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Category Archive: Hermeneutics

Against Fastidiousness - November 05, 2007
In a penetrating article on de doctrina Christiana, Rowan Williams points out that the grotesqueness and strangeness of the Bible is a "prophylactic against fastidiousness," particularly the fastidiousness that assumes we have "nothing to learn from what startles or offends...

Ideology of the Picturesque - August 10, 2007
In The Historical Austen, William Galperin notes that Austen understood that certain kinds of realistic art or aesthetics could naturalize and "realize" what is really only an ideological construct. And he notes the somewhat surprising political ramifications of such aesthetic...

Totality Transfer and Systematics - June 29, 2007
Some decades ago, James Barr criticized biblical scholars for a fallacy he labeled "illegitimate totality transfer." By this phrase, Barr was referring to the habit of some biblical scholars to pack every possible meaning of a word into every context....

Literal and spiritual senses - April 11, 2007
Early in the Summa theologiae, Thomas defends the fourfold interpretation of the Old Testament Scripture by saying that the words of Scripture refer univocally to things, and that God providentially uses those things to signify later things. In this, he...

Calvin and allegory - April 04, 2007
Calvin is harsher on allegorical interpretation than almost anyone, yet he is all in favor of typology. David, Zedekiah, Joseph, Aaron, Samson, Joshua, Zerubbabel, Cyrus and others are types of Christ. It is no easy task to discover where he...

Exegetical progress - April 04, 2007
If the fathers have already explained the Scriptures, Andrew of St. Victor asked, why do I need to? He answered that truth dwells "deep" and "screens herself from mortal sight." There is always more truth to dig up because truth...

Hebraic hermeneutics - March 29, 2007
One Rhonda Wauhkonen discusses Nicholas of Lyra's "Hebraic" semiotics and hermeneutics in a 1992 article on Chaucer. She begins by contrasting Augustine's signum/res distinction to Lyra's Hebraic viewpoint: "In the Hebrew system as evidenced in Scripture and as adapted by...

Last and first - March 29, 2007
Nicholas of Lyra is known for his notion of a "double literal" sense to Scripture. For him, interpretation ad litteram includes both the historical and the doctrinal/christological senses, and he suggests that the ancient Hebrews could well have seen the...

Intention and sense - March 29, 2007
Does the intention of the author determine the sense? There are problems with saying Yes, particularly when "intention" is assumed to be the mental state of the author, which is unrecoverable. There are also problems with saying No, because that...

Tragic hermeneutics - March 29, 2007
In an article in Theology Today (1980), David Steinmetz quotes Benjamin's Jowett's essay on the interpretation of Scripture (1859), which insists on a single meaning in a text - the meaning intended by the author and understood by the original...

Be the river - March 28, 2007
Gregory the Great again: "he that treats of sacred writ should follow the way of a river, for if a river, as it flows along its channel, meets with open valleys on its side, into these it immediately turns the...

Allegory and empire - March 21, 2007
Philo thought of allegory as a means for universalizing Jewish history and law, analogous to the way the Roman world had fused all peoples into a single empire. Literalists are "citizens of a petty state," while allegorists are "on the...

Androgynous numbers - March 21, 2007
Why did God create the world in six days? Philo said that 6 is the perfect number, both the sum and the product of its factors, which happen to be the first three integers (1, 2, 3). But there's more:...

Luther's hermeneutics - March 12, 2007
In a 1964 article in Theology Today, Gerhard Ebeling laid out some of the hermeneutical directions found in Luther's early writings. He focuses on three areas where Luther displays both some continuity with the terminology and problems of medieval interpretation,...

Quadriga on the cross - March 12, 2007
The quadriga makes a neat match with Rosenstock-Huessy's cross of reality: Historical = past Tropological = inside Allegorical = outside Anagogical = future...

History of texts - December 30, 2006
One way to characterize the modern innovation in biblical interpretation is that it changes the Bible from a history of salvation into a history of documents. The Bible does not give access to history or the acts of God; it...

Communion in humor - December 26, 2006
I tell a joke, and you get it. I include a veiled allusion to, say, Faust in a casual conversation; you catch it; and we exchange a mental wink. Humor provides a pathway into the hermeneutics of texts and communication....

Providence and Lessing's Ditch - December 22, 2006
Helmut Thielicke says that Lessing cannot find the absolute of reason in the relativity of history because "history is an accumulation of the accidental and irrational." Behind the epochal hermeneutical ditch between the truths of reasons and contingencies of history...

Purity - December 22, 2006
Lundin sees a link between (some) Protestant hermeneutics, Schleiermacher, and the quest of the historical Jesus. The common factor is a search for a pure origin: "In the nineteenth century the quest for scriptural purity and origins assumed a number...

Fractures of the mind - December 21, 2006
Problems of communication are often explained in terms of the inherent limitations of language. But this, of course, assumes that the mind's thoughts are whole, complete, and comprehensive until they have the misfortune to issue into the cold nasty world...

Gnostic hermeneutics, 2 - December 21, 2006
It's a strange hermeneutical theory that doesn't want to deal with words, but that's the way many modern hermeneutical systems (beginning with Schleiermacher) work: The interpreter is trying to slip past the veil of language to the mind behind. Inky...

Gnostic hermeneutics - December 21, 2006
Lundin suggests that "At the core of Hirsch's appeal is a promise dear to American culture - that we can return to the innocent origins and begin history anew. . . . Hirsch wants a 'ruthlessly critical process of validation'...

Intention - December 21, 2006
Roger Lundin comments on the ironies of evangelical support for ED Hirsch and its frequent suspicion, if not outright condemnation, of Gadamer: "There are manifold ironies to the conservative embrace of Hirsch and spurning of Gadamer. At their heart is...

Musical and Poetic Rhythms - October 17, 2006
Victor Zuckerkandl points out that Western music since the 17th century has been measured music, that is, music in which beats are organized into groups, into measures. This innovation in musical organization creates a complex rhythmic situation. At one level,...

Beautiful Proof - September 19, 2006
Does beauty compel assent? It certainly seems to. Ought it? That's trickier. If an explanation encompasses the data simply and elegantly and beautifully, does that make it a good explanation? Does that make it true? Are the "transcendentals" truly interchangeable?...

Double Narrative - September 19, 2006
Can we say that Hosea had Jesus in mind when he wrote "out of Egypt I call My Son"? Does it matter whether he did or not? If not, does this mean we can do anything we like to texts,...

Proof - September 19, 2006
I read John 1:1, and I hear echoes of Genesis 1:1, and I begin to suspect that John wants to teach that the gospel story is a story of new creation. That conclusion does not rest simply on the phrase...

One meaning - September 19, 2006
David Steinmetz finds Benjamin Jowett's claim that Scripture's "one meaning" is "the meaning which it had to the mind of the Prophet or Evangelist who first uttered or wrote, to the hearers or readers who first received it" to be...

Chemical reactions - September 18, 2006
Words are not hard BBs of meaning. Nor are words like the atoms of ancient atomic theory - impermeable bits of matter. Words are like atoms as understood in modern physics, taking on new properties when they are in the...

Not all or nothing - August 14, 2006
Kevin Vanhoozer wisely warns against hermeneutical all-or-nothingism: "Interpretation is not an all-or-nothing affair. We need not choose between a meaning that is wholly determinate and a meaning that is wholly undeterminate. Neither need we choose between a meaning that is...

Death of the author - August 09, 2006
A hypothesis to explore: What is the connection between the postmodern "death of the author" and higher critical methods of biblical interpretation? Did the dissolution of the text in biblical studies contribute to a dissolution of the author in texts...

Type and Antitype - August 09, 2006
At times, I've felt that my polemics against semi-marcionitism in sacramental theology and hermeneutics finds no actual targets. And then I read something like this. In his book on hermeneutics, Louis Berkhof characterizes the difference between type and antitype: "The...

Typology and history - August 03, 2006
In his classic essay on the "Reasonableness of Typology," GWH Lampe argued that critical scholarship reintroduced history into biblical interpretation: "In place of the unhistorical attitude which saw the Bible as a vast harmonious complex of prophecy and fulfillment, type...

The Use of Patristic Exegesis - July 31, 2006
Dale Allison notes that Matthew "stipulates that it be interpreted in the context of other texts. This means that it is, in a fundamental sense, an incomplete utterance, a book full of holes. Readers must make present what is absent;...

Interpretation and the Unstated - July 05, 2006
Interpretation is, we're often told, a matter of explaining what's in the text. Only eisegetes talk about what's not already there. Discussing Matthew 1:1, Dale Allison offers this, much more accurate, alternative: "The interpretation of this line can be nothing...

The Trouble with Biblical Hermeneutics - June 29, 2006
OK, one trouble, a trouble: There are, we are told, "three views" of the function of Matthew 1:1 - it's the heading for the genealogy, it's the heading for the whole book, or it's the heading for the first section...

Against Yale - April 05, 2006
Milbank contrasts de Lubac's advocacy of patristic and medieval hermeneutics, which insists that the allegorical fulfills and completes the literal, with the Yale school, which he sees as living in "the no-man's land of 'history-like narrative' which at once abolishes...

Sapiential hermeneutics - February 26, 2006
Elisha's anger toward Jehoash seems unfair (2 Kings 13). He tells him to shoot arrows, and then pound them on the ground. How was Jehoash to know that pounding on the ground symbolized victory over Aram? Well, for one thing,...

Inference - January 19, 2006
According to the Westminster Confession of Faith, "The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be...

Traces - January 09, 2006
Everyone with a more than elementary understanding of how language works knows that words can have different meanings in different contexts. The more intriguing phenomenon, and one exploited by poets and novelists, is that a word can have a different...

Textual boundaries - January 09, 2006
Perhaps we should not call it "intertextuality," but something like intertextuality is necessary to textual meaning, even at the most basic levels. You cannot read a single sentence without bringing some knowledge of the language to bear on the text....

Trinitarian Intertextuality? - January 09, 2006
The inherently inter-textual character of textual meaning appears to be a reflex of Trinitarian relations. To wit: Each person of the Triune God is God Himself. As the Athanasian creed said, The Father is God, the Son is God, the...

General Hermeneutics - January 09, 2006
What's needed is not a general hermeneutics developed from some philosophy of language or metaphysics. Rather, what's needed is a general hermeneutics developed from the premise that NT readings of the OT do not represent some bizarre exception to the...

Schleiermacher - January 04, 2006
Bauman distinguishes between the "legislative" notion of reason found in Kant and other Enlightenment figures and the "interpretive" rationality that characterizes much postmodern thought. The shift from the former to the latter was not accomplished all at once. Schleiermacher, for...

Sanctified Vision - November 27, 2005
John J. O’Keefe and R. R. Reno, Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 156 p. In recent years, theologians have given intensive, and increasingly favorable, attention to patristic and...

Recapitulation - November 26, 2005
In their recent study of patristic interpretation, John O'Keefe and RR Reno point out that Irenaeus borrows his notion of recapitulation from ancient rhetoric: "Recapitulation is an English form of recapitulans, the Latin translation of anakephalaiosis, which means final repetition,...

Musical and Narrative Structure - October 25, 2005
Mozart's little Minuet in F from Don Giovanni has a simple form. After a 3-measure introduction, the main theme runs through several measures, and then repeats exactly. A second theme follows, and is again repeated identically, and the piece ends...

Music and Hermeneutics - September 27, 2005
Bach's little Minuet in G ends, not surprisingly, on G, while the bass plays a descending series of notes that are part of the G-major chord: G, D, and G. With the G, and the fragments of the chord, the...

High Context Societies - June 27, 2005
Ronald Simkins has distinguished between "high context" and "low context" societies. In the former, the members of the society share many cultural assumptions and meanings; in the latter, the shared meanings are much thinner and more sporadic. Of course, the...

Poythress on Hermeneutics and translation - November 18, 2004
Vern Poythress gave an excellent paper at ETS on truth and fullness of meaning. It was typical Poythress �Earguing against any reductive account of meaning and language, insisting that Scripture speaks in all sorts of ways (propositions, metaphors, allusions, etc),...

Poesis in Renaissance - January 13, 2004
More evidence of "poesis" in Renaissance notions of human nature and "self-fashioning." The first quotation is from Pico, and is drawn from Lewis's English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: God's words to Adam at creation were: "To thee, O Adam,...

Greenblatt on Fashion - January 13, 2004
A couple of quotations from Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning, with a comment appended. He is talking about the changing meanings of "fashion" in the English Renaissance: "In the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning...

Thoughts on the Renaissance - December 17, 2003
A couple of thoughts on the Renaissance, inspired by Spenser: First, Spenser's emphasis on the proper use of the body (Book 2 of the Faerie Queene, the book of temperance) highlights the anti-Platonic thrust of Spenser's viewpoint. That was, if...

Humanist Iconoclasts? - December 08, 2003
Were there Humanist iconoclasts? It seems plausible, given the interest in Platonism and Neoplatonism among Humanists. And here's a quotation from the Humanist Vives: "If that very picture which we are gazing at, is obscene, does that not contaminate our...

Hays on Figural and Theological Interpretation - November 19, 2003
Richard Hays gave a fine defense of figural and theological interpretation of the OT at an ETS session. He argued that the NT writers read the OT in the light of the resurrection, and saw the resurrection of Christ as...

Green on Scripture's Audience - November 19, 2003
Joel Green at ETS challenged historical-critical scholarship on the basis that the community addressed originally by Scripture is the same as the community now addressed by Scripture. We can distinguish between what it meant and what it means, but even...

Differance - October 30, 2003
In an essay on "The Hermeneutics of Difference" in a volume edited by Merold Westphal, Garrett Green offers this helpful summary of Derrida's conception of supplement: "The fundamental hermeneutical situation in which we all find ourselves as users of signs,...

Nothing Outside the Text - October 30, 2003
In his book "Is There A Meaning in This Text?" Kevin Vanhoozer explains Derrida's dictum that "there is nothing outside the text" by saying that everything is part of a signifying system or classification system that is constituted by differences....

Rare Chiasms? - October 24, 2003
In her introduction to the current Semeia volume, Eskenazi argues that the biblical writers rarely use ring or chiastic constructions. The ones that are "found" are, in her opinion, usually unconvincing. But she offers a more philosophical reason for the...

Levinas and Biblical Studies - October 24, 2003
The current issue of Semeia, edited by Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, is devoted to studies of the influence of Levinas on biblical studies and the influence of the Bible on Levinas. Ezkenazi's introduction lays out the basic categories and the fundamental...

Rhyming History - October 17, 2003
I came across this from Mark Twain today: "History does not repeat itself but it does rhyme."...

Interpretation and the Fall - October 15, 2003
James K. A. Smith has a neat scheme for summarizing different view of interpretation in terms of the categories of creation and fall. For some thinkers, interpretation and the possibility of misinterpretation are results of the Fall; for others, interpretation...

Jokes and Hermeneutics - September 11, 2003
I've been wanting for some years to write an article developing the fairly simple point that all texts depend on things that are not in the text for their meaning. Jokes are among the best examples of this. What makes...

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