Hidden Treasure: The Truth 'in' Scripture

Sources: Alastair H.B. Logan, "Gnosticism," in Adrian Hastings, ed., The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (Oxford, 2000), Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Scandal of the Incarnation: Irenaeus against the Heresies, trans. John Saward (Ignatius, 1990), Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Vintage, 1981).

Reading: Mark 4:10-13, Matthew 13:44.

What Do We Make of Ambiguity in Scripture?
Is scripture 'perspicuous'? Or does it take special skill, insight, or experience to read correctly?

"You are wrong because you don't know the scriptures or the power of God" (Matthew 22:29).

Canons and Codes within the Canon

Biblical theologies seek themes that are pervasive in the canon.
Yet Christian traditions have often identified some kind of key to interpreting the rest:

Paul, and justification by grace through faith?
Acts, and Spirit-baptized mission?
Apocalyptic texts, and the 'end times'?
The Gospels, and Jesus Christ?
Moral material, and sanctification?
The Old Testament, and ethnic Israel?

Other traditions have treated scriptures as bearing esoteric or encoded meanings:

Kabbalah?
The Bible Code?
Christ represented allegorically in the Old Testament? ("The new lies in the old concealed.")
'Higher' biblical historical criticism? (What really happened?)

These strategies imply distinct theologies of revelation, inspiration, illumination, and roles of the Bible in mission and the life of the church.
(Will 'dramatic' narrative analysis reconcile thematic approaches and key-oriented ones?)

An Instructive Tale: Gnostic Hermeneutics

'A blend of distinctive universal myths of salvation constructed from biblical, Jewish, Christian, and Platonic elements to answer fundamental questions about the self as divine and about the problem of evil' (Logan 269).
Common 'themes':

The 'demiurge' creator is not the supreme God.
Spirit and matter are thus irreconcilable.
There is hope for spirit, but futility for the physical (and historical) world.

Gnostics carried 'secret teachings' they claimed come from Jesus through the apostles.

The Gnostic metanarrative traces the origin and fall of heavenly Sophia as the reason for life as we know it.
Life is 'soul making' in the challenge the evil body poses to the soul's escape, ascent, and reunion with its source.
Christ facilitates this with a pioneering rebirth and soul-ascent, then the communication of the necessary knowledge (gnosis; not faith) to follow him (Logan 268).

Gnostics also deconstructed the OT they rejected, reading between its lines to discover traces of the truth the creator couldn't fully conceal (for instance, the serpent as hero).

Irenaeus against Gnostics

Irenaeus' Against Heresies is decisive for Christian response to Gnosticism:

Book I: He describes the erroneous doctrines (in ways generally confirmed by the Nag Hammadi texts).

Book II: He exposes their absurdity.
Book III: He refutes their claims through biblical exegesis, reading out of both testaments the same God as the one creator and Lord through the one Word, Jesus the incarnate (not docetic) Christ.
Book IV: He affirms the value of the OT in light of the NT.
Book V: The resurrection, anticipated by the Eucharist, shows the goodness and divine origin of matter (Balthasar, 7).

Ireneaus identifies God the creator and God the redeemer in one oikonomia of recapitulation in Jesus Christ.
Irenaeus articulates the doctrine of creation ex nihilo (Hebrews interprets Genesis).
Irenaeus articulates a rationale and phenomenology of tradition through apostolic succession

and its 'rule of faith' (regula fidei) governing biblical interpretation
(Christ and church are key).

His treatment is a 'biblical theology' in some sense but not others.