Last night at work, as I’m prone to do, I was praying and thinking about—for some reason—the role that non-Christian biblical exegetes and commentators can have for the confessing Christian reading of Holy Scripture. When I was writing my Master’s thesis on I Corinthians I used a few commentators who would fit the higher critical non-confessional mold of a biblical exegete; one of these was Hans Conzelmann. He helped me work through some issues that the “evangelical commentators” weren’t. I think such critics can actually provide a fresh view of things without the oft ecclesial accretions that might attend the Christian confessional readings. Of course, the critics have to be critically received, and their limits must be recognized. Even so, there is still some value yet in engaging with such readers of Scripture; only to be constructively and critically received and deployed within the genuinely confessional Christian frame of mind.
I think the above sentiment is something Karl Barth affirms, particularly in his deployment of second naivete. That is to say, the critics only have value insofar that they do; limited by the horizontal vistas they work from. In the end, Barth would say that the critics out-critic themselves by attempting to go beyond the boundaries that they might be useful within. When the critics think and work from naturalist presuppositions, and they are engaging with a supranatural text, they end up seeing things from a muted frame of reference. In reduction they show that Holy Scripture is in fact too kerygmatic, too saga oriented (as Barth would say) for their framework to be of ultimate assistance. Even so, they do see certain things that confessional Christians might miss because of sectarian or other prior religious sociological commitments that might themselves impose upon their reading of Holy Scripture.
On a concluding and sobering note: Conzelmann died in his sins in 1989. He wasn’t critically aware of his limitations, and as such, ended up denying the reality of Holy Scripture; who is, Jesus Christ. Maybe one practical way of using such “exegetes” in our own critical ways, is to pray for them, if they are still alive, and ask that the Lord would open their eyes to the reality and power of God in Christ. That’s the sobering thing, at the end of the day a person can be the most educated genius in the world, and yet, if they don’t bow the knee to Jesus as Lord, the second they die, they will have realized they made a horrific and eternal mistake.