timothymichaellaw

Tim Grass, F. F. Bruce: A Life. The Definitive Biography of a New Testament Scholar (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2011). xiv+283 pp. £14.99. ISBN 978-1-84227-737-9.

Frederick Fyvie Bruce (1910-90) was something like a godfather of much British and North American evangelical scholarship on the New Testament. His commentaries are learned and eminently sane, enriched by his classical training if on the whole conservative in historical judgments and a bit dry.

Bruce has found a sympathetic and careful biographer in Tim Grass. While Bruce himself had written something of an autobiography (In Retrospect, rev. ed. 1993), Grass offers an external take on Bruce’s life and achievement. This isn’t necessarily an intellectual biography that sets Bruce’s results in their exegetical context or queries their adequacy, though Grass certainly does some of that. Rather, the distinctive accomplishment of this biography is to set him firmly in Brethren context, while not ignoring the broader contours of his career. Bruce produced an extraordinarily broad range of magazine articles, pamphlets and books directed to the non-scholar, on biblical as well as church-historical themes, and the portrait of this non-scholar often reflects the Brethren-in-the-pews in the assemblies where Bruce taught and preached during his whole life.

I expected to be impressed by Bruce’s industry and productivity, and I certainly was. But there were a few surprises in this biography as well.

First, the capaciousness of Bruce’s evangelicalism is striking. Throughout his life he retained a skepticism of synthesizing theological accounts, and this, together with a robust trust in the reliability of the New Testament (which Bruce of course would want to claim rests on good historical evidence), led him to insist that research be undertaken unfettered.

This is perhaps most notable in his 1947 article on the Tyndale Fellowship (in Evangelical Quarterly 19 [1947]: 52-61, available in PDF here), which Grass highlights and which may surprise some. Bruce was involved in the early stages of the Biblical Research Fellowship and the founding of its most famous institution, Tyndale House (though not as the prime mover; cf. Grass 41-49). In summarizing the rationale for the new institution, he writes,

This Fellowship is linked with the I.V.F. in that the I.V.F. Biblical Research Committee is also the Council of the Tyndale Fellowship, and its theological outlook is that expressed in the I.V.F. Doctrinal Basis. Its object is to maintain and promote Biblical studies and research in a spirit of loyalty to the Christian Faith as enshrined in the consensus of the Historic Creeds and Reformed Confessions, and to re-establish the authority of Evangelical scholarship in the field of Biblical and theological studies (55).

This is perhaps what one might have expected. But then Bruce goes on to say,

But an important question is sometimes raised. While the Tyndale Fellowship professes its desire to remove the stigma of obscurantism from English Evangelicalism, is it in fact free from obscurantism itself? Does not its acceptance of the I.V.F. Doctrinal Basis commit it ipso facto to an unprogressive “Fundamentalism” (to employ what Principal Maclean aptly called “a refined theological swearword”!)?[i] Are not its conclusions in the field, say, of Biblical criticism, prescribed and settled in advance? The answer is, unreservedly, No (56).

This is more remarkable. Though he draws a contrast with Catholic exegesis that no longer holds true after Vatican II, this sense of freedom is striking, especially when he goes on:

No such conclusions are prescribed for members of the Tyndale Fellowship. In such critical cruces, for example, as the codification of the Pentateuch, the composition of Isaiah, the date of Daniel, the sources of the Gospels, or the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles, each of us is free to hold and proclaim the conclusions to which all the available evidence points. Any research worthy of the name, we take it for granted, must necessarily be unfettered (58-59).

Grass later goes on to note a certain retrenchment in British evangelicalism, following on from the cultural wars over the Bible in North America in the 1970s. But Bruce was to resist the introduction of the language of inerrancy into Tyndale Fellowship statements (Grass 145-57), and apparently held to a late date of Daniel (in its final form) and harbored his own reservations about the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles. He retained through this a broad capacity to appreciate differing positions, even while convinced of his own; and so it was that Bruce was exempted from the ringing criticisms of his sometime Manchester colleague, James Barr.

To provide a bit of anecdotal evidence, my copy of Lewis R. Donelson’s Pseudepigraphy and Ethical Argument in the Pastoral Epistles (HUT 22; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986), was once owned by Bruce (as the nameplate indicates). He reviewed the book for Heythrop Journal in the last couple years of his life, summarizing very fairly:

This does away with the argument that pseudepigraphy was a routine literary procedure which deceived no one; it was intended to deceive and did deceive. No pseudepigraph was ever received as canonical except in the belief that it was genuine. There is an ethical and psychological problem here which has not been adequately solved by those who agree with the author on this point…Dr Donelson, in the earlier part of his monograph, engages in comparative literary studies of great interest, but the main value of the work lies in its further exploration of the Pastoral Epistles viewed as an exercise in what has been called ‘the domestication of Paul’ (HeyJ 30 [1989] 190-91)

Grass cites an illuminating passage from Bruce’s autobiographical reflections on the question of inspiration (Grass 150):

Occasionally, when I have expounded the meaning of some biblical passage in a particular way, I have been asked, ‘But how does that square with inspiration?’ But inspiration is not a concept of which I have a clear understanding before I come to the study of the text, so that I know in advance what limits are placed on the meaning of the text by the requirements of inspiration. On the contrary, it is by the patient study of the text that I come to understand better not only what the text itself means but also what is involved in biblical inspiration. My doctrine of Scripture is based on my study of Scripture, not vice versa.

If we could note that this smacks of a foundationalism that is likely to be impossible in practice and perhaps partakes in that modern confidence in one’s ability to bracket one’s convictions, it still attests an admirable willingness to revise one’s doctrine of Scripture on the basis of the concrete results of one’s exegesis, and so avoids some of the hopeless apriorism that so marks many debates about the nature of the Bible.

Another surprise was Bruce’s appreciation for German theology. As editor of Evangelical Quarterly (by the way, Bruce was also for some time editor of the Palestine Exploration Quarterly, founding member of the Sheffield biblical studies department, and president of both SOTS and SNTS!), Bruce accepted in 1954 an article by H. L. Ellison that had Barthian tendencies. In the Barth-anxious atmosphere of the 1950s, controversy broke out, but Bruce resolutely defended the author, and went on to criticise evangelical disapproval of Barth (for which Bruce himself was criticized by Iain Murray). He also appreciated the work of Bultmann (whose name ‘ought never to be mentioned without profound respect’, cited in Grass 153) and his followers, though clearly differing on some points. For example, he writes

On many points of New Testament criticism I find myself differing from such post-Bultmannians as Ernst Käsemann and Günther Bornkamm, but critical differences become insignificant in the light of their firm understanding and eloquent exposition of the Pauline gospel of justification by faith, which is the very heart of evangelical Christianity (Grass 153).

It is clear that Bruce’s theological ties were strongly evangelical, but he had a capacity for appreciation that has often been lost on his evangelical successors.

Finally, I noted above Bruce’s hesitance about synthesizing theological accounts. Perhaps one could count this as a virtue in light of what passed for ‘systematic theology’ in evangelical circles at the time. But now that we live in a time in which the situatedness of the interpreter is taken for granted and we have seen recent overtures toward a reconciliation between the strangely estranged disciplines of biblical studies and constructive theology, one would hope that the next generations of evangelical biblical scholars can do more than Bruce in his day did, for all his accomplishments, in the realm of theological interpretation. Tyndale House, for all its riches, is intentionally a residential library for biblical studies rather than theology. If a new generation is rightly unwilling to agree with the naïve and problematic thesis that systematic theology is simply something that arises organically from the sum total of our exegesis, then might we hope for a flourishing of more dialectical engagement between Scripture and theology – among evangelicals, of all people?

-D. Lincicum