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Introducing Hermeneutics (Part 1)At the request of my friend Jason, this post is an attempt to remove myself from the esoteric dialogue that is so particular to academic theological blogs. I am trying to explain this topic as clearly as possible because it plays a major role in my theological views and for my critique of the doctrine of inerrancy. My hope is that, regardless of your theological perspective, you will understand what I am trying to get across in this post. Furthermore, I welcome any and all comments in response to this post. I only ask that those of you who know a bunch about hermeneutics cut me some slack given my purposes here. Additionally, please forgive the length of this post, I try very hard to keep my posts of managable length. I want to give a general overview of hermeneutics as I will build upon it in later posts. However, this does not mean that I will cover everything, people write books on this stuff people!Now, "hermeneutics" is a technical term that basically means "the art of interpretation". But interpretation is just figuring out what the text is saying, right? I'm glad you asked because it is not that simple. For the past 2,000 years or so, Christians have been wrestling with the 'proper' way to interpret the Bible. Many early church thinkers weighed in on this debate and two opposing schools of thought quickly developed. The first was located in Alexandria and espoused a hermeneutic called "allegorical interpretation." Essentially, allegorical interpretation was the attempt to understand the Bible spiritually based on materials and presuppositions found outside the text. With this method, the text is understood symbolically as pointing to some deeper reality. The task of interpretation then was to discover the "true" meaning beyond the literal meaning of the text. In polar opposition to the Alexandrian school stood the Antiochene school, which espoused a purely literal mode of interpreting the Bible. The 'literal meaning' of the text was understood as the "face value" of the text and focused primarily on textual and grammatical analysis. Any attempt to bring an extra-biblical understanding to one's interpretation was vehemently opposed. These two schools of thought were at odds for many years until a church leader named Augustine offered a new hermeneutical proposal that was something of a compromise between the two. Augustine reaped the benefits of a classical education in which he engaged in text-by-text analysis of thinkers like Cicero and Plato. This methodology was very close to the "literal" hermeneutic touted by the Antiochene School. Augustine was heavily influenced as a young man by a Catholic bishop named Ambrose. Ambrose (via Origen--a prominent defender of allegorical interpretation) taught Augustine to read the Bible with an eye for the deeper, spiritual meaning of the text. After many years of study and experimentation, Augustine eventually established the method of interpretation that was to be the norm for Catholicism for the next few hundred years. Augustine had a healthy appreciation for the symbolic nature of language. He insisted that the biblical texts were human texts which refer to God and that they should not be treated as a God. Rather, they are used as guides to assist the Christian in forming a proper perspective in relation to God and humanity (cf.De Doctrina Christiana, I.40-1). This perspective, according to Augustine, was the notion of love. So, on the one hand, Augustine stood in solidarity with the Alexandrian folks in that he understood the words of the Bible as pointing beyond themselves to deeper truths (this is often called 'semiotics'). Therefore, the texts needed to be interpreted apart from the Bible. On the other hand, he argued for the Bible to be read according to the notion of love, which emerges from within the text itself. In so doing, Augustine resembled the advocates of the Antiochene school. Both notions, the literal, held in tension with the spiritual, became the mode of reading the bible until a guy named Thomas Aquinas appeard on the scene during medieval times. A bit before Aquinas' time (in the 12th Century A.D.) the lost works of Aristotle were discovered and led to the development of something called "Scholastic Theology". These Scholastics, of which Aquinas was arguably the most influential, departed from Augustine's two-fold interpretive program in favor of the strictly literal meaning of the text. Thus the interpretation of the Bible took on a scientific nature. In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas writes: The author of holy scripture is God, in whose power it is to signify hisOne scholar has summarized this interpretive shift ushered by the Scholastics: "The control of interpretation is clearly the motive of scholastic hermenteutics" (140-1, italics mine). Aquinas' insitance on the literal meaning of Scripture as the "true" grounds of theology became the accepted hermeneutic for the next 400 or so years. Then, in 1515, a chubby monk named Martin Luther posted his famous Thesis on the chapel at Wittenberg and Christian hermeneutics were altered yet again. Luther's insistance on sola scriptura (Scripture alone) intensified the Scholastic's emphasis on the literal meaning of the text. Luther, however, invoking the Christian mystical tradition, pressed for a strictly literal interpretation in light of one's contemplative wrestling in the Spirit with the text. Luther saw the Spirit as the author of the Bible and he believed that the Spirit would provide "the proper" interpretation to the extent that the interpreter submitted herself entirely to the spirit of the text. For Luther and his disciples the Bible's inspiration colluded with the text's literal, written word and thus the equation of the Word of God with the biblical text. The emphasis rather than the content of Luther's hermeneutics was challenged by the second-generation reformer, John Calvin. Calvin was greatly influenced by the Humanist tradition (championed by Erasmus) and found his greatest interpretive model in the great 4th century preacher, John Chrysostom. Calvin, as well as Luther, added a typological interpretation to his literal reading. This means that he sees the Bible as one unified story, with Christ as the culmination. In the service of this unity, Calvin either reads Christ back into the Old Testament (typologically) or views the Old Testament as prefiguing Christ in order to acheive this unity. Calvin writes, Let this point therefore stand: that those whom the Holy Spirit has inwardly Calvin's development of this doctrine will be taken up further in my next post on this subject. Well, my fingers are sufficiently blistered from this post. Later I will continue this post with a Part 2, in which I will offer a summary of hermeneutics from Calvin to the present. Then I will offer another attempt to summarize, as best as possible, the philosophical development of hermeneutics and how this has led many fundamentalists to 'circle the wagons' in defense of the erroneous doctrineof biblical inerrancy. For those of you who know this stuff better than I, I welcome your criticism. Peace. posted by Jake at 1/31/2005 10:30:00 PM  
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 Previous Posts It's a Girl! ------------ See where fundamentalism gets ya? ------------ The Heresy of Inerrancy (Part 3) ------------ More Baptist Conflict ------------ Not a good sign ------------ Ruth 1: Reflections (1:1-5) ------------ Ruth 2: Reflections (1:6-22) ------------ Ruth 3: Reflections (2:1-23) ------------ Ruth 4: Reflections (3:1-18) ------------ Ruth 5: Reflections (4:1-12) ------------ Archives November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007
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this is well done jake..a great excersise to articulate a difficult subject matter's history in concise language..perhaps an excersise we should all do more often..prob be good for me to do something like this for the history of preaching on my blog at some point...
ill be interested in reading part two..i see the church history from gwu is paying off..-g-...
peace
mark
Thanks for the overview, Jake. This is interesting stuff for a layman like me -- a nice little reader's digest version I can appreciate.
Of course you're refraining from comment, and merely laying out the history of interpretation -- but you know me, I can't resist. I've read that quote from Calvin's Institutes before (I.7.5), and was a bit skeptical. In one sense, I agree -- the Spirit must move in someone's heart in order for him/her to recognize the things of God, including Scripture. But in another sense, where's the teeth? Couldn't a Buddhist make a similar claim about their own scriptures? It's a rather tautological argument for the authenticity of Scripture, and while God may, at the end of time, sort out which tautology (Calvin's or the Buddhist's) was correct, it doesn't help the purpose of evangelism all that much.
You brought up Calvin's quote to explain why he would take a specific approach regarding Scripture -- not to address whether or not the Bible itself is authentic. But I just wondered what you or others thought about the latter.
Thanks for putting these ideas together!
Jake,
Great job here. I’m looking forward to part II, particularly as you role the whole thing over into the subject of inerrancy.
(and now for the proverbial adverse conjunction)
But I would challenge you a bit on some of your Augustine comments. You wrote,
“[Augustine] insisted that the biblical texts were human texts which refer to God and that they should not be treated as a God. Rather, they are used as guides to assist the Christian in forming a proper perspective in relation to God and humanity.”
This may be true as far as it goes, but the way you phrase the above seems to suggest that Augustine viewed the biblical texts as merely human texts. My area of Augustine study is in sotieriology, but his comment, “Only to those books which are called canonical have I learned to give honor so that I believe most firmly that no author in these books made any error in writing… I have read other authors not with the thought that what they have taught and written is true just because they have manifested holiness and learning” (Epistles 82,1,3; Cf. Epistle 8, 3, 3), seems to suggest that he views the canonical books as in a different class than other religious/Christian documents. But perhaps I read too much into your comments.
Also, perhaps you could clarify what you meant when you said that Augustine saw a need to “interpret the texts apart from the Bible.” And again I may be reading to much into your comments, but you seem to be setting up a contrast between Augustine (who interprets the texts apart from the bible) and Calvin (who sees the bible as self authenticating). In my reading of Augustine, he does allegorize many passages in the Bible, but he seems to let the didactic passages of the scripture drive his allegorical interpretations. In other words, Augustine wouldn’t allegorize “for by grace are you saved by faith.” He would simply attempt to understand the plain meaning of the text just like any other piece of writing (get your Derrida away from me!). But he would then take Paul’s didactic statement and try to find types and shadows of it in the biblical narrative passages. In this way, the text interprets the text and provides the parameters for his allegorical method.
But I drone on. Look forward to the rest of it.
Is it possible that that the Biblical scholars mentioned in your post (Aquinas, Augustine, Calvin, Luther) and the seminarian geeks such as well, Gerald and Jake (Gerald's words not mine), in their attempt to extract every detail from the Biblical texts lose site of the forest for the sake of the leaves?
The first century believers had no Christian tradition, no commentaries, and no library full of books analyzing the analysis of great analyzers' analysis of Christian analytical thought. They had the OT and the letters written by the early church leaders. The gentiles, for the most part, did not even have the OT.
Very few of these people had the luxury to spend their lives studying the nuance of some obscure turn of a phrase. These people were tradesmen, widows, beggars, and tax collectors trying to survive in a tough world. Perhaps some were well read but I imagine many were illiterate.
I just cannot see Paul sitting down to inscribe hidden meanings in his instructions to the new believers. These people needed practical teaching on what it meant to be a follower of Christ. They needed to know how to live their daily lives in the face of growing persecution from the Roman government. If something was meant to be allegorical or figurative Paul would have wanted to made it obviously so.
I do not mean to disparage the work of Biblical academia. I think their work is important. I just think sometimes we get so engrossed studying dusty tomes in some forgotten corner of the stacks we lose site of the fact that this book was written for the common man.
Agreed, CrnbrdEater! But things do get a little more complicated when the Word is translated across languages, across cultures, and across millenia. Perhaps part of the need for studying "the nuance of some obscure turn of a phrase" is in order to reconstruct what the original texts meant to their common-man audiences.
Jake,
I'm trying to begin a parralell dialogue regarding the ermegent view of inerrancy on iustificare, particularly as it relates to praxis. I welcome your emergent buddies to join, but you in particular as I am interacting with your Heresy of Innerancy post. Would love to have your thoughts.