Shucking Corn: The Theological Irrelevance of Historical Particularity

Last updated on: February 16, 2014 at 4:28 pm by Joel Willitts

Shucking Corn: The Theological Irrelevance of Historical Particularity 2014-02-16T16:28:33-04:00 Joel Willitts

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I’ve been thinking lately a lot about the problem of historical particularity in our reappropriation of Scripture. What I mean is that in order for Scripture to be applicable to our lives today a Bible reader (or preacher) must deal with the fact that the text is not written to them. In order to apply it to my life, I’ve got to find an approach that bridges the text to my life. There are a few tried and time-tested approaches to deal with the problem of historical particularity. One of the most popular and widely used approaches is that of principalizing the text. This is what one could call the “shucking method” (be careful how you say it!).

Step one: buy some ears of corn.
Step two: shuck the husk of the ear and discard it – best to be done outside on a beautiful summer day. Shucking corn is a messy business and there’s a lot of “trash” of the husk left behind.
Step Three: carefully separate any remaining stringing hairy bits off that beautiful golden delicious ear of corn so as not to find it in your teeth when you are eating delicious corn.

(In the middle of winter I am just longing for some freshly harvested summer corn!)

The goal in the shucking method is to all historical particularity so the pristine theological kernel of the principle can be consumed with pleasure and health.

Something about this approach is troubling to me these days, although I’ve been an adherent to it most of all my adult life. I once read a line in a Tom Wright essay that I resonated with. The essay was How Can the Bible Be Authoritative? from 1989**.** He said people are constantly trying to make the Bible be a different kind of a book than it is. By our practice, if not our rhetoric, we wish the Bible were a different sort of a book.

Tom wrote:

The problem with all such solutions as to how to use the Bible is that they belittle the Bible and exalt something else. Basically they imply–and this is what I mean when I say that they offer too low a view of scripture–that God has, after all, given us the wrong sort of book and it is our job to turn it into the right sort of book by engaging in these hermeneutical moves, translation procedures or whatever . . . the regular views of scripture and its authority which we find not only outside but also inside evangelicalism fail to do justice to what the Bible actually is–a book, an ancient book, an ancient narrative book. They function by turning that book into something else, and by implying thereby that God has, afterall, given us the wrong sort of book (13-14, emphasis mine).

It was modeled and taught to me in Bible Study Method’s class in college and again in my preaching course in Seminary. In fact, in what I took to be the best preaching course out there I was taught the three step method of preparing expository sermons: Step one: exegetical idea – idea with all its historical particularity (the ear of corn); step two: theological idea – shuck; step three: homiletical idea – the imperative of the sermon.

As I see it the most significant weakness of this approach is that it assumes the theological irrelevance of the historical particularity. But to Tom’s earlier point, doesn’t the shape of the Bible, the kind of book it is, suggest that this assumption is errant? And if we truly believe that the Bible, as we have it, is inspired, how should its historical particularity inform our hermeneutics, that is how we “apply” the Bible to our 21st century lives? In what ways are we anemic because we’ve not appropriated the whole of Scripture? I am not saying that some level of prinicplizing is inappropriate, perhaps it is necessary and unavoidable, but our theological hermeneutic needs to accommodate the historical particularity of the Bible we have.

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