Woodfin entitles his chapter on Metaphysics, "Christ, the Clue to Reality." He proposes that the person and work of Christ is the interpretive key to ontology. He writes, "It is therefore in the historical incarnation of Christ that the Christian finds the objective ground and rational paradigm for his understanding of creation, redemption, and the meaningfulness of reality as a whole." (Woodfin, With All Your Mind, 95)
Woodfin sees in the Incarnation what he terms as a "normative theological" paradigm. As normative, Christ constitutes the standard for all of reality. However we have difficulty understanding the biblical Christ in this fashion. He proposes that the Christian believer, and I propose that even the Baptist Christian "intellectual", has a hard time understanding Christ ontologically because of our exclusive and almost idolatrous commitment to the "grammatico-historical method" of biblical interpretation.
It seems to this writer that Woodfin is "onto something" so to speak.
In my faith tradition, I have been taught that my understanding of the person of Jesus is to be rooted in scripture alone and that in order to understand scripture's presentation of Christ I must utilize the grammatico-historical method of interpretation in order to be faithful to the text. Throughout 30 years of pulpit ministry I maintained a complete commitment to the exegesis of the words, clauses, phrases, context of the biblical material with which I was working.
However, there emerged a time in my life when I began to think that there was something limited to my understanding of Scripture in this manner and consequently to my understanding of the person and work of Christ. It has only been after having taught Philosophy for a number of years now that I have realized that the hermeneutical omission of the grammatico-historical method "philosophic understanding" of Christ and religious faith.
In fact, it seems that one of the reasons I initially had such a challenging time getting my mind around Woodfin's ontological understanding of Christ in this particular chapter is due to my being so entrenched in the grammatico-historical method of interpretation and the consequent understanding of Christ which emerges from the use of the method.
This seems to be what Woodfin is getting at when he cites the observation of James Barr. Barr contends that the tension which exists between the ontological understandings of Christ and "event centered Christology" is a consequence of the grammatico-historical method of interpretation. In short, the grammatico-historical method has placed interpretational blinders upon the student of the text with the result that an understanding of Christ beyond the "facts of the text" so to speak is rendered unlikely if not impossible.
It seems, at least to me, that a more well developed understanding of Christ transcends the grasping of the data or facts uncovered through the grammatico-historical method of interpretation.
