The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture by Iain Provan
Essentials in Biblical Theology Series
The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture by Iain Provan[1]
Published in 2017, Iain Provan’s tome The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture is a pivotal work within the field of biblical theology. Although not without its weaknesses, Provan’s work expertly captures the current hermeneutical moment and clarifies key biblical theological concepts that have swirled within church history for centuries concerning the literal sense, allegory, the rule of faith, and many others. An Old Testament scholar, Provan spent the last 25 years of his career at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada where he was a colleague with Hans Boersma, author of works like Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry and Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church.[2] As he indicates in his acknowledgements, it is through conversations with Boersma that the seeds of the book were planted and fostered. The full-grown product, though, obviously grew well beyond these small conversations, spanning some 650 pages and dealing with issues from feminist criticism to the rule of faith. Because of its size and breadth, readers can easily miss Provan’s forest if they don’t first situate the individual trees within his intended landscape.
Provan’s main goal is to interact with a narrative concerning modern hermeneutics that has taken shape over the last couple of decades. Fed up with their historical-critical shackles, many modern Christian scholars are finding freedom in the interpretive methods of their premodern forefathers. Modernity, so it is argued, is to blame for much hermeneutical dross that stains Christian works on the Bible. These methods are overly obsessed with the historical events that lie behind biblical texts, and this obsession has prevented the Bible from speaking into the life of the church. Although the Reformers were well-meaning, their criticism of allegory and tradition unfortunately fanned into flame this modern mindset. To fix the problem, the church must return to her premodern roots to allow her sacred text to speak theologically to her people. Perhaps the most careful and academic case for this narrative is Hans Frei’s Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative,[3] but there are other more recent works that make the same point. One thinks of Craig Carter’s monograph Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition[4] and Boersma’s own works, specifically Heavenly Participation.
Provan provides his own version of the narrative by grouping the various characters within it into four ways marked by their individual hermeneutical distinctives. His first way describes modern historical criticism that has been around since the eighteenth century. Historical critics thought they could get at the true meaning of historical texts by using scientific tools to peer behind them. Their goal was to discover the oral history that gave rise to the stories found within the Bible and the editorial process that brought these stories together into the final product we now know (13). Provan’s second way describes postmodern scholarship. Disillusioned with the modern project, second-way postmodern readers of the Bible disconnect the biblical texts from their authors and place more emphasis on readers as constructors of meaning (14). Third-way readers are represented by The Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics. They hold to classical theological commitments concerning the Bible (e.g., inspiration, inerrancy, authority, etc.), but they also unwittingly hold to a hermeneutic similar to that of the historical critics. They are modern historians dressed in evangelical garb (15–16). Provan’s fourth and final way describes what he calls Counter-Reformational Protestantism. These scholars “are sympathetic to some Roman and Catholic and Orthodox critiques of the Protestant understanding of the Bible, which is perceived as problematic both in its often sharp distinction between Scripture and Christian tradition, and in its rejection of ways of reading the Bible that are deeply rooted in this tradition” (16; italics original). Scholars like Charles Taylor, Brad Gregory, and Hans Boersma are the architects of the narrative described above. For them, modernity has ruined what was good and beautiful about the premodern age, and the Reformers are to blame (17).
Instead of these four, Provan offers a fifth way: “My own conviction is that it is possible in our Bible reading to be appreciative of, and to stand properly in continuity with, much of the pre-Reformation, heritage, while at the same time by no means abandoning the attempt to read both tradition and Scripture in accordance with the principle of Reformation hermeneutics” (20). The keystone of this argument concerns Provan’s take on the literal sense. “To read Scripture ‘literally,’ in line with the Reformation perspectives on this topic, means to read it in accordance with its various, apparent communicative intentions as a collection of texts from the past now integrated into one Great Story, doing justice to such realities as literary conventions, idiom, metaphor, and typology or figuration” (86). In other words, Provan means to provide nuance to this narrative—not completely disagreeing with it but neither completely affirming it. There are many redeemable hermeneutical insights within the modern age and there are many lamentable hermeneutical commitments of the premodern age. In the Reformers, Provan finds a perfect blend of theological commitment and literary sensitivity. It is they that defend a robust version of the literal sense of the text that allows for the right reading of Scripture.
Provan does not interact with all four ways in equal proportion, but there are common threads. Consistently, his view of the literal sense serves as the main point of contact between Provan’s fifth way and the other four, and majority of the book either directly or indirectly attempts to defend it. Provan does not think we should look behind the text. God speaks through the text, but readers must acknowledge what that text is—a divine-human work of literature.
His conversation with Counter-Reformational Protestantism occupies the majority of the book seemingly because their criticism of the Reformation involves multiple moving pieces in order to defend tradition as a source of theology and retrieve allegory as a legitimate hermeneutic. He begins with their view of tradition and then spends an extended amount of time on allegory. Fourth-way scholars typically appeal to the pre-Reformation use of the rule of faith as evidence that tradition operated as an arbiter of orthodoxy alongside the biblical canon. Early church fathers like Irenaeus, for example, used the rule of faith to fight against the Gnostics, and this procedure, according to these scholars, should serve as a model for the present day, placing tradition on par with the Bible. Provan does not deny that this pattern exists. He merely points out that the rule of faith is not a wholly separate tradition from the biblical canon. Rather, it served as a summary of canonical teaching, an effort to situate individual pieces of Scripture within the whole (45). Thus, the notion that the rule of faith establishes warrant for elevating tradition alongside the Bible is misleading because the rule of faith is not really separate from it.
Provan’s interaction with allegory is the most extensive portion of the book, and it isn’t difficult to see why. Allegory stands directly at odds with the Reformers’ defense of the literal sense, a defense that Provan intends to mount again. His analysis runs along three lines—historical, biblical, and conceptual. Historically, fourth-way Protestants argue that for centuries the church was marked by a spiritual form of reading loosely called allegory that, when wed to a Platonic metaphysic, allowed the Bible to make objective claims about God and his creation.
Here, Provan is very careful. He admits that allegory certainly occupied pride of place in the early church, but he challenges the idea that all theologians prior to the Reformation viewed allegory in the same way. The Alexandrian-Antiochene dispute is often appealed to here, but Provan points out that disagreement existed even among proponents of allegory that these fourth-way Protestants still hold in high regard. Augustine, for example, was not as critical of allegory as Theodore of Mopsuestia, but he does lament that the practice has often been used to support all sorts of poor teaching. According to Augustine, careful readers should only appeal to allegory when they have no choice lest their reading become self-serving (190–93). This counsel stands at odds with Origen’s which argues that the Bible should be allegorized as much as possible to get at the spiritual meaning that lies behind the body of the text (183). Provan’s purpose in pointing out these nuances is that if we are to retrieve allegory from the premodern church, whose allegory do we retrieve? There is clearly true variety among these men, and all of them were writing long before the Reformation.
Biblically, fourth-way Protestants defend allegory by appealing to the methods of the apostles, and in so doing they stand in line with the advocates of allegory that have come before them. The apostles, so it is argued, used allegory, and so also should we. Provan’s response is simple: “Jesus and his apostles read Scripture (i.e., the OT) predominately, perhaps even entirely, literally” (107). In other words, out of the dozens of appeals to the Old Testament by Jesus and his apostles, only a handful of them could be categorized as allegorical reading. Moreover, even these handful of passages—including Paul’s so-called allegory in Galatians 4:21–31—are not obviously allegorical (138–149).
Finally, conceptually, these Protestants argue that only allegory allows the Bible to speak theologically to the church in the present. Overemphasizing the literal sense, on the other hand, relegates the biblical text to the past. But there is a deep irony here. Admittedly, allegory allows the reader to draw abstract pieces of theology from the text that can be applied to the present, but it actually undermines the authority of the text by allowing the reader to disagree with the intent of the author (206). The text becomes a wax nose that the reader can shape as he pleases. Instead, the church needs “texts that can bite back. [It] shall not discover such texts as allegorical readers, any more than as postmodern readers, of Scripture. [It] shall encounter them only as readers who are devoted to the letter” (225).
In the last third of the book, Provan blends his interaction with first-way historical critics and second-way postmoderns. Like he does with the Great Tradition, Provan attempts to add nuance the premodern-versus-modern narrative above. Too often post-Enlightenment scholarship is painted with too broad a brush. Multiple disciplines—modern and postmodern—came from the thinking of the enlightenment, and some of them have proven fruitful in understanding the Bible (456–547). Provan concedes that historical-critical scholarship has largely prevented the Bible from speaking to the church, but in his view, it is too simplistic to say that everything that came from the enlightenment has obscured the biblical text. Although much more critical of postmodern thought, his analysis of the second-way takes a similar path, redeeming what can be redeemed and rejecting what cannot (550–608).
Provan’s interaction with third-way evangelicals occupies the middle third of the book and is perhaps the weakest portion of his argument. Initially, it is difficult to see why he would be critical of defenders of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy given his approval of the Reformers formulation of inspiration he discusses earlier in the section (e.g., 326–28). It becomes clear though that he thinks the statement is actually “an understanding of Scripture’s infallibility (and inerrancy) that stands in serious tension with how the Reformers themselves understood these matters—not a retrieval after all but a misunderstanding of that position” (426; italics original). The Reformers certainly affirmed the truth of every one of God’s words, but they had room in their view of inspiration that allowed for human qualities within the text and, consequently, for Provan’s seriously literal type of reading. Provan argues that the Chicago Statement leaves no such room and turns the text into a two by four (428).
If Provan is right about the Chicago Statement excluding the sort of literary reading he defends in the book, then his criticism would find its mark, but it seems as if he misunderstands the claims of the statement in multiple key places. In fact, J. I. Packer—one of the key architects of the Chicago Statement—addresses every one of Provan’s concerns in his book Fundamentalism and the Word of God.[5] Packer quite persuasively demonstrates that the statement means to make room for the human qualities of the text and to limit the scope of biblical claims with an eye toward modern science.[6]
The driving force behind Provan’s critique seems to be his reading of Genesis 1–11. He views the opening chapters of Genesis as highly symbolic, and thinks that modern science has made any sort of literal reading of the creation account untenable. It is here that Provan thinks the Chicago Statement prevents readers from getting at the intent of the opening chapters of Genesis (430–31). Again, recognizing the literary character of Genesis 1–11 is crucial, but Packer’s words on this issue expose a key flaw in Provan’s criticism: “There is a world of difference between recognizing that a real event (the fall, say) may be symbolically portrayed, as Evangelicals do, and arguing, as these persons do, that because the fall is symbolically portrayed, it need not be regarded as a real event at all, but is merely a picture of something else.”[7] (Packer, 105). In other words, pointing out that Genesis is not a modern scientific text but a work of ancient literature doesn’t do as much as Provan thinks it does. Certainly, he is correct to point out that we can misread the text by making it claim something it is not, but the opposite is true as well. We can misread the text by not reading something that it is indeed claiming, whether Genesis is a piece of literature or not. Recognizing this fact is not to succumb to literalism, but an attempt to treat the text seriously. It is to allow the text to bite back even against modern scientific findings.
Even with these weaknesses, The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture is a highly significant work within the world of biblical theology. Provan rightly and robustly captures the current hermeneutical moment. In so doing, he not only helps readers understand the contours of the current landscape, but also offers a potent defense of Reformed hermeneutics that clarifies issues repeatedly discussed throughout the history of the church. “There are few more perplexing and yet important problems in the history of biblical interpretation than the issue of defining what is meant by the sensus literalis of a text. The great scholars of the synagogue and the church wrestled intensely with the question. At times within this history a consensus regarding its meaning appeared to have been reached only once again to break apart for succeeding generations.”[8] Provan’s work effectively attempts to bring the church to a renewed consensus concerning the literal sense of Scripture by defending it from its premodern, postmodern, and modern critics alike.
Jarrett Ford
Cedarville University (February 2026)
TL;DR
Provan’s work interacts with a narrative that blames the Reformation for the shortcomings of historical-critical scholarship and attempts to retrieve a better form of reading from the premodern era.
He provides his own version of this narrative by describing its actors’ hermeneutics in four “ways” (historical criticism, postmodernism, Chicago Statement evangelicals, and Counter-Reformation Protestantism) and proposes a fifth way.
Provan’s fifth way defends Reformed hermeneutics, specifically their robust literary view of the literal sense.
Against the fourth way, Provan argues that the rule of faith was merely a summary of biblical teaching, not a wholly separate tradition.
Further, Provan challenges the retrieval of allegory, noting historical diversity among the fathers, its limited use in the New Testament, and its tendency to undermine biblical authority.
While critical of the children of the Enlightenment (modernism and postmodernism), he affirms that some of the tools that these movements produced are still redeemable and useful.
Provan critiques third-way evangelicals for their view of inerrancy because he doesn’t think it allows room for the Reformed view of the literal sense, a view that is open to the literary components of the text. However, Provan misunderstands the Chicago Statement at this point.
Nevertheless, Provan’s book is a significant contribution to biblical theology, capturing the current hermeneutical moment and clarifying the discussion on the literal sense that has taken place in the church since the third and fourth centuries.
[1] Iain Provan, The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017).
[2] Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011); Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2017).
[3] Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).
[4] Craig A. Carter, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2018).
[5] J. I. Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God: Some Evangelical Principles (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958).
[6] Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God, 79, 96.
[7] Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God, 105.
[8] Brevard S. Childs, “Sensus Literalis of Scripture: An Ancient and Modern Problem,” in Beiträge Zur Alttestamentlichen Theologie: Festschrift Für Walther Zimmerli Zum 70 Geburtstag (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977), 80.
