Journal: Bulletin for Biblical Research
Volume: BBR 08:1 (NA 1998)
Article: To What End Exegesis? Reflections on Exegesis and Spirituality in Philippians 4:10-20
Author: Gordon D. Fee

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BBR 8:1 (1998) p. 75

To What End Exegesis? Reflections on Exegesis and Spirituality in Philippians 4:10-20

Gordon D. Fee

Regent College

The purpose of this lecture, which begins by tracing the author’s pilgrimage as an evangelical NT scholar, is to urge that the ultimate aim of exegesis is the Spiritual one—to produce in our lives and the lives of others true Spirituality, in which God’s people live in faithful fellowship both with one another and with the living God, and thus in keeping with God’s purposes in the world. It is further argued, therefore, that the exegesis of the biblical texts belongs primarily in the context of the believing community who are the true heirs of these texts. These concerns are then illustrated by an exegesis of Phil 4:10-20, where it is argued that the predicates of friendship and orality not only make sense of this passage in its present placement in Philippians, but are intended likewise to lead the community into the climactic theology and doxology of 4:19-20 as the letter is read in their midst.

Key Words: Phil 4:10-20, exegesis, spirituality, doxology

In part this lecture1 is something of a confessional narrative of my own pilgrimage as an evangelical NT scholar. It is certainly not intended to serve as a paradigm. But as those who know me well would tell you, it is hard for Gordon to do anything that is not at least a bit hortatory.

I. The Pilgrimage

The crisis event that led to this lecture occurred three years ago, when I was asked to team up with my colleague Eugene Peterson for

BBR 8:1 (1998) p. 76

Regent’s annual Pastor’s Conference. The topic had been set by those responsible for the conference: Exegesis and Spirituality. In preparing for those lectures, I realized that over the years I had developed a kind of schizophrenia regarding these two topics—schizophrenia in the derivative sense of that word: of a truly “divided mindset.”

Even though I am easily the least intentional NT scholar in the history of the discipline, I had nonetheless become one, whether intentional or not. In so doing I had also entered into a concern to restore a viable evangelical voice in the academy, where scholarship in the generation preceding mine seemed pretty well committed to the agenda of modernity—to control the data by means of a historical-critical methodology, within a nonsupernatural framework, which very often included a strongly antisupernatural bias.

When my generation came on the scene, not only had such a bias rather totally ta...

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