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The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)
Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)
The Four: A Survey of the Gospels
Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
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
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
Anatiolios offers this explanation of Athanasius’ defense of homoousios: “the meaning of the Nicene homoousios is contained in its function as a guide to a certain way of reading Scripture. An immediate hermeneutical consequence of this principle is that efforts to understand this term primarily by recourse to secular usages of ousia and cognate terms are misguided. Neither the council fathers of Nicea nor Athanasius himself were working with any determinate technical sense of ousia or homoousios. Moreover, they were not attempting to signify the divine essence by directly invoking an objective reference, whether the being of God or some creaturely analogue. The meaning of homoousios thus resides not in its inherent capacity to invoke an objective referent of its own, but rather in its assigned function of regulating how scriptural language as a whole refers to God and Christ.” The word does “successfully refer to God,” but it does so because it “regulates the reference of the whole nexus of scriptural paradeigmata in the direction of the radical ontological correlativity of Father and Son.”
Anatiolios is exactly right about Athanasius, and comments, as he recognizes, raise some important methodological questions: “Do the scriptural patterns of naming Christ and the scriptural way of telling the story of Christ equally permit two rival interpretations, so that endorsing one and rejecting the other amounts to a heteronomous determination of the meaning of Scripture?” Is Scripture ambiguous, a wax nose, that actually does leave open the question of the Son’s ontological status? Athanasius answers No: “He argues that the Nicene homoousios provides the only correct interpretation of scriptural language . . . . The regulation of scriptural language provided by the homoousios arises from within scriptural language and narrative considered as a whole – not from without.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 2:42 pm
Does it matter whether we say the events recorded in the Bible happened? Couldn’t we draw the same “lessons” regardless?
Not if one of the “lessons” has to do with the pattern of God’s action in history. Whether tropological or allegorical, “timeless” and ahistorical interpretations neutralize the text.
Take the example of Revelation. Most scholars today insists that we should not try to tie the images of the book to actual historical events. Revelation instead depicts the realities underlying all human history. Thus for instance, the beast of Revelation 13 should not be understood as “Rome” but as “Empire” as such. Revelation’s images uncover the timeless essence of political power. John the seer is Foucaultian avant la lettre.
That essentializing mode of reading makes it impossible to make discriminating hermeneutical and political judgments. Empire is empire is empire. If, by contrast, the beast of Revelation 13 refers to an actual empire and the events of Revelation 12-17 depict a real series of events (written in images), then we remain open to the possibility that there might be a non-bestial form of power. Bestial powers might appear again; new Rome might arise. But by reading ad litteram, we aren’t paralyzed by the conclusion that all power is bestial.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, October 29, 2011 at 8:21 am
Jacob has gotten a bad rap over the centuries, not least because of the way his two wives have fared in the hands of the allegorists. For Philo, beautiful Rachel represents bodily beauty and Leah beauty of soul: “Rachel, who is comeliness of the body, is described as younger than Leah, that is beauty of the soul. For the former is mortal, the latter immortal, and indeed all the things that are precious to the senses are inferior in perfection to beauty of soul, though they are many and it but one.”
By the same toke, Leah represents contemplative virtue and Rachel active virtue: “Thus one of the lawful wives is a movement, sound, healthy, and peaceful, and to express her history Moses names her Leah or ‘smooth.’ The other is like a whetstone. Her name is Rachel, and on that whetstone the mind which loves effort and exercise sharpens its edge. Her name means ‘vision of profanation’, not because her way of seeing is profane, but on the contrary, because she judges the visible world of sense to be not holy but profane, compared with the pure and undefiled nature of the invisible world of the mind.”
Jacob loved Rachel, not Leah, choosing the lesser good over the greater.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 6:12 am
Herman Rapaport’s The Literary Theory Toolkit: A Compendium of Concepts and Methods
Early on, Rapaport discusses the hermeneutical circle, and suggests that various theorists (Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, Zizek) have found ways to break out. In fact, he thinks that Husserl and Freud had already broken out before the new wave of theory started. In discussing Derrida, he summarizes Derrida’s four explorations of Heidegger’s use of Geschlect, “which means sex, race, gender, family, kin, and stock.” The four essays are about sexual difference, monstrosity and the figure of the hand, Heidegger’s readings of Trakl, and Heidegger’s treatment of Mitsein. Rapaport claims that these explorations “evade the vicious circle of moving from particular to universal and back again.” He elaborates,
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 5:01 pm
Lewis Ayres gave a wonderful paper on early church hermeneutics at a recent conference at Regent College. Part of the point was to place the early fathers – Irenaeus, Clement, Origen, and Tertullian – in their original context, and ask what they were responding to. Predominantly, they were responding to Valentinian gnostics who read the Bible according to “parabolic” or “enigmatic” methods of reading, derived from the ancient methods applied by Greek critics to Homer. Valentinians used the gospels to discover metaphysical ideas in Jesus’ teaching, ideas that were not on the surface of the text.
In response, the early fathers developed a method of reading that prioritized the literal. They still allegorized and found “enigmatic” teaching in the Bible, but they applied a much stricter standard for determining when and how allegories should be derived from the literal text.
In other words: The church fathers didn’t invent allegorical exegesis; it was already around in abundant. Insofar as they were innovative, they were innovative in their insistence on reading ad litteram.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 8:21 am
The NASB renders Deuteronomy 30:9 this way: “Then the Lord your God will prosper you abundantly in all the work of your hand, in the offspring of your body and in the offspring of your cattle and in the produce of your ground, for the Lord will again rejoice over you for good, just as He rejoiced over your fathers.”
If you follow the literal translations in the margin, it comes out this way: “Then the Lord your God will make you have excess for good in all the work of your hand, in the fruit of your womb and in the fruit of your cattle and in the fruit of your ground, for the Lord will again rejoice over you for good, just as he rejoiced over your fathers.”
What’s lost in translation? One might say nothing substantive is lost. But a great deal of the artistry of the verse is suppressed.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 8:11 am
Schleiermacher saw language as self-expression.
Not unnaturally, on that theory, interpretation of language retraces the path of language back to the source, to the author’s intention.
But Schleiermacher’s view of language is of a piece with his liberal experiential-expressivist theological framework.
Why then would any evangelical, rejecting Schleiermacher’s theology, follow his hermeneutical theory?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 4:29 pm
Gadamer from Truth and Method: “Every age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way . . . The real meaning of a text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience. It certainly is not identical with them, for it is always co-determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter. . . . Not just occasionally but always, the texts goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well . . . . It is enough to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all.”
Another: “It is part of the historical finitude of our being that we are aware that others after us will understand in a different way. And yet it is equally indubitable that it remains the same work whose fullness of meaning is realized in the changing process of understanding, just as it is the same history whose meaning is constantly in the process of being defined. The hermeneutical reduction to the author’s meaning is just as inappropriate as the reduction of historical events to the intentions of their protagonists.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 4:24 pm
Not Wesleyan Methodism, but against the methodism attacked by Gadamer. As Anthony Thiselton notes (in his essay in The Promise of Hermeneutics
Thiselton explains “the historical finitude of fallen humanness characterizes every ‘Other’ with a givenness that calls into question all notions of unconstrained autonomy found in liberal optimism. More to the point, interpreters conditioned by their own embeddedness in specific times, cultures, and theological or secular traditions need to listen, rather than seeking to ‘master’ the Other by netting it within their own prior system of concepts and categories. This premature assimilation of the Other into one’s own prior grooves of habituated thought constitutes the ‘control’ and advance commandeering that Gadamer calls ‘Method.’ In a theistic context, listening to the God who is Other remains dependent on the priority of the Other as Giving and Given. Unless God chooses to give himself as One who is given, we listen in vain, and can ‘master’ nothing by constructing a prior ‘method’ in advance of understanding who it is who addresses us.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 3:39 pm
Fairbairn gets patristic interpretation exactly right: He admits they were “overly exuberant,” but argues that they were excessively excited about the right thing: “They correctly understood that the key to good interpretation is discerning the whole message of Scripture well, and they correctly saw that the Bible as a whole is fundamentally about Christ.”
For that reason, following their example is safer than following modern methods: “it is less dangerous to discern the Bible’s central message clearly but read that message too enthusiastically into all passages than it is to read each passage individually without an adequate grasp of the central message.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 11:52 am
Back to Christian Smith’s Bible Made Impossible, The: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture
What interpretive pluralism actually demonstrates, though, is not irrelevance of inerrancy or convictions about biblical authority, but the poverty of the hermeneutical expectations of Biblicism.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 3:48 pm
Augustine asks exactly the right questions: Why did God do things in the particular way He did, when plenty of other options were open? And, why did the writers of Scripture record just these details, from among the infinite details they might have included, and why specific details that are not at all necessary to the story?
After a series of Why? Why? Whys? he answers: “When all things are considered in that way and apparently superfluous things are found interwoven with those that are necessary, they warn the human mind, that is, the rational soul, first that they signify something and then that what they signify should be investigated.”
It’s hard to imagine a better summary of art of biblical interpretation.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, February 5, 2011 at 12:55 pm
The relation of language and thought has been a contested issue in philosophy and linguistics for several centuries. Guy Deutscher’s contribution (Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
The book is divided into two large sections: Language as mirror and language as lens. Under the first metaphor, he probes the question of whether language reflects nature or culture. Initially, he follows a traditional distinction between labels and concepts: Linguistic labels are culturally relative, but the concepts to which the labels are attached are given by nature. ”Dog” and “chien” and “Hund” are arbitrary, but the range of objects to which they are attached is not. Deutscher quickly complicates things by showing how “cultural penetrates the land of concepts.” ”Dog” is an object of nature, but when we move to complex, inherently social realities like “victory” of “Schadenfreude,” it’s clear that the thing is not just out there waiting for us to pin a label on it.
Thus the relativity of cultural labeling affects the way nature is perceived and organized, and not just abstractly in theory but in everyday ways. We use wee “we” whether we are talking about me and you, me and you and Bob, me and you and my dog and Africans, We the People. Other languages, though, distinguish between “we two” and “we three” and “me and someone else but not you.” We know our upper appendages are divided into arm, hand, fingers. Hebrews use yad for both arm and hand, and Hawaiian uses a single term for the whole assembly.
So much for mirrors. The lens section – language as the glass through which we look at reality – was the more interesting to me. Does the lens affect what we see? If so, how?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, October 16, 2010 at 12:16 pm
Umberto Eco (On Literature
“It addresses in the first place a Model Reader of the first level, whom we will call the semantic reader, the reader who wants to know (and rightly so) how the story will end. . . . But the text also addresses a Model Reader of the second level, whom we will call the semiotic or aesthetic reader, who asks himself what kind of reader that particular story was asking him to become, and wants to know how the Model Author who is instructing him step by step will proceed. To put it bluntly, the first-level model reader wants to know what happens, while the second-level model reader wants to know how what happens has been narrated.” First-level readers may never advance to the second level, but Eco insists that to become a good second-level reader, “you have to have been a good first-level reader.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 28, 2010 at 4:40 am
Texts are musical. How? Both texts and music display a paradoxical quality. Let’s start simple.
On the one hand: The sequence of words is a temporal sequence, and we couldn’t recognize a sequence of words as a sentence unless one sound or written word yielded its place to the next. Each word in the sequence must die if the next word is to live; each dies for the sake of the whole sentence. But it’s through that death that the sentence comes alive. If the first word refused to sacrifice itself, refused death, but continued to sound as I spoke the rest; and if the second word also resolutely refused to fade, and the third, and fourth, and so on, we couldn’t discern articulated differentiated words, a sentence, at all. Music is like that too, with some variations. In music, a single note can drone along while others play, and the music is sensible. Yet, there is also a sense in which one note has to yield to the next if there is to be a melody. If every note droned on and on, we wouldn’t have a melody but noise.
On the other hand: I can only recognize the sentence as a sentence if I also, in some fashion, grasp the whole thing together. If I lose the first part of the sentence when the sound waves dissipate, I won’t grasp the meaning of the sentence. I won’t even recognize it as a sentence. I will hear only disconnected words. Musical notes have to accumulate too, and be in some sense simultaneous, if a melody is to be heard. Memory is essential to making sense of music, and of sentences.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 27, 2010 at 10:44 am
Alan Jacobs gave a brilliant lecture at NSA yesterday afternoon – beautifully written and constructed, enormously informative, exploding with insight. Everything you’d expect from Jacobs.
The thrust of the lecture was an exploration of the reading habits that are encouraged by the development of the book. He started with the scroll cabinet of the ancient Jewish synagogue. Given the nature of scrolls and cabinets, the books of the Bible did not have a fixed order or sequence. Quite late in pre-Christian Judaism, rabbis were still debating the proper order of the canon.
With the book, decisions about canonical order are made and fixed. Books are today economical and portable, but the earliest codices were huge and expensive. Whatever the practical reasons for Christians adopting the book, there were important theological and hermeneutical ramifications. Jacobs pointed out that books also physically express the unity of the Bible and its sequentiality. The sheer physical form of a book that includes both Old and New Testament between two covers was a standing renunciation of Marcionitism.
The book has a fixed order, which encourages sequential reading. At the same time, the book allows one to read back-and-forth. You can put your finger in Jeremiah, check Hebrews, and flip from one to the other quite readily. Try that with a scroll. So, the book encourages sequential reading, but a complex zig-zag, reading-forward-and-back reading that is characteristic of Christian typology. The book, Jacobs said in an arresting formula, is the technology of typology.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, September 18, 2010 at 2:51 am
The opposition of literal v. figurative language is problematic for a number of reasons, one of them being that words can become quasi-figures without ever ceasing to be literal.
Suppose I write a short story in which the word “gardenia” appears several times. In each case, it is literal, referring to actual (well, fictional-actual) gardenias. It doesn’t become a metaphor or simile for something else; I never say “she’s a gardenia” or “she’s fragrant as a gardenia.” By well-placed and significant repetitions, however, I can pack all kinds of “figurative” force into the word.
For instance:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 14, 2010 at 8:54 am
Linguists these days tell us that an author chooses one synonym over another for reasons of meaning (one may be slightly more specific or general than the other), for reasons of common usage (one of several synonyms may be used more commonly in certain contexts), or for stylistic reasons.
All true. To which I would want to add that an author may choose one synonym over another for reasons of sound (alliteration, assonance), or even shape (one word looks “smoother” on the page and thus conveys “smoothness” along with everything else it conveys; dittos with “prickly” looking words, etc.), or for reasons of rhetoric (a word choice may not only convey information but also nudge the reader to think about the information in a certain way), or for reasons of historical/cultural associations.
For instance:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 7, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Linguists these days tell us that when a word is ambiguous (more than one lexical definition), the default option is to assume that the author intends one of the multiple meanings. Fair enough: “I rose from bed” and “I plucked a rose” clearly use “rose” in two radically different senses. Linguists recognize that there can also be deliberate double meanings, such as “Jesus is the rose from the dead.”
But that’s a fairly colorless featureless way to handle the problem. It may be all you need to know for translation purposes, but certainly not for interpretation purposes. Besides “multiple lexical definitions” words have a host of associations that are lexically secondary but may, in certain contexts, be literarily primary. Thus, even when there is no “double entendre” happening, a writer may intend to evoke a range of associations that keep spinning off the more you think about it.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 7, 2010 at 4:36 pm
John Webster (Word and Church: Essays in Church Dogmatics
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 6, 2010 at 7:43 pm
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