by
David R. Bauer

It is fitting that we should honor Robert Traina tonight, November 4, 1995, at the meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society dedicated to the theme "Asserting Our Biblical Heritage." Dr. Traina has devoted his entire professional life and his varied and remarkable gifts to the teaching of the Bible in the Wesleyan spirit and at one of the great theological seminaries of evangelical Wesleyanism, Asbury Theological Seminary.

Dr. Traina was born in 1921 in Chicago, the son of Italian immigrants. His father was a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, but served as a lay pastor to the Italian Mission Free Methodist Church in Melrose Park, Illinois. In this church Dr. Traina was nurtured in the Christian faith and first sensed the call to ministry at the age of sixteen. He majored in religious studies at Spring Arbor and Seattle Pacific Colleges. While a student at Seattle Pacific, he became aware of the program at the Biblical Seminary in New York and matriculated there in the fall of 1943.

The Biblical Seminary in New York, founded in 1900 by the Yale-educated Wilbert Webster White, had gained a worldwide reputation for the "inductive method" of the study of the English Bible, a hermeneutical approach that focuses on the literary analysis of the text and in many ways anticipated what we now know as "literary criticism." The goal was to allow the text to speak on its own terms, challenging all presuppositions and conforming the whole person to its message. Dr. Traina found this approach to be a liberating experience. He had come to seminary, according to his own account, with a deductive personality, and the inductive approach changed his orientation to life and the Bible.

Excelling as a seminary student, Traina was encouraged to serve the church as a teacher in theological education. He was appointed a faculty member by the Biblical Seminary upon his graduation. During his early years of teaching there, he became troubled at the lack of integration between English Bible and traditional exegesis. He judged that English Bible, as it was being taught at the Biblical Seminary, was not sufficiently comprehensive and specific. So he developed further the inductive method and its practical application, combining its traditional insights with the tools of traditional exegesis and setting forth the result in his book, Methodical Bible Study (1952). This book has been translated into several languages, has been used in scores of colleges and seminaries around the world, and is the universally recognized standard text on the inductive approach. No one in the Wesleyan movement has done more rigorous thinking about biblical hermeneutics or exercised more influence on the way the church thinks about interpretive methodology than has Dr. Traina.

While not unique to John Wesley or the Wesleyan tradition, the inductive method formed a significant dimension of Wesley's understanding of the role of the Bible in the church. In his "Address to Clergy" Wesley argues that skill in biblical interpretation ranks first among the essential qualifications for ministry:

In 1966, having earned his Ph.D. from Drew University, Dr. Traina accepted an invitation to join the faculty of Asbury Theological Seminary as Professor of English Bible. The next year President Frank Bateman Stanger asked him to assume the role of academic dean and vice president for academic administration, an office he held from 1967 to 1975, when he resumed full-time teaching in English Bible. He retired in 1988. As academic dean of the largest institution of theological education in evangelical Wesleyanism, Dr. Traina did more than any other one person to shape the educational philosophy and curricular goals during what were Asbury's most formative years.

He was a model teacher of the Bible. No detail of the text escaped his careful scrutiny. What else can one say about a man who produced 428 transparencies on the Gospel of Mark? He was theologically oriented. For him, the Bible is the ultimate source of the church's theology and life. The question always was: What is the theological significance of this passage? What role does it play in the whole of biblical revelation? How does it confirm, clarify, or in some cases correct what Wesleyans have traditionally held? Finally, he exemplified the biblical message, including the biblical doctrine of Christian perfection, in his own life and in his relationship with students. He was utterly committed to their welfare and their learning. For them no sacrifice was too great.

In honoring Dr. Robert Traina we also recognize the contributions of all those who teach the Bible from the Wesleyan perspective, who instill in their students the same enthusiastic commitment to the study of the Scriptures that Wesley had when he declared in the "Preface to his Sermons on Several Occasions":

MY CENTRAL CONVICTIONS¹

by
Robert A. Traina

Please accept my heartfelt thanks to the Wesleyan Theological Society for the generous recognition given me in the form of the Lifetime Service Award to the Holiness Tradition. I accept it on behalf of all those who share the calling of teaching the Scriptures at whatever level. I appreciate deeply the important work of the Society, and I encourage and urge a keeping up of the good work! I hope we will continue to place due emphasis on the critical area of biblical studies, an area vital to us all.

My thanks also to David Bauer, esteemed colleague and friend, not only for his generous introductory tribute, but also, and more importantly, for the excellent way in which he is promoting inductive Bible study. It is persons like him who give me great hope for the future of biblical studies. In all this I am reminded again of the overwhelming grace of God, and also of the graciousness of all of you, my sisters and brothers and fellow-workers in Christ.

I set forth here some of my central convictions and concerns. My statements revolve around an issue which has burned itself into my consciousness and about which I feel strongly, namely, whether there may be a growing chasm between (1) our affirmation that Scripture and the God and Christ of Scripture are the supreme authority for faith and practice and (2) what we actually do in our theologizing and in our conduct. In this regard, what we do is what we truly believe. No matter how orthodox our confession about Scripture, unless it controls our faith and practice, it loses its value. It may well be that our use of the so-called Wesleyan Quadrilateral has contributed to this problem.

There are several concerns and convictions that relate to this issue. The first is that one of the main reasons for the apparent growing dichotomy is the failure to test our faith and practice constantly by reference to specific biblical texts, interpreted properly in their grammatical, historical, literary, and canonical contexts. This failure obviously includes the use of "proof-texting," whose dangers we all recognize. But even more important and more subtle is the tendency to think of Scripture in terms of broad motifs, such as the Trinity, Creation, and Incarnation, and then to fill in the details, not by a careful and proper examination of specific biblical texts, but rather by using data which come from theologians and theological systems, philosophy, the behavioral sciences, experience, and other sources. In such a case, tradition, reason, and experience tend to shape biblical motifs instead of the specific data of Scripture shaping them. This is not to say that these extra-biblical data are not important; rather it is to emphasize the danger of using them in such a way as to distort what are purported to be motifs grounded in biblical authority.

An experience I had in a class at Drew University comes to mind in this connection. In the midst of discussing various theological concepts, a member of the class, who became a well-known seminary professor and theologian, reacted to my constant reference to specific biblical texts by asking angrily, "Why are you always talking about Scripture?" The answer is obvious: "Because Scripture, and not theologians and theologies, is authoritative for me." Unless we constantly test our theology and ethics on the basis of biblical texts and contexts, properly understood, we are bound to stray from the authority of Scripture. There is good reason why John Wesley was "a man of one book."

A second conviction is that we need to take the discipline of biblical theology more seriously, especially as regards what Brevard Childs describes as the ultimate task of biblical theology, namely, determining the relationship between the two testaments. The beginning point of doing biblical theology is what Gerhardus Vos calls "exegetical theology," that is, deriving theology from specific biblical texts, which harkens back to the first concern. The integration of these findings provides the basis for a biblical theology, including an understanding of biblical ethics. We are then ready to move to a biblically-based systematic theology. This movement from exegetical theology to biblical theology to systematic theology would seem to be a logical sequence if Scripture is to be in reality our authority for faith and practice. And yet this sequence is often not taken seriously in our theologizing or, for that matter, in our curricular planning. As a result, Scripture is not truly normative because, among other things, we view it in terms of a "flat Bible" and we misuse the analogy of Scripture.

A third conviction is that the key to doing sound exegetical, biblical, and systematic theology is the proper use of inductive, inferential reasoning in contrast to a deductive approach, which may often be disguised as induction. There are, to be sure, different definitions of induction and deduction, and consequently different understandings of the relationship between them. Without taking the time to set forth a detailed rationale, I would propose three essential characteristics which should be included in inductive, inferential reasoning. One is that it should operate with premises, whether particular or general, which are supported by evidence. Thus the key question in developing such premises would be, "What is the evidence?" By this is meant primarily internal biblical evidence, although relevant extra-biblical evidence is also important. A second characteristic is that the inferential reasoning used be valid. And third, both premises and inferences should be open-ended, that is, subject to change when warranted.

Such induction emphasizes the primacy and priority of a direct, firsthand approach to the biblical text itself, with a view to allowing it to speak its own message and attempting to determine the meaning and intention of its implied writers. It should be recognized that such a lofty goal can never be fully realized. There is no such thing as perfect induction. There are no infallible exegetes. Induction is a quest more than an achievement. Wilhelm Dilthey was right in holding that all of us approach all texts with preunderstandings, and Rudolph Bultmann rightly held that there is no presuppositionless exegesis. But we need to attempt to become aware of our presuppositions and to subject them to the evidentiary test with a willingness to change them when warranted.

A fourth conviction flows from an approach based on inductive, inferential reasoning. It is that interpretation should be an attempt to arrive at past-historical meanings and should precede evaluation. Much of what goes awry in biblical studies results from approaching the Scriptures initially with presuppositions that include value judgments. Such is the case with Bultmann's assumption that the universe is a closed continuum which makes miracles impossible. He therefore interprets miracle stories as "myths" that need to be "de-mythologized." Why not begin with the implied writers' point of view, that is, that God can and does perform miracles, and then attempt to discover what the writers' original intention and meaning were in including miracle stories? Then, and only then, is one in a position to evaluate the writers' point of view, and to respond either in acceptance or rejection, that is, to decide whether to join the community of faith which by God's grace produced Scripture. To use Thiselton's language, first the past horizon, then the present horizon. To be sure, this sequence is not easy to follow, and there are those who doubt its possibility. But it is a logical and necessary sequence if the Scriptures or any other documents are to be examined as objective realities in their own right.

It should be stressed also that there is no need to believe in order to understand. The grace of God and the Holy Spirit can be at work to illumine even the minds of those who approach Scripture as unbelievers, as long as there is an openness, actual or potential, which is required by a truly inductive approach. Thus the proper sequence is: first understand, then assess. We need to avoid merging the two or reversing their sequence if Scripture is to function as authoritative in faith and practice.

A fifth conviction is that the approach to Scripture which allows it to speak for itself is a literary approach, understood in its broadest and most inclusive sense. It is the approach pioneered by Richard Moulton in his book The Literary Study of The Bible. What is called "literary criticism" is often too narrow and restrictive, and operates deductively on the basis of certain presuppositions. What we have in mind is the general thesis that the Bible consists of a collection of literary units, and that it can and should be approached as literature. Indeed, it can and should be approached like any literature. There is no need for a special hermeneutic, or for making a faith-commitment before interpreting Scripture. A general hermeneutic will suffice, without prejudice or favor.

Such an approach focuses on the final form of the canonical text. It is primarily synchronic, though also diachronic. It can make use of all that is valid in various approaches, including source analysis, form analysis, narrative analysis, redaction analysis, rhetorical analysis, discourse analysis, or any other kind of analysis, as long as the message of the writers of the canonical text is allowed to be heard.

Finally, I would emphasize the conviction that the church will not become biblically literate and thus be able to live and minister under the supreme authority of Scripture without a major emphasis on teaching the Bible to its members. The best kind of preaching, which in my mind is expository preaching, will not suffice. Neither will the kind of "Bible teaching" which is monological and which amounts to another sermon, often in the form of a homily. The kind of teaching I have in mind is dialogical and interactive. It is participatory in the fullest sense of the word.

Such teaching cannot take place unless the participants are taught how to examine the text for themselves. Direct Bible study is not only informative; it is powerful and dynamic and life-transforming. The Scriptures have their fullest effect when no intermediary stands between the text and its reader. Experts have a very important role in the study and teaching of the Bible. But we must not reserve Bible study for the experts. The Scriptures originally were addressed to ordinary readers, not to experts. They should be studied by all in order to realize their salvific and normative purpose.

Our ultimate challenge and task, then, is to facilitate the functioning of Scripture, and of the God and Christ of Scripture, as the supreme authority for faith and practice. Whatever impedes the realization of this lofty goal should be discouraged and discarded; whatever contributes to it should be embraced and fostered. It is my hope and prayer that all of us together will join in this great endeavor.

Notes

¹This address was delivered to the annual meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society, November 4, 1994, on the occasion of the Society honoring Dr. Traina with the award of "Lifetime Service to the Holiness Tradition."

Edited by Michael Mattei for the
Wesley Center for Applied Theology
at Northwest Nazarene University
© Copyright 2000 by the Wesley Center for Applied Theology

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