The Letter and Spirit of Biblical Interpretation

From the Early Church to Modern Practice

Stanglin, Keith D.

• Editorial: Baker Academic
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781493414307
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Biblical Studies

For the better part of fifteen centuries, Christians read Scripture on two complementary levels, the literal and the spiritual. In the modern period, the spiritual sense gradually became marginalized in favor of the literal sense. The Bible came to be read and interpreted like any other book. This brief, accessible introduction to the history of biblical interpretation examines key turning points and figures and argues for a retrieval of the premodern spiritual habits of reading Scripture.

1
Introduction to the History of Biblical Interpretation

If you prefer to be strong spiritually rather than clever in debate, if you seek sustenance for the soul rather than mere titillation of the intellect, read and reread the ancient commentators in preference to all others, since their piety is more proven, their learning more profuse and more experienced, their style neither jejune nor impoverished, and their interpretation more fitted to the sacred mysteries.

—Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam1

Church history as the history of the interpretation of Holy Scripture is thus the history of the continued living presence of that same Jesus Christ who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and rose again.

—Gerhard Ebeling2

For many educated Christians interested in the study of Scripture, including preachers and many professional scholars, it may never have occurred to them to ask how ancient or medieval Christians interpreted the Bible. If it has, then it may mean nothing more than mere historical interest in seeing how people long ago interpreted Scripture before they discovered a better, more scientific way of approaching the text. But of what practical use to us is an ancient method of interpretation? Why should the church today look to the distant past for models of biblical interpretation? Why should we care?

Ressourcement and Exegesis

Let us begin an answer to this question with a psalm. The Psalter was the worship book of Israel and of the early church. For millennia, God’s people have turned to its pages for inspiration and comfort. This collection contains some of the most affective texts in all of Scripture. Psalm 137, composed during the time of Judah’s exile, is a poignant example of the emotion of the Psalter:

1By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept

when we remembered Zion.

2There on the poplars

we hung our harps,

3for there our captors asked us for songs,

our tormentors demanded songs of joy;

they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

4How can we sing the songs of the LORD

while in a foreign land?

5If I forget you, Jerusalem,

may my right hand forget its skill.

6May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth

if I do not remember you,

if I do not consider Jerusalem

my highest joy.

7Remember, LORD, what the Edomites did

on the day Jerusalem fell.

“Tear it down,” they cried,

“tear it down to its foundations!”

8Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,

happy is the one who repays you

according to what you have done to us.

9Happy is the one who seizes your infants

and dashes them against the rocks. (NIV)

Imprecatory psalms, so named for their imprecations or curse language, are common in the Psalter. Psalm 137 is an imprecatory psalm at its best, or its worst.

Imagine that you are a student interested in studying Scripture, interpreting it, and applying it to your life. You are also a Christian, who considers Scripture to be more than simply a historical document, but also your primary rule of faith and practice. What do you make of this passage? Yes, it tells us something about the conditions and emotions of exiled Israel, but how can we as Christians sing this? David Steinmetz imagines a medieval priest trying to relate to this difficult psalm.3 It is no less difficult for us today. I don’t know about you, but I have not been wronged by Babylon (Ps. 137:3). I would like to visit Jerusalem someday, but it is not “my highest joy” (137:6). I don’t have a particular beef against the Edomites (137:7). And I have never expressed a desire, or even entertained the thought, of dashing babies against the rocks (137:9).

Imagine that you have just run across this or an equally challenging text in your personal study of Scripture. What do you do? Do you say, “Here’s what I think it means. Here’s how I will apply it.” What is wrong with that picture?

The problem is the individualism, the presumed authority of the individual. One cannot plumb the depths of God’s Word or of theology without discussing it with others in community. Christ called his disciples to be in community. Indeed, the very meaning of “church” (ἐκκλησία, ekklēsia) is gathering, or assembly. An old adage states that one Christian is no Christian (unus Christianus, nullus Christianus). An isolated, solitary Christian is not practicing the Christian faith as it was intended. Bible reading and study, like prayer, can be done individually, but not exclusively so. When you encounter a difficult passage, do you have peers who might have an insight? Do you consult teachers? Commentaries? What about a church community? Biblical interpretation was never meant to be done in isolation. It is a communal task. As iron sharpens iron, we challenge each other’s interpretations and applications. I have perspective that you do not have, and vice versa. I have blinders that you do not have, and vice versa.

So biblical interpretation ought to be done in community. But there is a part of this community of interpretation that has not yet been mentioned. We usually neglect these members of the community because they are the easiest to ignore. They are easy to ignore because they are dead. And the longer they have been dead, the more we tend to ignore them. The longer they have been dead, the more out of touch they are with our language and our culture and our problems and our addictions and our needs. And I would argue that this is exactly why we need to hear them. We must listen precisely because their perspective and their blinders are so different from ours. When we listen to them, sometimes we see why we interpret some Scriptures the way we do, or sometimes we see a new and fresh path that is really quite old. More often than not, these are the people whose knowledge of Scripture, devotion, and piety, whose wisdom and trust in God, would put us all to shame. Why wouldn’t we want to hear such people? Why would we have a preference only for the latest commentaries or for the opinions of the people “who happen to be walking around”? To study the history of exegesis is to give a voice to the most marginalized of all; it is, to borrow the famous words of G. K. Chesterton, “the democracy of the dead.”4

The point here is that the community of interpretation extends to those who are not us and who are not like us. Believers throughout history make up an important part of our interpretive community and, through the study of what Everett Ferguson calls “historical foreground,” they can provide helpful perspective on the interpretation of Scripture.5 The discipline is similar to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of the history of effects (Wirkungsgeschichte), which asks, What effects has the text had on subsequent generations? There is much to commend the study of reception history, or the history of biblical interpretation, inasmuch as Christian history is full of people who have labored hard to understand Scripture. What did they say? How did they interpret and apply the hard texts of Scripture?

In recent decades, Roman Catholics and Protestants alike have shown increasing appreciation for the communion of the saints past and have witnessed a marked rise of interest in the history of the church for the sake of understanding theology in general. This ressourcement is a returning to the sources of the early church for the sake of renewal today.6 Through increased ecumenical contact and attention to tradition, many churches have begun to rediscover and recover ancient liturgical forms and theological norms. This renewed interest in the Christian past has also included increased engagement with premodern—that is, patristic, medieval, and Reformation—methods of biblical interpretation. The interaction is unavoidable for anyone who reads older theology, for, with few exceptions, premodern theology is a constant interaction with Scripture.

The interest in ancient approaches to theology and exegesis also comes at a time when the historical-critical method of exegesis has come under fire. The limitations of the historical-critical method as a tool for the church (which never was its purpose anyway), along with its weaknesses as a means for providing objective textual meaning (which was its sole purpose), are now widely recognized. As a reactionary alternative that takes such limitations seriously, subjective methods of interpretation, including the variety of so-called postmodern perspectives, have been introduced but also have been met with widespread discontent. The inability of any one of these methods to “do it all” or to attract a majority of adherents in the church and academy has further strengthened the turn toward the theological, as opposed to narrowly historical, interpretation of Scripture as a viable option.7 There exists now a plethora of literature on the theological interpretation of Scripture and a growing mound of commentaries that explicitly employ such an approach. Along with the growing popularity of theological interpretation comes the recognition that premodern interpreters are excellent models for theological interpretation.

In short, these two pursuits—ressourcement and theological interpretation of Scripture—are fueling interest in older, premodern approaches to Scripture. This interest implies a rejection of the individualistic approach to the Bible that has characterized much of evangelical Protestantism. It also implies a growing consensus that the history of interpretation can be a means to better exegesis today.

The Challenge of Premodern Exegesis

The first point, then, is to admit learned Christians of all times and places into the community of faith. This admission, however, raises a problem. As with other beliefs and practices of the ancient church, there is an initial strangeness also when we encounter the exegetical techniques of early Christians. When we compare the basic exegetical techniques of professional interpreters today to those of Christian antiquity, there seems to be a fairly wide chasm. What they did with the Bible is not what I was taught to do with the Bible. As a friend of mine puts it, “I’m a big enthusiast for patristic exegesis in theory, and I want to find their exegesis illuminating. But when I turn to actual examples of patristic interpretation, what am I to do with some of their allegorical interpretations?” I doubt that he is alone. The initial excitement for the endeavor is lost, as it appears from our modern perspective, in so many decontextualized and metaphysical discourses. The reason for the disenchantment may be summed up in one word: allegory.

Contempt for allegory as a biblical hermeneutic runs deep in Protestant blood. Beginning with Martin Luther and continuing through other sixteenth-century Reformers, the Protestant and humanist polemic against the Roman Church was frequently connected with the rejection of certain allegorical readings of Scripture. The popular conception that the Protestant Reformers totally abandoned allegory in favor of a historical-critical approach to the Bible is overly simplistic. Yet the gradual triumph of this putatively more objective method is due primarily to early modern Protestant efforts. The rejection of allegorical interpretation became one of the unquestioned doctrines that united the majority of late modern Protestants, from the self-described “fundamentalists,” through evangelical and mainline groups, to the self-described “liberals.”

To give merely one example of the common Protestant bias against premodern exegetical methods, one may note the comments made about allegory in a popular evangelical survey of church history by Earle Cairns. Speaking of the ancient Alexandrian school of interpretation, the author writes, “Instead of emphasizing a grammatico-historical interpretation of the Bible, they developed an allegorical system of interpretation that has plagued Christianity since that time. This type of interpretation is based on the supposition that Scripture has more than one meaning.”8 Although there was no “grammatico-historical” method, as he imagines it, that was followed in the ancient church, for Cairns, “allegory”—and the concomitant assumption of multiple senses in Scripture—is the bogeyman. He faults Origen and Ambrose for their allegorical method.9 Cairns later contrasts Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples’s “literal and spiritual interpretation of the Bible” with “the study of the text of the Bible,” as if they are mutually exclusive enterprises.10 Cairns’s confusion is further evident in his denigration of some Radical Reformers whose “literal interpretation . . . often led to mystical or chiliastic excesses.”11 His readers are not treated to the right way to interpret the Bible, but they are left with the distinct impression that few premodern interpreters did it well. Protestants (the theologically conservative and otherwise) have thus predominantly rejected allegory and advocated a grammatico-historical, or historical-critical, method of biblical exegesis.

Now that many Protes...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction to the History of Biblical Interpretation
• Part 1: Historical Survey
• Part 2: Letter and Spirit
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover