From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Hermeneutics: Word and thing

TF Torrance ends a series of articles on the hermeneutics of Athanasius by returning to a theme developed throughout the series: “Christian doctrines are not to be established or to be defended simply by appealing to Biblical texts, but by listening to the things they signify by and reflecting on the acts of God they attest and allowing our thought and statements to be objectively determined by them.”

And, “If we transfer our interest from the realities signified to the language itself, as though we could excogitate truth out of it, or use it only as the occasion for devising new forms of thought on our own in order to express what we are able to conceive of ourselves, then we shall fall away into heresy.”  Put differently, the realities of which the Bible speaks are the criterion of our interpretation of the words.

How does this work?

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Hermeneutics: Reformation allegory

Did the Reformers approve of allegory?  That depends on whether you look at their hermeneutical theory or their actual exegetical practice.  In the former, they insist on a single sense; in practice, they recognize types, which are distinguished from allegories but which are certainly a species of “second sense.”  When the actual practice is theorized, difficulties arise.  In a 1974 article, George Scheper writes:

“there is a certain discrepancy between the purity of these theoretical statements, polemical in context, and the actual exegetic practice of the Reformers. Moreover, the rejection of allegory and the insistence on one undivided sense hinged for the early Reformers on maintaining a radical distinction between typology and allegory. But the more systematic Protestant hermeneutic treatises reveal . . . that any essential distinction was impossible to maintain. . . .

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Hermeneutics: How we say what we say

Thomas writes that “to signify something by words or merely by the construction of images . . . yields nothing but the literal sense” and “poetic images refer to something other than themselves only so as to signify them; and so a signification of that sort goes no way beyond the manner in which the literal sense signifies.”

If I understand this, I’m not convinced.  First, because this seems to conflate meaning with signification, which I take to be equivalent to reference.  They aren’t the same.  Second, because how we say what we say is as important as the reference of what we say.  I can refer to the same person as a “man” and as a “dirty rat”; they are both literally signifying the same person, but the way they signify inflects the reference.  ”Dirty rat” is not just a pointer, but an implicit metaphor that attributes some sort of “ratness” to the dirty rat in question.

Hermeneutics: Typology and Allegory

Denys Turner notes that the Song of Songs presented challenges to the “minority” of medieval theologians who argued for a more rigorous grounding of spiritual in literal senses.  For these, the text speaks literally, referring to specific events; and these events, as Thomas says, providentially typify future events.

To qualify as a type, though, an event would not only have to have some formal similarity to the fulfillment in Christ, but should participate in the history that leads to Christ.  The exodus not only has the same shape as redemption in the new Moses; it’s also the case that “without exodus, no Christ,” since the exodus is a means by which Israel is shaped to be the people that would receive the Messiah.

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Hermeneutics: Heidegger’s hermeneutics

Ouch!  Schaeffer again, this time on Heidegger’s interpretive methods: “Paraphrase, translation, dismantling of the syntax, making the text autonomous with regard to the concrete subject who utters it, absolute silence regarding the poetic form: to these five characteristics we must add hermeneutic authoritarianism,” the last of which “postulates an opposition between what the poem seems to say and what it really means.”

Hermeneutics: Moses and Christ

Michael Hollerich, who has done some superb revisionist work on Eusebius of Caesarea, explains in a 1990 article from Church History that Eusebius employed a “similar situation” form of typology that focuses on similarities rather than differences between type and antitype, and draws out the similarities in great detail.  He summarizes Eusebius’ discussion of the parallels of Moses and Christ:

“The parallelism is quite close, except that Jesus worked on a worldwide scale by spreading the gospel of monotheism and the godly polity to the gentiles.  Jesus and Moses, Eusebius continues, agreed substantially in their teaching on the origin of the world, the immortality of the soul, and ‘other doctrines of philosophy.’  Furthermore, they both authenticated their proclamations with miraculous works. Moses liberated the people from slavery in Egypt; Jesus Christ summoned the whole human race to freedom from their ‘Egyptian’ bondage to idolatry. . . .”

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Hermeneutics: Deep Exegesis

My forthcoming book on hermeneutics is available for pre-order at Amazon, Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture.

Hermeneutics: Christological interpretation

For the writer to the Hebrews, Christological interpretation is an absolute necessity.  Earlier revelation was fragmentary – many parts, many ways – but His new speech is unified in huio – in the (one) Son.  Without Jesus, the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible lacks unity.

Would the writer to the Hebrews be surprised that the modern assault on typology had produced a source criticism that in turn produces a seemingly boundless fragmentation?

Hermeneutics: Hath God Said?

Fenn again, reflecting on the serpent’s temptation: “The Word of God is ’solid,’ whereas all other words are slippery at best and may be downright empty or misleading.  But one only knows the word as solid if one is in a solid relationship to the author: a relationship of trust and obedience.  That relationship authenticates the promises of God; it is the proof that eludes philosophical syllogisms and a search for empirical results.  Only those in the proper relationship of God therefore understand the nature of the proof itself.  Outside that relationship there is ample room for speculation concerning the seriousness of God’s promises and whether they are to be taken literally as threats, or as empty words intended to keep the hearer at a safe distance from divine knowledge and power.”

In short, a promise can be a promise only when the context is clearly established; and a promise can be taken as a promise only when there is a community of speech with rules for actors and actions that are widely understood and obeyed.”

Hermeneutics: Honoring the author

Hamann says that the historical-critical method of biblical interpretation does not, despite its apparent attention to the human author, really honor the author.  This is because historical-critical interpretation is “castrated,” removing all passion and kerygmatic intention.

Dickson writes, “The desires and kerygmatic intentions of the biblical authors are appreciated, and indeed given the courtesy of a response.  To recognize an author’s or redactor’s aims but not to respond to them (even with a polite refusal) could be seen as a curiously cold and indeed de-personalizing way to behave to another human being whose work one professes to respect.”

Hermeneutics: Il n’y a pas de hors-texte

Hamann can repeat this Derridean scandal, quite literally.  As Gwen Dickson puts it, “Hamann’s conception of language as speech as a ‘translation’ reveals that at the basis of his thinking there is no language-world dichotomy; language, after all, is part of the world, and moreover the ‘world’ or ‘reality’ or ‘things’ are somehow linguistically conceived, so that speech is not a first depiction or description or representation but a translation of something that already is a ‘text.’”

That “somehow” is too coy: Creation is a text because the Creator speaks to creatures through creatures.  The world is text because it is the speech of the world’s Maker.

Hermeneutics: Protestant hermeneutics

Richard Muller points out the essential continuity of Protestant interpretation with patristic and medieval models: “The Reformers and, indeed, the Protestant orthodox all assumed that the living Word addressed the church directly in and from the text.  In other words, they advocated a spiritual and ecclesial exegesis that participated in the same dynamic as patristic and medieval exegesis.  This step from exposition to churchly dogma was not, therefore, ruled out on hermeneutical grounds.  (This degree of hermeneutical continuity between the Middle Ages and the Reformation not only made possible the dogmatic enterprise of Protestant orthodoxy in the late sixteenth century, it also rendered that enterprise suspect as the patterns of interpretation continued to change and a historical-critical method was introduced, under the impact of rationalism and deism, in the eighteenth century.)”

Hermeneutics: Typology

Typology is a philosophy of history.

It is also a theory of meaning.

Typology is a historical theory of meaning, a theory of historical meaning.

That Matthew can say “Out of Egypt I called My Son” is fulfilled in Jesus isn’t evidence that Matthew was a midrashist.  It’s not merely a hint about how to read the Old Testament.  It’s a pointer to the character of history and the nature of meaning.  Texts mean the way Matthew says Hosea’s text means; history’s contours are the contours that Matthew discerns in Hosea’s reference to the exodus.

Typology is the beginning of wisdom.

Hermeneutics: Union card

E. Miner wrote, that “the ability to declare typology absent is a kind of proof of sound modern critical method.”

Which translated means, Skepticism about typology is the union card of serious biblical scholarship.

Hermeneutics: Brick Hermeneutics

A. K. A. Adam offers a useful critique of what he calls “brick hermeneutics.”  Taking a cue from George Herriman’s early 20th-century comic strip Krazy Kat, he describes brick hermeneutics as follows: “Most of our discourses take for granted the premise that we communicate by infusing ‘meaning’ into some expression, then throwing that meaning-laden word toward others, whose job it is to extract the meaning from what we wrote or said.”  He also suggests “bubble hermeneutics”: “we blow meaning into a bubble that floats toward an interlocutor’s ear then bursts, emitting the ‘meaning-content’ for a listener’s edification.”

In reply, Adam reminds us that many things besides words mean:

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Hermeneutics: Ancient etymology

In a volume on Philo’s etymology of Hebrew names, Lester Grabbe notes that allegory and etymology played an important role in Greek interpretation of myths: “In the physical types of allegory the gods were related directly and baldly to the nature elements by etymology, so that Hera was air (aer); Cronus, time (chronos); Apollo, the sun (because he was unique: a-polloi, ‘not many’); and so on. . . . especially the Stoics etymologized divine names and did so in the context of interpreting poetry or myth. Etymology because the chief ‘handmaid’ of allegory. As the allegories became more sophisticated, though, etymology seems to have occupied a more subordinate place.”

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Hermeneutics: Reader Response

Anthony Thiselton (New Horizons in Hermeneutics) notes that “It may readily be granted, without any difficulty that some (or even in principle many) biblical texts do function in ways which invite a reader-oriented hermeneutic.”

A very wise statement, that.  Wise, first, in acknowledging the strength of reader-oriented modes of interpretation; wise, second, in recognizing that text differs from text, and that imposing a single hermeneutical grid or method on all is ideology not interpretation.

Hence: Joyce and many modernists produce texts that are radically underdetermined.  Readers don’t merely discern the coherence, but actually do provide whatever coherence the text has.  And that’s by authorial design.  Hence also: If the short ending of Mark is right, that’s a classic example: The gospel leaves the reader hanging, forces a decision upon him.

Hermeneutics: Expression and content

Umberto Eco (Limits of Interpretation) criticizes Barthes’s notion that connotation occurs when “a sign function (Expression plus Content) becomes in turn the expression of a further content.”  He argues that “in order to have a connotation, that is, a second meaning of a sign, the whole underlying first sign is required – Expression plus content.”

“Pig” can mean “filthy person” only “because the first, literal meaning of this word contains semantic markers such as ’stinky’ and ‘dirty.’  The first sense of the word has to be kept in mind (or at least socially recorded by a dictionary) in order to make the second sense acceptable.  If the meaning of pig were ‘gentle horse-like white animal with a horn in its front,’ the word could not connote ‘filthy person.’”  Even when a word like pig comes to have this connotation, that use still has to be “legitimated by the context.”  (He mentions Disney’s three little pigs who are “neither filthy nor unpleasant,” but I wonder if he’s not missed an important inversion of the connotation here: Is it important to the Disney story that the pigs are contrary to type?)

What Eco says of words goes for larger units.  A sentence like “the Pharisees cast him from the synagogue” could not mean “the ‘Pharisees’ cast him from the ’synagogue’” (applied, say, to the expulsion of a minister from his church) if the first sentence didn’t mean “the Pharisees cast him from the synagogue.”  The connection between “Pharisee” and “‘Pharisee’” is not merely expression; the original content of the word is carried into the second sentence as well.

Hermeneutics: God-like Hirsch

Frank Lentricchia argues that there is “no unmediated historical knowledge,” and adds: “That is reserved for God, or for theorists like Hirsch who believe that objective knowledge can be acquired in a massive act of dispossessing ourselves of the only route to knowledge that we have: the historicized self.   What Hirsch’s readings of Heidegger and Gadamer may ultimately indicate is the traditional Anglo-American fear and manhandling of any sort of thought which does not work from Carestian premises.”

Hermeneutics: Sacraments and texts

Roger Lundin notes that modern interpretation often seeks an unmediated encounter with the text, and then adds: “Both Keith Thomas and Charles Taylor trace it, in part, to the Reformation’s anti-sacramental impulses, which fed into the desacralizing of nature that seventeenth-century science and commerce eagerly promoted.  The process accelerated through the eighteenth century and issued in the romantic reaction at the end of that century.”

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