Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen

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: Accommodation and Criticism

Calvin described Scripture as an accommodation to human capacities - God babbles to us like a parent to a baby.  Spinoza and Galileo appealed to the same principle.  For Galileo, it was a way of retaining the truth of Scripture, at least as regards matters of faith, while also maintaining his new scientific discoveries that seemed to violate the sense of Scripture: “these propositions dictated by the Holy Spirit were expressed by the sacred writers in such a way as to accommodate the capacities of the very unrefined and undisciplined masses, for those who deserve to rise above the common people it is therefore necessary that wise interpreters formulate the true meaning and indicate the specific reasons why it is expressed by such words.”

Spinoza’s use of the theory was more all-encompassing: “Scripture, being particularly adapted to the needs of the common people, continually speaks in merely human fashion, for the common people are incapable of understanding higher things. . . . In this way the Prophets made up a whole parable depicting God as a king and lawgiver, because he had revealed the means that lead to salvation and perdition, and was the cause thereof.”

Both Galileo and Spinoza charged that without the principle of accommodation, the Bible would be blasphemous, since it would attribute body parts, passions, and actions to God that are not worthy of God.

Hermeneutics: Worthy of God

Grotius “proved” the truth of the Bible by saying that “in their stories as well as in the rules they give, nothing is taught that is unworthy of God, nothing that is not conducive to the best conduct of life, whereas poets, philosophers and all those who claim to instruct others teach many things that are unworthy of God, absurd, and at variance with good morals.”

Two comments: One, Grotius’s argument runs against the thrust of much patristic interpretation of Scripture, which appeals to allegory precisely at those points where the Bible makes claims that, in their opinion, are unworthy of God if taken literally.  Second, Grotius’s argument is incipiently rationalistic (as is the patristic argument).  How, after all, can Grotius conclude that the Bible’s depiction of God is “worthy of God” unless he knows what kind of God God is from some other source.  To say “The Bible is worthy (or unworthy) of God” is implicitly to measure the Bible by a standard outside the Bible.

Hermeneutics: Calvin and the fourfold

On the Psalms, Calvin wrote: “although David speak of himself in this Psalme: yit he speaketh not as a common person, but as one that beareth the person of Christ, bicause he was the universall pattern of the whole Churche: and the same is a thing worth the marking, too the intent eche of us may frame himselfe too susteine like lotte.  For like as it behoved the thing too bee substauncially fulfilled in Christ, which was begun in David: so must it of necessitie come to pass in every one of its members.”

That is: The Psalms speak of David (literal), who typifies Christ (allegorical), with the believer, as a member of the body, included within the fulfillment (tropological).  All he’s missing is anagogy.

Hermeneutics: Totus Christus

Samuel Mather wrote that “types relate not only to the Person of Christ; but to his Benefits, and to all Gospel Truths and Mysteries, even to all New Testament Dispensations.”  To speak of “types of Christ” is thus not merely to speak of types fulfilled in Jesus, but types that “shadowed forth Christ and all the good that comes by him.”

There is some continuity here with the Augustinian Totus Christus as a principle of interpretation, but what striking is the discontinuity.  Instead of seeing OT types as types of Christ and His body, the church, Mather speaks of types of Christ and His benefits.  There’s a sea-change in theology and hermeneutics in that difference.

Hermeneutics: Single sense

William Perkins on the one sense of Scripture, referring specifically to Galatians 4: “There is but one full and intire sense of every place of scripture, and that is also the literal sense. . . . To make many senses of scripture is to overturn all sense, and to make nothing certen.”  Perkins, however, goes on to say that typology is located within this single, literal sense: “It may be said, that the historie of Abrahams familie here propounded, hath beside his proper and literall sense, a spiritual or mysticall sense. I answer, they are not two senses, but two parts of one full and intire sense.  For not onlely the bare historie, but also that which is therby signified, is the full sense of the holy Ghost.”

Hermeneutics: Puritan sacramental hermeneutics

William Perkins on figures of speech: “There is a certaine agreement and proportion of the externall things with the internall, and of the actions of one with the actions of the other: wherby it commeth to passe, that the signes, as it were certaine visible words incurring into the externall sense, do by a certaine proportionable resemblance draw a Christian minde to the consideration of the things signified, and to be applyed.  This mutuall, and as I may say, sacramentall relation, is the cause of so many figurative speeches and Metonymies which are used.”

Hermeneutics: Typology and history

I have found Thomas’s explanation of the quadriga convincing.  He argues that the multiple spiritual senses are not “located” in the words but in the things that the words name.  One might say that for Thomas the words have a single, namely literal, sense; but the things they name are themselves signs, the “words” with which God writes history, and these things foreshadow later things.

Barbara Lewalski (Protestant Poetics and Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric) raised some questions about this formula:

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Hermeneutics: Arbitrary signs and Relational identity

Culler writes: “because the sign is arbitrary, because it is the result of dividing a continuum in ways peculiar to the language to which it belongs, we cannot treat the sign as an autonomous entity but must see it as part of a system.  It is not just that in order to know the meaning of brown one must understand red, tan, gray, black, and so on.  Rather, one could say that the signifieds of color terms are nothing but the product or result of a system of distinctions.  Each language, in dividing up the spectrum and distinguishing categories which it calls colors, produces a different system of signifieds: units whose value depends on their relations with one another.”

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Hermeneutics: He frightened sincerity

Culler points out that there are both paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations at every level of language.  Nouns combine with prefixes and suffixes, and the possible syntagmatic combinations help to define the noun: “A noun is partly defined by the combinations into which it can enter with prefixes and suffixes.”  Friend can take be- and -ly but we don’t find “disfriend, friender, friendation, subfriend, overfriend, defriendize.”

What is the force of Culler’s “can”?  Why “can’t” we say “I disfriended him” or “he’s more a subfriend than an overfriend”?  The answer is, we can, and the sentences are sensible.

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Hermeneutics: Arbitrary Signs, 2

I have the suspicion that Saussure’s theory of the arbitrariness of signs depends on a political theory - namely, some form of social contract theory that posits a pre-social state of nature.

Saussure seems correct that signs are arbitrary if we imagine some Adam formulating language de novo.   To associate the signifier cat with the concept “cat” or snow with “snow” is no more obvious or necessary than associating the signifier rustilifaction with “cat” and lourvin with “snow.”

But only Adam was Adam, and everyone else entered a linguistically articulated world.

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Hermeneutics: Arbitrary Signs

A couple of weeks ago, I mused on whether Saussure would have agreed with Barr’s rejection of the idea that different mentalities are built into different languages.  In his superb book on Saussure, Jonathan Culler provides further evidence that Saussure would not agree with Barr.

Culler’s argument, to put it in a nutshell, is that understanding Saussure requires us to understand what he means by the “arbitrary nature of the sign,” and specifically to understand that Saussure means the arbitrary nature of the sign, not merely the arbitrary nature of the signifier.

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Hermeneutics: Exercise in interpretation

On the first page of Arthur Phillips recent “ghost story,” Angelica, we read: “The burst of morning sunlight started the golden dust off the enfolded crimson drapery and drew fine black veins at the edges of the walnut-brown sill. The casement wants repainting, she thought. The distant irregular trills of Angelica’s uncertain fingers stumbling across the piano keys downstairs, the floury aroma of the first loaves rising from the kitchen: from within this thick foliage of domestic safety his coiled rage found her unprepared.”

What do we know of Constance and her setting from this paragraph?

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Hermeneutics: Difference and history

Linguistic values arise from differences between linguistic items in a system, Saussure argues.  But on what basis do we conclude that those differences are differences between items at one moment?  What can’t value and meaning arise in the difference between a word’s value now and a word’s value a century ago?  Why flatten out the network of difference?

Hermeneutics: Phonetic change and value, 2

Saussure also suggests that phonetic changes sometimes have the effect of obliterating the distinct parts of composite words.  Latin’s amicus (”friend”) was clearly negated by inimicus (”enemy”), but the French ami and ennemi are no longer so obviously related by derivation.  Again, breaking of these historical links between words has the potential to change the value of the words involved, and, conversely, the historical links are partly responsible for determining value.

Hermeneutics: Phonetic change

Saussure notes that phonetic changes in a language can have wider consequences on a language.  One of these effects is “to break the grammatical link connecting two or more words.”  Where linguistic signs once wore their derivation on their sound, a phonetic change breaks the link.  In Latin, house-house is obviously linked (mansio-mansionaticus); in French the link is broken (maison // menage).  Same for sheep-shepherd (Latin: vervex-vervecarius; French: brebis // berger).  Saussure says that this change “has an affect on the value of the terms”; for example, “in some local patois French berger becomes specialized to mean ‘oxherd.’”

“Value” is not identical to “meaning,” but rather a combination of a sign’s position in a lexical system and its “exchange value” with its meaning (see my earlier post).  But it’s significant that Saussure suggests that value may change when a sign’s lineage is broken, when we can no longer hear its etymological and historical links to other signs.  Conversely, of course, its value is affected when we can hear those links.  Even on the most strictly synchronic analysis, the value of linguistic signs is partly an effect (of a trace?) of diachronic considerations.

Hermeneutics: Product not sum

Saussure argues that syntagmatic relations are more like multiplication than addition.  Adding -eux to desir is not putting together “independent units”; rather the two “form a product, a combination of interdependent elements, their value deriving solely from their mutual contributions within a higher unit.”

At another level, we can say the same about sentences: Words are not added up in a sentence, but the sentence is the product of something more like multiplication, the product of the interdependent elements of the sentence.

Hermeneutics: Meaning and value

Would Saussure have agreed with Barr’s challenge to the notion that there is a difference between Greek and Hebraic mentalities evident in the differences between the languages?  Barr appeals to Saussure at one or two points in his book (Semantics), and his project as a whole is reliant on Saussure’s structuralism.

Yet, it seems that Saussure’s theory actually goes in the opposite direction.  Below is a summary and brief (tentative) analysis of one section of Saussure’s Course, arguing that Saussure would not have agreed with Barr’s conclusions.

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Hermeneutics: Segmenting sounds

At a couple of points in his Course, Saussure suggests that the “primary characteristic of the spoken sequence is its linearity.”  It is a “chain,” a “line.”

I find this questionable, but he makes interesting use of the image: “In itself, it is merely a line, a continuous ribbon of sound, along which the ear picks out no adequate or clearly marked divisions.  In order to do so, recourse must be had to meanings.” Listening to an unknown language, “we are not in a position to say how the sequence of sounds should be analysed.”  Once we know what the sounds mean, then “we see those segments separated from another, and the shapeless ribbon is cut up into pieces.”  Knowing the meaning allows us to differentiate sounds.

Now, an Augustinian gloss: Several places Augustine describes time and history as a speech act, a string of words moving from future, through the present, into the past.  Before I recite a Psalm, it’s all future; halfway through, my present divides the Psalm into what-has-been-said and what-is-yet-to-be-said.  If Saussure is correct, this sequence is only a line, an undifferentiated string of words, unless we know what the words mean.

If we apply Saussure’s suggestion to Augustine’s image, we can say this: The sequence of time is an undifferentiated line - one damn thing after another - unless we know the language in which it is expressed.  We have to know the meaning of time and history before we can recognize that history and time are articulated into episodes.

Hermeneutics: Chemical reaction

A “sign” in Saussure’s terminology consists of a signification (a concept or idea) and a signal (the “sound pattern” associated with the idea).  He suggests some analogies: “This unified duality has often been compared with that of the human being, comprising body and soul.  But the parallel is unsatisfactory.  A better one would be with chemical compounds, such as water.  Water is a combination of hydrogen and oxygen: but taken separately neither element has any of the properties of water.”

One could extend the analogy: Words in sentences are like atoms, which take on different properties in combination with other words.

Hermeneutics: Linguistic system

Saussure associates langue with collective social realities; it is the system created by society and existing, almost identically, in every member of a linguisitic community.  He associates parole, in turn, with individual expressions within the system.  The system is impervious to change: “changes are never made to the system as a whole,” though each individual change in parole might have “repercussions” for the system.

This distinction is crucial for Saussure, and it seems analogous to the notion of an illegitimate ahistorical “social” that, according to Milbank, is a fundamental assumption of sociology.

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