Interview: A Mouth Full of Fire

Interview by Matthew Claridge–

The prophets of the OT have their high vistas of stunning clarity from which we can survey the entire horizon of the canon past and present. Isaiah 53, Ezekiel 36, Daniel 2 and several others could come to mind as mountain top experiences. But between those peaks are vast swaths of tangled and dimly lit forests. Reading or treading straight through the prophets is not a walk in the park.  Obviously, we modern travelers are at a great disadvantage not being familiar with the language, the genres, the culture, and (shamefully) the theology of these towering visionaries. Thankfully, there are many excellent and proven travel guides to lead us along. Andrew Shead’s most recent book, A Mouth Full of Fire: The Word of God in the Words of Jeremiah, forges a new path into the book of Jeremiah.

You are happy to label your book an exercise in “theological interpretation of Scripture.” What do you mean by this, and how does your book serve as an example?

Good question! The last 20 years have seen a growing number of scholars from confessional backgrounds lose patience with the determination of the secular academy (think SBL) to ‘bracket out’ questions of faith when interpreting the Bible. The fear is that a person’s faith commitments will distort his or her conclusions, and yet we recognize that everyone has prior convictions that shape the way they read, and the decision to read the Bible as a divinely inspired book is neither more nor less distorting than the decision to read it as an uninspired book. That’s a roundabout way of saying that ‘theological interpretation’ means reading the Bible as a theological book. Actually, I want to be a bit more specific than that, and insist that the way the Bible conveys its theology is through a single story arching from Genesis to Revelation, with Christ as its centre and purpose.

My book is an example of this sort of reading on a number of levels. Most basically, I am trying to read Jeremiah as Christian Scripture, which means allowing its theological character and place in the large story of the Bible to shape my decisions about what constitutes the best reading of a text. Ultimately, I want to explore how to read the Old Testament in its own right as a source of Christian theology.

The distinction you draw between the “Word of God” and the “words of God” and how these phrases interact forms a major piece of your analysis of Jeremiah. What is the significance of the distinction? How does it contribute to a robust Doctrine of the Word of God?

Jeremiah distinguishes very carefully between these two things. The word is the message; the words are its constituent parts. The words are spoken by the prophet; eventually they are written down and read out; receptive listeners hear them not as the words of Jeremiah but as the life-giving word of God. To rebellious listeners, however, they seem just words, as if some vital ingredient had not got through.

The words which make up the word are human, they are changeable in the sense that the word (message) can be translated into other words but remain the same word. It’s the message that counts: to the extent that (but only to the extent that) the message conveyed by, say, English words is the same as the message Jeremiah spoke, the English words count as the very words of God.

What is this word? It is a message, made of human words, by which God makes himself present to the listeners. What they receive is not just words, but a Person. When they hear receptively that word enters in and transforms them; when they refuse to heed, the word crushes them from without, as a word of judgment.

 On your reading, the Word of God is not just a series of messages conveyed by Jeremiah, but a character, indeed, the central protagonist of the book. Help us understand how Jeremiah’s message takes on such personal attributes?

At the simplest grammatical level ‘the word of Yahweh’ is the subject of the book (1:1-2), and I argue that it is effectively the main character of the book – but that is not the same as saying the word is a person. It is a theological idea. It is, of course, also a message, and that message is ‘embodied’ in the prophet who speaks it, and as he speaks and lives this message the God who first spoke it makes himself present to the hearers in living power. The words are human, but they come from God, and because God communicates himself by the word that emerges from those words, that word truly has power to unmake the world.

 Could you give us a glimpse of the ways in which the book of Jeremiah is structured as a “narrative of the word of God”? (65)

The book of Jeremiah in its final form is built around a series of headings which translate as ‘The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord’. The story these large units combine to narrate is made up of four ‘movements’ in which we see the word of the Lord at work from different angles. In Jer. 1–25 the word of the Lord announces Judah’s destruction and its speaker is crushed; in Jer. 25–34 the word of the Lord vindicates its speaker and offers true hope to deaf listeners; in Jer. 35–44 the word of the Lord destroys the nation it created and plants seeds of new life; in Jer. 45–52 the word of the Lord sends a tide of judgment across the earth and draws a new nation from the wreckage. Do you mind if I quote myself? Here goes:

 The story of Jeremiah is the story of God’s word addressing his people with the utmost urgency, over matters of life and death, with patience and longsuffering, until at last that divine word puts into effect all that it had declared, with devastating results. The suffering that was initially felt only by the speaker of the word (both God and Jeremiah) was ultimately poured out upon his deaf audience and, in the end, every nation on earth. And yet, all along – glorious twist in the plot! – it turns out that it is precisely and only through this very devastation that God’s longed-for future can be created. And so the word of God triumphs twice over. (p. 105)

“The book of Jeremiah is unique in the extent and significance of its biographical material ..and yet [Jeremiah] appears to have no profile at all when it comes to the real subject of the book, the Word of God.” (119) This does seem like a strange paradox. What purpose does this heightened biography and heightened diminution of the prophet serve?

We are familiar with the way Ezekiel is rendered mute by God and turned into a living proclamation of his own message. Much the same thing happens with Jeremiah, whose total life is pressed into service – even his complaints against God! – to become part of God’s message, part of the word by which God manifests himself among his people. The book is therefore uninterested in Jeremiah as a person in the normal sense, but extremely interested in the way that person becomes a transparent vessel for the word of God.

We are accustomed to thinking about the “prophetic” genre of which Jeremiah is a part. However, our definitions of this genre quickly create problems when we consider the fact that most, if not all, of Jeremiah is the result of scribal activity and much of the OT is written by those not traditionally designated as prophets. How do you suggest Jeremiah’s Word theology helps us understand the entire OT cannon as “prophetic” in the way the NT authors assumed?

Yes, the book of Jeremiah is a scribal product from start to finish. Traditional descriptions of the ‘prophetic’ genre, and models of ‘prophetic inspiration’ which follow on from that, are too tied to imagined situations of a prophet receiving dictated words from God. Yes, we see words coming to the prophet by dictation, but we also see words spoken spontaneously by the prophet, deuteronomic sermons composed by the prophet, and even biographies written by his scribe, all included among the ‘words of Jeremiah’ according to the book’s opening verse, and identified with ‘the word of the lord’ in the next verse. What makes these words prophetic is not the mode by which they were given, but the level of divine superintendence involved, which is sufficient to make each word count as a word of God.

When the word first given to a prophet is transcribed, perhaps even reshaped by the scribe using new words, the scribe responsible is not a prophet in the sense of having God’s word come to him with unmediated directness; however, if one takes the claim of Jer. 1:1-2 seriously, one is forced to postulate some sort of divine ‘concursus’ by which God ensures that the newly written words add up to the very same word originally given to the prophet. We may therefore characterize the scribe’s work as ‘prophet-like’, and the scribe as an ‘occasional prophet’. His words function as canon in a way a preacher’s words never do. In short, I suggest that when NT writers speak of ‘the prophetic Scriptures’ (including Law as well as Prophecy in Rom. 16:26) they are expressing their confidence in the words of those Scriptures. Language of prophecy, applied to Scripture, is the NT’s way of describing what we might call verbal inspiration.

You note the fact that Jeremiah has “no theology of the spirit,” rather, “Jeremiah transfers language in the domain of the spirit to the domain of words” (pg. 266). This leads you into a discussion of Barth’s Doctrine of Scripture who held that the Bible becomes the Word of God through the Spirit. Yet you point out  that Jeremiah’s more Word-centered approach aids us in avoiding Barth’s views of illumination. How so?

Your questions keep getting harder – I’m glad this is the last one! All I can do is hint at some conclusions without providing much in the way of working.

Karl Barth’s account of the relationship between Scripture and the Word of God finds both support and resistance from Jeremiah, at different points. Perhaps surprisingly, the much-maligned idea that the Bible ‘becomes’ the word of God is strongly affirmed by Jeremiah’s dynamic word theology – but with some crucial differences. First, Jeremiah would have us see that the proclaimed words always become the word of God to a hearer (if that hearer rejects the message then the words spoken become a word of judgment). Because Jeremiah has no concept of an ineffectual word, we can simply say that the Bible is the word of God.

Barth’s immediate objection would be that since the word of God is never less than Jesus Christ, it is wrong to attach inspiration to the written text and so make God an ‘attribute’ of the Bible. Instead, inspiration needs to remain in the ‘circle’ of the Spirit’s activity, beginning with the word first given and ending with the illumination of the hearer.

What Jeremiah does for us is demonstrate how a text can be simultaneously the words of Jeremiah and the words of God, so that the text itself becomes a location of God’s activity. There is therefore a corresponding ‘circle’ of the words (plural): the words God puts into the prophet’s mouth (an activity of inspiration) are the same words written, proclaimed and then written again on the hearts of the hearers so that they hear the Word of God (an activity of illumination). The words come from God and, like the Spirit, point beyond themselves as the instruments of God’s self-manifestation in the form of his Word. When we affirm that inspiration attaches to the words we have not divinized the text, or located its power to judge and save anywhere other than in God’s free decision to make himself present as Word through those divine and human words.

 Andrew G. Shead is Head of Old Testament at Moore College, Sydney, where he lectures in Hebrew, Old Testament and music. He is the author of The Open Book and the Sealed Book: Jeremiah 32 in its Greek and Hebrew Recensions and numerous article, essays and reviews.