Exegetical pressure, exegetical pressures and "Canonical Pressure"

(updated twice from note originally written in September '14. 16/04/2015)

"Exegetical pressure" (Holmes and others - Childs?) is - I am now convinced - not the right term in this whole debate. Of course I may be misunderstanding or not fully processing what Holmes means by this expression, exegetical pressure (hear him respond to questions at the end of his Fuller lecture), but when we see some of the early exegetical processes, I feel nothing short of shocked! It is the very foundations of biblical exegesis that are leading me to question which way does the “pressure” might lead us.

Well, the answer is... there probably is not one exegetical pressure, unless we redefine exegesis in a way similar to Holmes’ suggestion at the Fuller lecture. There are exegetical pressures, plural. Some believe they lead one way, and others another culminating in one general "pressure".

But there is a third way, expounded by Ehrman and others: the authors did not all believe the same thing about Jesus. A trinitarian will say, or at least in my view should say, that is fine, God revealed different aspects to different writers, and even to the same authors different aspects at different times (e.g. nearness of Christ's second coming for Paul in 1 Thessalonians) and it is the beautiful, painstaking, complementary and collective mosaic of revelation that results in such a wonderful finale. This finale thus harmonises these perspectives into a single portrait, approximating the extraordinary fourth-century creed. The unitarians have many texts that are in favour of distinction between God and Jesus in the New Testament writers' mind that do not require in my view quite the same mosaic approach or creedal layering.

But while the battle is being wrought, and different assumptions being accused, they all miss the great assumption that actually unites them, quite possibly into the one faith, although many would disagree with me on that.

This is the assumption:

At the end of the day, the bible must be cohesively uni-vocal on this issue of whether or not Jesus is God, there simply cannot exist a plurality of pressures.

I think we can give a name to this assumption: canonical pressure. Both camps share a wonderfully deep reliance on this assumption and yet often fail to spot their common ground.


Some of this was inspired from the rather engaging debate with Buzzard and White here, where this assumption is not even laid out.

Stephen Holmes transcript

Trinitarian Action & Inseparable Operations

"One very broad answer in terms of what I think we are doing with the doctrine of the trinity, in terms of exegesis, you know there's this question that Fred touched on this morning, "is this doctrine biblical?", and Fred's answer was "yes it is if we take big enough chunks of the bible... I'm not sure that I fully agree with Fred there, I think in terms of the technically developed doctrine, I am not sure that you can get to certain bits of it just by doing exegesis, rather I think the way you get to it is by facing up to apparent contradictions in the biblical texts and trying to imagine the sorts of things that must be true, particularly about the divine life, in order for those apparent contradictions to not be contradictions for both texts to be true." 

53'00 PRAYER ON JESUS LIPS : "it seems to me that prayer is necessarily a human action, and so when we hear a prayer on Jesus' lips, we have to say well this is a specifically human action. The dyothelite interpretation of those passages which was declared orthodox: The clash of the wills here is not the clash between the Son and the Father because the son and the father have one will. It is the clash of the human will of Jesus with the single divine will. That is not what you get if you said I just want to exegete this text, but i do think it is a reasonable claim to say that if actually we try to make sense of the entire witness of scripture, to the being of the incarnate son, that you are going to need to say something quite like this eventually down the line and do things with that text that are not on the surface, in order to be able to confess its truth alongside the truth of other texts rather rather than picking which texts we believe and which texts we don't.”