themselves over to the play of interpretation. Thus, the ideal meaning “begins,” in a certain way, with the intention of the author and what sense a given clause, sentence, story, or image may have meant within the author's historical, linguistic, and social context. Next, the reference of that meaning, its claim, must be ascertained, and finally, with that reference, the question of truthfulness of a text comes to the fore in a dialectical interplay between text and interpreter. This interplay is what mediates the possibility of a transformative encounter with the God of Jesus Christ in the present.Footnote ⁵² Therefore, the subjectivity of the reader must also be a focal point of any adequate interpretation of the New Testament. For Schneiders, “The replacement of authorial intention by ideal meaning as the touchstone of objectivity allows for both the possibility of multiple valid interpretations that literary scholars rightly insist characterizes all texts and for the ‘norming’ of interpretation by the text itself, which is thereby enabled to speak for itself and not simply as a projection of the interpreter.”Footnote ⁵³ Context is key, but that includes not only the original context of the author(s) of a text, but also its interaction and contribution to the contemporary context at the time the text is interpreted.

B. Tradition and Distanciation

Schneiders regularly acknowledges her indebtedness to the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur, whose writing informs her basic approach to the interpretation of the New Testament. Her major work on biblical interpretation, The Revelatory Text, includes entire chapters dedicated to Ricoeur's basic distinctions among the three “worlds” of the text (i.e., “the world behind the text,” “of the text,” and “in front of the text”Footnote ⁵⁴), and she makes good use of Ricoeur's methods in setting forth a series of important distinctions and connections among these “worlds” and the horizons that define them. Along with Ricoeur, Schneiders privileges Gadamer's emphasis on the value of “tradition” (i.e., prior communal interpretive contexts) for its capacity to provide the necessary context for adequate and effective interpretation.Footnote ⁵⁵ She therefore reads the New Testament with a robust commitment to the place of Scripture within the believing community and its tradition as a “classic” (limitless reservoir of meaning) and a privileged source of spiritual encounter with the living God. But Schneiders also views with suspicion the notion that the interpretation of the Bible is the exclusive purview of the church, and she instead recognizes the value of ecumenical, interreligious, and even secular contributions to the interpretation of Scripture.

Schneiders provides a nuanced and critically informed account of the relationship between Scripture and tradition, one that privileges the ongoing dynamic of interpretation over and against any petrified notions of traditionally or even magisterially defined interpretation. She posits a reciprocal relationship between not only the traditions that aid in the interpretation of Scripture but also the authority of Scripture itself to ground and hold accountable the exercise of tradition. This is a thoroughly Catholic and robust account of the reciprocity of Scripture and tradition.Footnote ⁵⁶ Schneiders aptly sums up this relationship by calling attention to the manner in which progress in interpretation is accomplished in the course of history through a thorough submission to the proclamation carried in the text: “The Church that produced the text placed itself under the guidance of this text and as it lives that guidance it enters more deeply into the meaning of the text, even to the point of understanding the text better than its original writers did and having to modify the originally constructed meaning of some of the text.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Progress in interpretation demands an active suspicion of purely academic and historical-critical methodologies, but Schneiders insists “the academy and the church need each other if the work of biblical interpretation is to be at once intellectually responsible and spiritually fruitful.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Because the New Testament is indeed both ancient artifact and religious classic, the academic and the believer (even if she is the same person) need one another so that the academic will be precluded from reducing the biblical text to mere historical artifact and the believer can be disabused of “a simplistic naiveté in presuming a familiarity with the text that is both irreverent and blind to the challenging complexity of this strange book.”Footnote ⁵⁹ And it is precisely through this movement of the estrangement, or “distanciation,”Footnote ⁶⁰ of the biblical text from its immediate availability in a contemporary setting that Schneiders retains the value of historical-critical methodologies as well as the value of biblical scholarship in general.Footnote ⁶¹

Schneiders’ ability to value the contributions of historical-critical methodologies offers an important corrective to a narrow understanding of growth and revelation within history. Indeed, much of the emphasis among some practitioners of TIS privileges the New Testament as the unique if not the exclusive provenance of the believing community, the church. From that perspective, orthodox exegetes who choose to make use of the tools and results of critical exegesis may do so to further theological goals, but not because such tools have value in their own right, and only if they further an explicitly theological agenda. Stephen Fowl, for example, uses the image of the Israelites plundering the Egyptians as an example of the manner in which Christian exegetes ought to plunder non-Christian critical exegesis for their own ends.Footnote ⁶² For Fowl and others associated with TIS, the questions and insights derived from critical exegesis are, at best, suspect resources to be used merely on an ad hoc basis, with no real obligation to address the judgments of historical criticism.Footnote ⁶³ It is true that the church and Bible (the New Testament in particular) are related reciprocally in a way that outsiders are not, but that does not make Christian faith a requirement for interpretation, for such a requirement would threaten to reduce the biblical text to a solipsistic arsenal of proof-texts for dogmatic and cultural agendas. Contrary to Tertullian's position, non-Christians and non-Christian methodologies can and do offer valid and important insights into the meaning of the biblical text, and one might rightly argue that a willingness to be open to what the text proposes is the minimum requirement for exegesis.Footnote ⁶⁴ For Schneiders, biblical scholarship must keep the text at least somewhat strange and unfamiliar, even making use of nonecclesial voices and experiences to unlock the revelatory power of the text; otherwise the message of the text will likely become domesticated, stale, and irrelevant. Conversely, without engaging believers and their communities of faith, academics risk missing a genuine dialogue with the actual subject matter of the text, leaving them with an interesting but irrelevant record of an ancient and dead world.Footnote ⁶⁵

Schneiders is ready to engage in a dialectic account of interpretation when it comes to the tradition and received wisdom on a variety of biblical passages and church practices. She subjects the Christian tradition, and even the tradition of academic research, to a thorough critique, a hermeneutics of suspicion, and grounds her exegesis within a horizon of authentic meaning and value derived from an engagement with the text itself. Indeed, for Schneiders, authentic meaning is often unlocked through appeal to critical scholarship, but it is also unlocked through an appeal to the common experience of believers, especially the experience of the marginalized, and this sets up a recurring dialectical engagement. Through a consistent distanciation from the text, readers cultivate a disposition of openness and receptivity and risk their very selves in an engagement with the subject matter, refusing to allow biblical interpretation to become a settled question. As an encounter with the living God, Scripture always speaks anew, speaks personally, guides community, and leads to radical transformation.

C. Spirituality, Transformation, and the Paschal Imagination

The fundamental importance of religious conversion stands at the heart of Schneiders’ understanding of the paschal imagination and its place in the authentic interpretation of the gospels. At the heart of the paschal imagination lies the experience of an ongoing transformative encounter with the God of Jesus Christ. This grounds Schneiders’ understanding of the nature of the experience of the earliest Christians, and it also informs her approach to the interpretation of the gospel witness. For Schneiders, the experience of the earliest Christians was so unexpected and ineffable that the biblical texts reflect the struggle of the earliest disciples to understand such radically “good news.” Indeed, some of the insights of historical-critical methodologies help to highlight the omitted, contorted, or distorted material presented in the text, demonstrating the apophatic dimensions of the earliest disciples’ experience. These strange features of the gospel narratives bear witness to how fundamentally inadequate the original authors were for the subject matter of the text they produced—the power of the living God revealed Jesus Christ.Footnote ⁶⁶ The realization of this “gap” (mentioned previously) between the text and the events the authors proclaim becomes intelligible, affirmable, and above all accessible, once the gap is acknowledged and taken into account. Such distanciation unlocks the sense of witness evident in the biblical proclamation and makes the acknowledgment of the authorial gap “an indispensable moment in the full interpretive process.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Unlocking this witness character of the gospels is actualized by what Schneiders calls “the paschal imagination.”

The proclaimed Jesus is the inclusive subject of the gospels, and it is this proclaimed Jesus who anchors the imaginative symbol termed “the paschal mystery.” That symbol includes elements of the historical moments in Jesus’ life, but it also includes transhistorical and interpretive elements (e.g., the resurrection and ascension). The tensive image of the paschal mystery that governs the Christian imagination yields the proclaimed Jesus, and it is through the paschal imagination that the proclaimed Jesus is encountered.Footnote ⁶⁸ Schneiders’ recognition of the paschal imagination grows out of an understanding of the historical dimensions of the gospels and rests, at least in part, on the work of historical critics who acknowledge and emphasize the gap or distance between the mere recording of historical occurrences and the events of revelation and proclamation. Given the status of the gospels as proclamation and witness, they are inexhaustibly revelatory—they are recognized as religious “classics” par excellence. They represent the fusion of the historic witnesses to the event of Jesus and the appropriation of the revelation of God in Christ by the first generation of believers, and it is in this fusion that the paschal imagination births the gospel text and reveals the living God.

The paschal imagination is both the agent and object of the gospel text. In other words, Schneiders sees the text emerging from the experience of the first believers:

For Schneiders, the paschal imagination is a cipher for the Christian spiritual imagination born of religious conversion.Footnote ⁷⁰ It is a constructive imagination insofar as it produces a worldview, yet this worldview is neither simplistic nor without intellectual depth. Indeed, for Schneiders, constructive imagination has several dimensions. First, the paschal imagination brings together images that are dynamic, assembling experiences and insights that were previously scattered and dispersed in time into a tensive whole. Second, these images operate hermeneutically inasmuch as they provide a pole around which other objects, symbols, and experiences begin to coalesce. Third, the images produced by the paschal imagination are irreducible, never fully thematized, and always somewhat elusive. Fourth, Schneiders says that these symbols operate beyond the frozen images of “the past.” Instead, these symbols work in the present to interpret and provide depth to the flow of experience while bringing healing to traumatic memories (note theories of trauma in the study of the Resurrection narratives in particular).Footnote ⁷¹ Finally, the images produced by the paschal imagination are loaded with affect and are actualized in the realm of feeling even as they assist in the apprehension of meaning and value.Footnote ⁷² Through the process of symbol-making, the biblical authors proclaim the mystery by which they have been redeemed, and they begin to enact the values inherent in the symbolic narrative that was birthed by them.Footnote ⁷³

It is through the distanciation made possible by historical-critical methodologies (“the gap”) that the interpreter can begin to appreciate the real character of the gospels. Herein lies the space to see the gospels as products of the paschal imagination, the fruit of the encounter with the risen Jesus. It is here that the revelatory power of the text is both displayed and realized in redemptive communion, that is, through participation in the paschal mystery. This participation in Christ finds its actualization in constant rehearsal, prayerful appropriation, and the performance of concrete acts of love, whereby the truth of the gospel is made known and affirmed by the transformed subject committed to doing the truth.Footnote ⁷⁴ This realization of the biblical text, one that is born of a communal process of “scripturing” the truth (to borrow a phrase from Schneiders) is an authentically theological interpretation of Scripture, one that takes into account the limitations of the biblical text in order to open it.

A. Distanciation: The World Behind the Text and the Authority of the Witness in John 20

As discussed previously, Schneiders acknowledges that historical-critical methodologies, and the questions they seek to answer, reach the end of the road when their sole aim is to “get behind” the biblical narratives of the resurrection.Footnote ⁷⁷ But getting partially behind the narrative in John 20 is certainly possible, and Schneiders makes some important claims about the world behind the text, the world that gives birth to and structures John 20.

Drawing on the work of Raymond Brown, among others (including even Bultmann),Footnote ⁷⁸ Schneiders rejects the facile identification of John, the son of Zebedee, as both the author of the Fourth Gospel and the Beloved Disciple (BD).Footnote ⁷⁹ She views the authoritative eyewitness behind the gospel as distinct from the evangelist, and as distinct from the so-called “ecclesiastical redactor” of the gospel. Her work on identifying these figures and illuminating the development of the Johannine community instantiates a clear and fruitful embrace of historical criticism—wrestling with complex questions of the origin and purpose of the Fourth Gospel.Footnote ⁸⁰

Schneiders views the eyewitness testimony of the BD as the authoritative tradition from which the Fourth Gospel flows. Moreover, the BD functions as a textual paradigm historically realized in the leading figures of the Johannine school but “refracted” in the text through several important characters, including: Nathaniel, the Samaritan woman, the royal official, the blind man of Bethsaïda, Martha-Mary-Lazarus of Bethany, Mary Magdalene, and Thomas. Among these figures, Mary Magdalene is the most significant, given her place in the resurrection narrative and her role as the witness of the resurrection to the apostolic community, “the apostle to the apostles.”Footnote ⁸¹ The BD thus functions not only as authoritative witness and “auteur,” but also as the ideal disciple, providing testimony to the Johannine idea of discipleship while simultaneously inviting the reader to enter into that identity.

The evangelist (i.e., the writer of the gospel), for Schneiders, is a second-generation Christian, whose identity is intentionally concealed. This concealment is designed to secure the legitimacy of the gospel within the larger church body of the first two centuries, the churches of the Petrine and Pauline ministry, allowing the textual “alter ego” of the evangelist to emerge in the figure of the Samaritan woman (John 4) who blends Samaritan and Jewish theology throughout the narrative. Additionally, the Samaritan woman, like the community of the Fourth Gospel, claims to derive its authority directly from Jesus rather than from the twelve, and she stands as a reminder that the Johannine community embraced the foundational role of women in the church. A late editorial hand, the one Bultmann famously identified as the Johannine “ecclesiastical redactor,”Footnote ⁸² was likely responsible for tempering what Schneiders identifies as the two most distinctive features of the Fourth Gospel: (1) the autonomy of the BD versus Simon Peter and (2) the preeminent role of women as the foundational apostolic witnesses of the community. Although not sharing Bultmann's characterization of the redactor or Bultmann's account of the history of the Johannine text, Schneiders nevertheless discerns the hand of this redactor in mollifying these two features of the Fourth Gospel, features that the dialectic and critical dimensions of her interpretation bring to the fore as illuminating theological dimensions of the text.

Schneiders draws on an account of the historical context of the production of the Fourth Gospel as she leads the reader into an exegesis of the text, and her exegesis distances the text from its literal and immediate simplicity without doing violence to it. Historical questions about the origin and redaction of the text help to shed light on important features that may otherwise be domesticated in more doctrinal or traditionally centered exegesis. These features of the text are highlighted as Schneiders engages the resurrection narrative in John 20 and they are illuminated by her exegesis.

B. Encounters with the Risen Christ (John 20)

In many of her writings on the Resurrection of Jesus, Schneiders points out that exegetical approaches that ignore the question of “what happened” risk ignoring the central conviction of the entire Christian tradition. As a “saturated phenomenon” (a category Schneiders borrows from Jean-Luc Marion), the Resurrection of Jesus remains an event of inexhaustible meaning and consequence.Footnote ⁸³ It is an event that overwhelms the human capacity to absorb or analyze it, and it is precisely this dimension of the Resurrection event that inaugurates and finds a home in the paschal imagination described previously. Even with the utter newness and radicality of the event, the earliest Christians nevertheless were consistent about some matters pertaining to the Resurrection of Jesus: the risen body of Jesus, while no longer physical, was still material, and it served as the definite and real symbol of Jesus—it mediated his presence and placed him within a network of relationships. This symbolic presence of the resurrected body of Jesus, this bodyperson, was no longer sarx or psykikos (“flesh” or “natural”) and therefore no longer subject to the physical or natural limitations of space and time. The spiritual implications of these features of the risen Christ became increasingly important for Christian spirituality for several reasons, most notably because the relationship between the disciples and Jesus was changed, but it was still personal. This personal relationship also defines the relationship between Jesus and believers of subsequent generations: in prayer and acts of mercy/justice, one acts in personal concord with Christ, and one thereby encounters Jesus as a person.Footnote ⁸⁴

One important presupposition of Schneiders’ reading of John 20 is that Bultmann was wrong to see it as a concession to the emerging orthodoxy of the Christian church, which took the bodily resurrection of Jesus as the sign of his vindication by God. For Bultmann, John 20 was appended to the Fourth Gospel, which had originally ended with the glorification of Jesus on the cross and thus with no need of a resurrection narrative.Footnote ⁸⁵ For Schneiders, a sapiential eschatological reading of the Resurrection obviates Bultmann's point and lets stand the glorification of Jesus on the cross, but makes the Resurrection of Jesus “manifestation of the meaning for the whole bodyperson of life in God now lived in all its fullness.Footnote ⁸⁶ In the case of Jesus, the Resurrection is a precondition for the possibility of his post-Easter personal presence to his disciples and his continuing action in the world.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Schneiders thus argues for the literary unity of the chapter as it stands, making the initial scene at the empty tomb an integral unit and connecting the BD and Mary Magdalene as examples of the journey into full Johannine faith.

Coming to faith in the risen Christ unfolds in a series of appearances in John 20, and these appearances are imagined around the major figures and themes that define the Johannine community and make it, at least in some ways, both spiritually provocative and perhaps, in a sense, dangerous. As a unique scene in the gospel tradition, Schneiders sees John 20:1–10 as a provocative statement about the faith of the BD (and the Johannine community) and the struggle of Simon Peter to come to faith. As Schneiders reads the passage, Peter stands as a foil for the BD. On the one hand, Peter arrives second to the tomb and sees that it is empty, notes the linen burial clothes set aside, and sees the soudarion folded by itself, but he does not understand nor does he believe. When the BD, on the other hand, sees the soudarion, he comes to believe (John 20:8). Schneiders, therefore, centers her reading of the passage on the soudarion and connects it to the flesh that Jesus has, in his Resurrection, set aside. Schneiders interprets the soudarion as the veil worn by Moses (Exodus 34:33–35) after he descended from his encounter with God on Sinai.Footnote ⁸⁸ Like the flesh of Jesus, the soudarion was worn by Moses after his face became resplendent on Mount Sinai as it reflected the glory of God. The veil protected the people and allowed them to encounter and talk to Moses. As the flesh of Jesus is set aside, the soudarion acts as a genuine Johannine sēmeion, “a perceptible reality that is itself ambiguous.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Peter's failure to respond to the sēmeion is indicative of the nature of Johannine faith in the resurrection: it is not deducible from the empty tomb. Rather, “the believing of the Beloved Disciple is the faith response to revelation encountered in sign.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The BD stands out as the example of faith in contrast to the preeminent figure of the other churches as reflected in the synoptic tradition, namely, Simon Peter.Footnote ⁹¹

The subsequent scenes in John 20 offer another pair of examples of Resurrection faith: on the one hand, Mary Magdalene, and on the other, Thomas. Through Schneiders’ work with these scenes, she moves the discussion of the encounter with the risen Christ away from a question centered on “What happened to Jesus in his Resurrection?” or “How was Jesus raised from the dead?” to an exploration of the theologically more important question, “Where is the risen Christ?” and “How does one relate to him?” In the first scene following the discovery of the empty tomb and the departure of Simon Peter and the BD, Mary Magdalene mourns the loss of the master and the loss of his body. Because the tomb is empty, someone must have taken the body. But in the subsequent encounter with an unrecognizable figure, Jesus addresses Mary Magdalene using her Aramaic name, Mariam (not the Greek form of her name, Maria, used throughout the rest of the Fourth Gospel), and Mary Magdalene responds with the Aramaic word, Rabbouni, conveying an intimacy, a familiarity, between the two. But Jesus corrects Mary, admonishing her to stop relating to him as if he was still “in the flesh,” as if nothing had changed. Indeed, everything had changed. The biblical admonition, as exegetes often point out, is “stop touching me” (mē mou haptou), meaning, “stop being in relationship to me as you were before.” Mary is then given the task of going and announcing the Easter message to the disciples, identified here as adelphoi (“brothers and sisters”) for the first time, those who now share in Jesus’ relationship with his Father.

In the ensuing episode with Thomas, Schneiders once again characterizes the position of the disciple as one who tries to be in relationship to Jesus “in the flesh” (“unless I probe the nail marks …”). Thomas does not “doubt,” as is so often assumed; rather, Thomas is apistos, that is, “without faith,” and certainly without Johannine faith. Schneiders notes that in the Fourth Gospel, faith is always a deliberate response to God's revelation in Jesus, and Thomas is clearly refusing to believe. Thomas wants the conditions of the earth-bound “fleshy” Jesus to return. When Jesus appears to Thomas, he prompts Thomas by saying, ide (“see” or “behold”) and telling Thomas, phere ton daktylon sou hōde kai ide (“bring your finger here and see”) the marks in his hands. Additionally, Jesus commands Thomas by telling him to “thrust” (bale) his hand into the side of Jesus. But Thomas responds not by touching Jesus, but by declaring his faith (“My Lord and my God”). Jesus then blesses those who do not see but who nevertheless believe because of the testimony of the disciples and because of the words of the Fourth Gospel (20:31).

Much of what Schneiders does in John 20 reflects her penchant for a literary-theological approach to interpretation. She engages in word studies, “reads” the development of characters and ideas in the text, and connects scenes and details in one part of the narrative with others, emphasizing the flow and development of themes in the story told in the Fourth Gospel. But there are at least three ways in which Schneiders’ interpretation of John 20 integrates historical-critical insights, that is, insights that center on “world behind the text” questions, questions that deal with the origins of the Fourth Gospel, its circumstances, and its authorial intentions in a way that grounds the deeply theological reading Schneiders provides.

First, the authority or authorship behind the Fourth Gospel and the story of the community anchor Schneiders’ reading of the role played by Mary Magdalene and the BD in the story. The BD is clearly an alternative authority in the community, and this status impacts and reinforces the tension between the BD and Simon Peter at a narrative level. As for Mary Magdalene, she functions as the authoritative witness of the Easter message and stands in contrast to the women who feared and failed in the synoptic tradition (Mark 16:8).

Second, Schneiders’ work on reformulating the theological context of late-first-century Judaism and the emergence of sapiential eschatology (as an alternative way of understanding the meaning of the resurrection in terms of Jesus returning to his disciples) allows the Johannine resurrection narrative to stand out from the synoptic accounts. It rebuts, in a sense, the notion that the Resurrection was itself primarily to be understood as a vindication of Jesus. In other words, Schneiders highlights a significant theological, and perhaps spiritual, tension in the biblical accounts of the Resurrection and its meaning.

Third, Schneiders’ emphasis on the encounter of the bodyperson (not the “flesh”) of Jesus with those who knew him and to those who would come to know him amplifies her account of the options within early Judaism for understanding the Resurrection. The Resurrection does not serve as a sign of Jesus’ vindication; rather, the Resurrection of Jesus centers on the ongoing personal relationship of Jesus to his disciples and to subsequent generations who come to believe through the witness of the Fourth Gospel. Both the invitation to touch (Thomas) and the prohibition of touching (Mary) in John 20 serve, in their own ways, to reinforce and locate the encounter with the risen Christ in the life and proclamation of the church and not merely as a historical event in the past related to Jesus’ life and ministry.

These three features help Schneiders’ interpretation of the Resurrection in John 20 to speak more directly to contemporary believers through their significance as spiritual insights that lead readers to an engagement with the text beyond questions of literary meaning or history. Rather, the features of Schneiders’ exegesis of John 20 play directly into a spiritual encounter with the risen Christ precisely by inviting readers to be aware of and to engage the paschal imagination, both as it is present in the text as well as how it might be present within their own experience of personal encounter with the Risen One—this Jesus, who we crucified. Such encounters are born of a deeply ecclesial reading of the text, but a reading that is nevertheless open to the tensions and contradictions that Scripture brings to the reader—challenges that don't always square simply with flat notions of Christian piety or doctrine.