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

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: Miracle of the written

Gadamer: “Nothing is so strange, and at the same time so demanding, as the written word. Not even meeting speakers of a foreign language can be compared with this strangeness, since the language of gesture and of sound is always in part immediately intelligible. The written word and what partakes of it – literature – is the intelligibility of mind transferred to the most alien medium. Nothing is so purely the trace of the mind as writing, but nothing is so dependent on the understanding mind either.  in deciphering and interpreting it, a miracle takes place: the transformation of something alien and dead into total contemporaneity and familiarity.  This is like nothing else that comes down to us from the past. The remnants of past life . . . are weather-beaten by the storms of time that have swept over them, whereas a written tradition, once deciphered and read, is to such an extent pure mind that it speaks to us as if in the present.”

Hermeneutics Philosophy: Language, Nature, Translation, Man

Wilhelm von Humboldt gives this profound explanation of the role of language in human life: “Just as the individual sound intervenes between object and man, the entire language does so between hum and nature acting upon him both externally and internally.  He surrounds himself with an ambient of sounds in order to assimilate and process the world of objects. These expressions do not in any way exceed the measure of simple truth. Man lives principally, or even exclusively, with objects, since his feelings and actions depend upon his concepts as language presents them to his attention. By the same act through which he spins the thread of language he weaves himself into its tissues.  Each tongue draws a circle about the people to whom it belongs, and it is possible to leave this circle only by simultaneously entering that of another people.”

To that he immediately adds this about translation and learning foreign languages: “Learning a foreign language ought hence to be the conquest of a new standpoint for the previously prevailing world-view of the individual.  In fact, it is so to a certain extent, inasmuch as every language contains the entire fabric of concepts and the conceptual approach of a portion of humanity.  But this achievement is never complete, because one always carries over into a foreign tongue to a greater or lesser degree one’s own viewpoint and that of one’s mother tongue.”

Hermeneutics Philosophy: Interpretive play

Weinsheimer explains how Gadamer can think of interpretation as “play” while avoiding the bogeyman of an interpretive “free-for-all”: “In playing, we do not stand over against the game; we particular in it.  A  player who does not get fully involved in the game is called a spoilsport, because toying with or playing at a game spoils it.” In short, games are not “objects” over there that we examine from a safe distance: “taking a game seriously entails belonging to it, and this belonging in turn precludes treating the game as an object.”

Neither is the game simply a subjectivist utopia: “in the same process of playing that prevents objectifying the game, players lose their status as subjects. As part of the game, participants play parts that are not merely themselves insofar as they have been assigned roles to perform.  Playing consists in a perfromance of what is no object, by what is no subject.”

If interpretation is play, “then it always involves something like performing a drama, for the player who takes the play seriously interprets it from within, by belonging to and playing a part in it.”

Hermeneutics Philosophy: Objective subjectivism

Joel Weinsheimer (Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory) neatly summarizes Gadamer’s argument that objectivism and subjectivism are the same thing: “Governing itself by rule, objectivity tries methodologically to eliminate bias, prejudice, and all the distortions that go by the name of subjectivity. This Cartesian endeavor assumes that a methodologically purified consciousness guarangees certainty.”

And that’s where the quest for objectivity turns subjective: “On one level, objectivity consists in humble self-effacement, but on another, it is marked by a distinct arrogance insofar as it makes individual self-consciousness the locus and arbiter of truth,” that is, the purified consciousness.  Thus, “though it is by definition not subjective . . . objectivity as an ideal derives from a highly subjectivist epistemology.”

Following Heidegger, Gadamer insists that “consciousness always is more than it knows,” and it is thus self-contradictory to think that this “more” can be discovered “by trusting solely to the self-governance of consciousness.”  Method cannot purify the consciousness.  But self-consciousness can be grasped, if not wholly, by attention to tradition, because “consciousness belongs to historical tradition.”  Interpretation within a tradition, then, can understand “the truth that exceeds self-consciousness.”  In short, if there is “truth that exceeds what can be methodologically certified, its disclosure invariably requires an interpretation of tradition from within a tradition,” a circular interpretation that is neither objective nor mere subjectivism.

Hermeneutics: Bound Interpretation

Gadamer says that every thing that is to be interpreted gives rise toa plurality of interpretations.  This is not a free-for-all but rather “the work’s own possibilities of being that emerge as the work explicates itself, as it were, in the variety of its aspects.”  A reader of a poem can note the meter, the rhyme, the elegance of the lines, the imagery, the themes, the relation to the other works of the same poet, the relation to other works by other poets in the same language or different languages, the relation of the poem’s treatment of its subject to prose treatments of the same subject, etc etc.

Yet, the work has an “obligatoriness,” and all interpretations are “subject to the supreme criterion of ‘right’ representation.”  The performance of interpretation is “bound” to the work and must be correct.

Yet again, this doesn’t mean that we can ever close out on one final performance:

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Hermeneutics: Prejudice and the Process of interpretation

Gadamer writes (Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts)): “A person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting.  He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text. . . . Working out this fore-projection [prejudice], which is constantly revised in terms of what emerges as he penetrates into the meaning, is understanding what is there. . . . The process that Heidegger describes [in terms of the hermeneutical circle] is that every revision of the fore-projection is capable of projecting before itself a new projection of meaning; rival projects can emerge side by side until it becomes clearer what the unity of meaning is; interpretation begins with fore-conceptions that are replaced by more suitable ones. This constant process of new projection constitutes the movement of understanding and interpretation.”

Hermeneutics: Death of which Author?

Westphal has the wit to ask Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes which author died, and he gives this answer: “According to familiar versions of theism, God is Creator, and the world has all and only those features that God (intended to) put there; if there is a certain indeterminacy due to creaturely freedom, that is only because God (intended to) put creaturely freedom in the world.”

The author who died is the text’s “Creator,” and like the Creator of theism, the text “has all and only those meanings that the author (intended to) put there.”  The author that died is “a very particular kind of author,” and in fact an author that “never existed in the first place”: “Real authors do not create meaning in the way God created the world. They are neither the Alpha (pure, unconditioned origin) of meaning nor the Omega (ultimate goal) of interpretation.”

He wisely reminds us that “the death of the absolute author is not the absolute death of the author.”

Hermeneutics Philosophy: Intuition v. Interpretation

Westphal asks why Christians are hesitant to affirm the inevitability of interpretation, and answers that denying the necessity of interpretation seems to be the easiest way to affirm truth as correspondence and to preserve objectivity.  If interpretation intervenes into every act of knowing, then it doesn’t seem that we can actually know what’s out there, we can’t actually know what’s in the text.  Objectivity seems to diffuse into subjective interpretations.

One of Westphal’s responses is to show that “the whole idea that some construals are subjective interpretations while others are objective intuitions is itself a particular (contested) tradition within philosophy.”  That is, the view that rejects the necessity of interpretation in the act of knowing is dependent on an interpretive (philosophical) framework to make the distinction between interpretive and non-interpretive acts of knowing.  The distinction between “just seeing” what’s objectively there and “interpreting” is not itself “just seen.”  The opposition of intuitions and interpretations collapses because it is self-refuting, dependent on epistemological assumption that the theory wants to deny.

Hermeneutics Philosophy: In defense of Kant

Merold Westphal (Whose Community? Which Interpretation?: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture)) notes that “realism begins as the claim that the world (the real) is ‘out there’ and is what it is independent of whether or not we might think about it.”  But this simple claim is not all that is involved in realism since “no one actually denies this.”  The further claim is that “we can (at least sometimes) know reality just as it is, independent of our judgments about it. In other words, our thoughts and judgments about the world correspond to the world, perfectly mirror it.”

Kant affirms the first claim (the world is out there) but denied the second, and this is “the paradigmatic antirealist.”

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Bible Hermeneutics: Eye v. Expert Witness

Expounding on the differences between explanation and narration, Craig Hovey (To Share in the Body: A Theology of Martyrdom for Today’s Church) connects them to two forms of witness: “If the eyewitness knows about the particular case and the character witness knows about the person, the expert witness knows neither of these things. Instead, she knows how cases like this usually work – whether this kind of gun could have made that kind of bullet hole, whether this kind of medication could have that kind of effect, whether this kind of act could be attributable to that kind of mental lapse.”

Being a “one-off,” Jesus has eye- rather than expert witnesses: “Just as the character witness is confounded by the identity of Jesus, so also the expert witness is immaterial, for Jesus’ uniqueness admits of no general appraisal. In perfect freedom from established ranks and divisions, Jesus will not be understood as a particular instance of something else.”  No one can be an expert witness to Jesus, since what He is and does don’t “refer back to a more definitive body of knowledge, a more basic theory, or a more axiomatic truth.”

True, and a necessary reminder.  Yet: precisely because Jesus is narrated rather than explained, He cannot be known outside the story of Israel.  That doesn’t make Him a particular instance of a general category, or “just another episode.”  But neither is He an isolated surd, a “Barthian” bolt without precedent or preparation.  If the antitype gives the types their meaning, it is also true that there is a circularity such that the antitype is known only through the types.

Hermeneutics: Typology and Narrative

Wright writes that Paul’s “re-reading” of the OT is not “a matter merely of typology, picking a few earlier themes and watching the same patterns repeating themselves, though this also happens often enough.”  Rather, “Paul had in mind an essentially historical and sequential reading of scripture, in which the death and resurrection of the Messiah formed the unexpected but always intended climax of God’s lengthy plan.”

But what Wright describes as a “historical and sequential” reading is what typology at its best always did – to read Scripture as a single book climaxing in Jesus.  But, like any good narrative, the Scriptural story gives faint foreshadowings and dark hints to the end long before the end.  It’s a detective story: All the clues are are there but it takes the master detective to demonstrate how the clues could only be pointing to this conclusion.

Hermeneutics Theology - Trinity: Beginning with the word

God Himself is speech, language, Word.  This is implicit in the opening pages of the Bible.  God created heaven and earth, and when we see how that works in more detail we find that He does it by speech.  The God revealed in Genesis 1 is a Creator, Maker, Actor, but He is all these things because He is a Speaker.  His Word is a creative Word: When He speaks, things are that weren’t before.  He speaks light into being, forms an firmament by Word, gathers waters by Word, calls vegetation from the earth by Word, speaks and makes heavenly lights, speaks and creates sea creatures.  He not only speaks them into being, but assigns them names.  We aren’t told that God is eternally Word here, but the creation account definitely gives us a glimpse of a “chatty” God (Jenson).

Is He inherently chatty?  What is implicit in the creation account becomes explicit in the New Testament.  John 1:1, alluding to the opening of Genesis, identifies the Word that spoke the world into existence as God Himself: “The Word was toward God, and the Word was God” and “all things came into being by Him” (vv. 1-3).  This Word becomes flesh in order to explain (exegomai) the Father (v. 18).  The Word is the Father’s self-expression to humanity, but He is also the eternal Word.  God was never without his self-expression.  He was never undisclosed.  He was never silent.  He is an eternally chatty God.

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Hermeneutics: Figures and Semantics

In a critical assessment of Louw-Nida’s “semantic domain” approach to  to Hebrew lexicography, Reinier de Blois points out that the approach breaks down when dealing with figurative language.  The word cherev, “sword” is listed in Louw and Nida under the domain of “Artifacts.”  De Blois points out, however, that many of the uses are figurative, the word used as a metaphor for violence or war.

Louw and Nida might distinguish metaphorical and literal sense, with a separate entry for cherevas an “event.”  But it’s not so easy to tell the difference in particular texts.  He points to Jeremiah 47:6-7: “ Ah, sword of the LORD! How long till you are quiet? Put yourself into your scabbard, rest and be still! How  can it be quiet, when the LORD has given it a charge? Against Ashkelon and against the seashore he has appointed it.” And he asks what “sword” means: “Is it used as an artifact here? Yes, because of the scabbard. Is it used as an Event here? Sure, because it actually means ‘war’ in this context.”

This is not a rare example, but “is a structural problem in this language. . . .

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Hermeneutics: Typology

It’s hard to imagine a more succinct or accurate description of typology than that of Danielou (Bible and the Liturgy): “That the realities of the Old Testament are figures of those of the New is one of the principles of biblical theology.  This science of the similitudes between the two Testaments is called typology.  And here we would do well to remind ourselves of its foundation, for this is to be found in the Old Testament itself.  At the time of the Captivity, the prophets announced to the people of Israel that in the future God would perform for their benefit deeds analogous to, and even greater than those He had performed in the past.  So there would be a new Deluge, in which the sinful world would be annihilated, and a few men, a ‘remnant,’ would be preserved to inaugurate a new humanity; there would be a new Exodus in which, by His power, God would set mankind free from its bondage to idols; there would be a new Paradise into which God would introduce the people He had redeemed.  These prophecies constitute a primary typology that might be called eschatological, for the prophets saw these future events as happening at the end of time.  The New Testament, therefore, did not invent typology, but simply showed that it was fulfilled in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.”

In sum: Events of the past form hopes for the future.  Hope is hope that God will do again what He has done, and will do it definitively.  Those hopes are realized in Jesus.

From here, there’s nothing to do but tolle lege.

Hermeneutics Philosophy: Hamann and Schleiermacher

In his introduction to Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present, Kurt Mueller-Vollmer gives us a very Hamannian Schleiermacher: “Man, the linguistic being, can be seen as the place where language articulates iself in each speech act and where each spoken utterance can be understood in relation to the totality of language.  But man is also a constantly evolving mind and his speaking can only be understood as a moment in his mental life (Tatsache im Denkenden). . . . Through verbal articulation the mental fact becomes exemplary. This is so because for Schleiermacher  mental facts articulated as speech are not independent of language.  Or, in Schleiermacher’s own words: ‘Speech as mental fact cannot be understood if it is not understood as linguistic signification (Sprachbezeichnung), because the innate nature of language modifies our mind.’”

This Schleiermacher is not guilty of psychologism since “even the purely intentional mental side of speech – speech as a mental phenomenon – is not free from language.  It is always conditioned and modified by its linguistic form.”  Yet Schleiermacher doesn’t believe we are confined to the prison of language, since language “while it forces patterns upon thought, in return must suffer the influence, the labor of thought upon it.”

The echoes of Hamann are not accidental.

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Hermeneutics Theology - Liturgical: Interpreting Signs

In his classic study of Bible and the Liturgy, Jean Danielou asks how we are to interpret sacramental signs.  Do they “possess only the natural significance of the element or of the gesture . . . water washes, bread nourishes, oil heals”?  Or do they “possess a special significance.”  He argues that since Christian sacraments and liturgy was rooted in Jewish worship, the signs and gestures of Christian worship take their meaning of that Jewish context.  Working with a sacramental typology, we can interpret not only the “content of the sacraments, but also their form.”

Naturally considered, baptismal water might seem to emphasize “cleansing and purifying.”  Cleansing is certainly part of the significance of baptism, insofar as it catches up the cleansing rites of the OT purity system.  But in typological perspective, that is not the focal point of the rite.

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Hermeneutics: Athanasian hermeneutics

Athanasius ends his treatise on the incarnation with this wonderful statement of the qualifications for the biblical interpreter: “But for the searching of the Scriptures and true knowledge of them, an honorable life is needed, and a pure virtue, and that virtue which is according to Christ; so that the intellect guiding its path by it, may be able to attain what it desires, and to comprehend it, in so far as it is accessible to human nature to learn concerning the Word of God. For without a pure mind and a modelling of the life after the saints, a man could not possibly comprehend the words of the saints. For just as, if a man wished to see the light of the sun, he would at any rate wipe and brighten his eye, purifying himself in some sort like what he desires, so that the eye, thus becoming light, may see the light of the sun; or as, if a man would see a city or country, he at any rate comes to the place to see it—thus he that would comprehend the mind of those who speak of God must needs begin by washing and cleansing his soul, by his manner of living, and approach the saints themselves by imitating their works; so that, associated with them in the conduct of a common life, he may understand also what has been revealed to them by God, and thenceforth, as closely knit to them, may escape the peril of the sinners and their fire at the day of judgment, and receive what is laid up for the saints in the kingdom of heaven.”

Hermeneutics: Anagogy

In his History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to Origen, de Lubac highlights the centrality of anagogy in Christian interpretation: “It will not be enough to ‘allegorize’ . . . the events and persons of the Old Testament so as to see in them figures of the New if we continue to see in them only other events, other persons.  Israel is the figure of spiritual things.  In its turn, then, in order to be understood as it must be, in its newness, which is to say, in its spirit, in order to merit its name as New Testament, the content of this second Scripture must give way to a perpetual movement of transcendence.  The spirit is discovered only through anagogy.”

I agree entirely with the thrust of this.  The newness of the New must be preserved; eschatology transforms allegory and gives a fixed “end” to the story of Israel.  But I am not enamored of the way that de Lubac says this.  In other places, he describes the shift from Old to New as a shift from history to spirit.  But the New is as historical, bodily, earthy as the Old; the new is as historical, bodily, earthy as a man mangled on a cross and an actual body rising from the tomb.  It’s Pauline to say that the new covenant is a spiritual one, but in Paul that means a covenant in which the fullness of the Spirit has come.  To say that the new “spirit” elevates the new beyond history is confusing and confused.

Hermeneutics: Florilegium of Danielou

Some early spring flowers from Danielou.

“In the gradual unfolding of God’s design, there appears a system of analogies between his successuive works, for all their distinct self-sufficiency as separate creative acts. The Flood, the Passion, Baptism and the Last Judgment are closely linked together in one pattern.  In each instance, though at different levels, there is a divine judgment on the sinful world, and a divine clemency whereby aq man is spared to be the beginning of a new creation.  Hence arises a new kind of symbolism, which is characteristic of the Bible.  It specific difference is historicity, for it denotes a relationship between various events belonging to sacred history.”

Jesus is “the action of God coming towards man to save him and lead him to the Father.  In Him, therefore, is revealed the fullness of the mystery of God’s love. But He is also the Man who, raised up by God, mounts towards the Father and thus fulfills the vocation of man. He is at once – let us repeat – the movement of God towardes man and the movement of man towards God.”

“The eschatological times are not only those of the life of Jesus, but of the Church as well.  Consequently, the eschatological typology of the Old Testamament is accomplished nopt only in the person of Christ, but also in the Church.  Besides Christological typology, therefore, there exists a sacramental tyology, and we find it in the New Testament.”

Hermeneutics: Florilegium of de Lubac

A morning’s harvest from the de Lubac garden.

“Under the opposition of the letter and the spirit, or of the shadow and the truth, in its varied and sometimes, for us, paradoxical expressions, there is always the opposition of two peoples, of two ages, of two regimes, of two states of faith, of two ‘economies,’ which is affirmed. There are two peoples, two ages, two states, two regimes, two economies, which, however, are opposed to each other in a real contradiction properly speaking only once they have come to coexist, the first not having wished to disappear on the arrival of the one for which its whole task was to prepare, because it had not understood that it was merely the means of getting ready for it.”

On the difference of Christian and Greek allegory: “Where would one find in the facts of history, or only in the thought of the imagination of the Greek allegorists, the irruption of some ‘new testament’ analogous to that of the Christians, an iruption which one day would have turned the ancient exegesis of the Homeric poems upside-down by overturning the very being of their exegete?  Where would one find, in Cornutus and the rest, anything even remotely resembling the opposition between the oldness of the letter and the newness of the spirit?”

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