Interpretation in Theory PDF

part two INTERPRETATION IN THEORY Many books on interpretation of the Bible assert that it should be read "like any other book." In one sense, it should be read like any other book, because, as we argued in the previous chapter, the Bible was written in ordinary human language, and we should therefo...

part two INTERPRETATION IN THEORY Many books on interpretation of the Bible assert that it should be read "like any other book." In one sense, it should be read like any other book, because, as we argued in the previous chapter, the Bible was written in ordinary human language, and we should therefore go about understanding its discourse content in the same way we would other books. But in another sense, by arguing for divine authorship, we also implied that the Bible is no more like any other book than the death of Christ is like any other death. The only way to understand the Bible properly is to submit to it as God's word. If the Bible is divine speech, is it in some respects a genre by itself and subject to different rules of interpretation? Although God is its ultimate author, the Bible is still genuinely human speech, not just divine speech in a human guise. Thus, we must first look at the discourse of the Bible in the same way we would attempt to understand other human speech. Just as a preliminary knowledge of general revelation is necessary to understand special revelation, so a knowledge of the human meaning of Scripture must serve as a base for knowing the divine meaning. What the human author said in his original context must be intrinsically linked to what God intends to say for all time-they must be organically related. Otherwise, we would have no means of understanding the speech, no sociolinguistic framework in which to arrive at a "meeting of meaning." When examining biblical discourse, however, we must bear in mind that God's past actions and words are of a piece with his later actions and words. Thus, the NT writers are free to refer to the historical meaning of the OT as something which, in its original historical context, looked forward to the Christ. Notice how the author of Hebrews argues that the OT itself foresaw that the sacrificial system was temporary, because it pointed beyond itself to a more perfect sacrifice (Heb. 10:1-18). This does not imply that the Christological meaning was necessarily in the mind of either the OT writer or his first hearers. (Neither is there reason to deny that they often were aware of the promise of Christ.) Certainly it is impossible to demonstrate that the OT writers and first readers always understood the Christological meaning that the NT writers unfold. But the Christological meaning is inherent in the history and revelation itself. Biblical revelation in the OT period was always going somewhere (see Heb. 11:39-40). Abraham, for example, knew that God was doing things with a view to the future. He bought the field at Machpelah (which was in Canaan) because he expected the fulfillment of God's promises (Gen. 23). He himself may have understood very little of all that those promises would entail, but Hebrews indicates that in a sense Abraham believed in the resurrection, because of his obedience in offering his son Isaac (Heb. 11:19). Moses also knew that biblical revelation was going somewhere. Deuteronomy indicates that he looked forward to a prophet like himself, but even greater than himself (Deut. 18:15, 18). So if we wish to obtain a sound understanding of what God is saying in a text, we must first understand what the human author was saying. In other words, we cannot cite a text as a proof text for some teaching until we first find out what that text was saying in its original setting, both textual and historical. Neither can we simply assume that our subjective impression of a text is the meaning that God intends for us. The task of grammatical- historical exegesis, which will be explained in chapter 5, is the first step to understanding God's Word.1 Nevertheless, as divine speech, the Bible is qualitatively different from ordinary human utterances in its effectual power, its absolute trustworthiness and consistency, its fullness of meaning, and its applicability to all God's people at all times. Grammatical-historical exegesis may exhaust the accessible meaning of an ancient inscription on a potsherd, but the limits imposed by this method cannot do full justice to Scripture. Thus, chapter 6 will look at how we may learn more from the Bible than grammatical-historical exegesis would reveal. No one comes to a text without a background; for example, this book is written for Christians, and Christians operate within the context of God's people, the church. This means that our interpretation will be influenced by the traditions and methods of interpretation of our predecessors, in recognition of the fact that the Holy Spirit actively leads the church in its understanding of Scripture. In chapter 4, therefore, before we look at how we interpret Scripture today, we will observe how the apparent tension between reading the Bible like other books and reading it as the transcendent word of God has occupied the church's thinking about biblical interpretation throughout its history.  4 THE CHURCH AND BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION This chapter does not so much survey the history of biblical interpretation as highlight the principal ways in which the church has attempted to resolve the problem of interpreting a book that is both earthly and transcendent.1 We shall therefore focus on the key figures in church history who not only interpreted the Bible, but set the interpretive agenda for subsequent discussions of how the Bible should be interpreted. THE EARLY CHURCH: JUSTIN MARTYR AND IRENAEUS The early church took its cue from a variety of sources. Most important was the NT itself. Since the NT saw the OT as pointing to Christ, early church exegesis did likewise. Christians believed that God had genuinely foretold the Christ in prophecy, and they interpreted the Prophets and Psalms in particular as referring directly to Christ. Unfortunately, the efforts to find Christ in the OT sometimes proved fanciful, and allegorical interpretation, which was an accepted technique in Hellenism for interpreting sacred texts, became common among Christians. Justin Martyr (d. ca. 165), for example, in his Dialogue with Trypho, argued with a Jewish non-Christian about the meaning of Isaiah 7:14: "I admit," said Trypho, "that your arguments are so numerous and forceful that they suffice to make me confused, but I again call to your attention that I want the proof of that Scriptural passage which you have so often promised. Please go on now and show us how that passage refers to your Christ, and not to Hezekiah, as we Jews believe."  "I will do as you wish," I replied, "but, first, prove to me that Hezekiah was the one spoken of in the following words: 'Before he had known how to call father or mother, he received the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria in the presence of the king of Assyria.'... Now, you cannot prove that this ever happened to any of you Jews, but we Christians can show that it did happen to our Christ. For at the time of His birth, the Magi came from Arabia and worshipped Him, after they had met Herod, then king of your country, whom Scripture calls king of Assyria because of His wicked ungodliness. For you well know that the Holy Spirit often speaks in parables and similitudes, just as He did to all the people of Jerusalem when He frequently said to them: 'Thy father was an Amorite and thy mother a Hittite.'... The words of Isaias, 'He shall take the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria,' meant that the power of the wicked demon that dwelt in Damascus should be crushed by Christ at his birth. This is shown to have taken place. For the Magi, held in servitude (as spoils) for the commission of every wicked deed through the power of that demon, by coming and worshipping Christ, openly revolted against the power that had held them as spoils, which power the Scripture indicated by parable to be located in Damascus. And in the parables that sinful and wicked power is fittingly called Samaria."2 This kind of argument would convince few modern Westerners, but in Justin's day the allegorical meaning of sacred texts was taken for granted. But in spite of his allegorizing, Justin does preserve a historical dimension: certain events actually happened in fulfillment of certain OT prophecies. Irenaeus (d. ca. 200) is another well-known Christian of the second century, and he developed the historical approach in a typological direction. The coming of Christ clarifies what was previously only hinted at: For every prophecy, before it comes about, is an enigma and a contradiction to men; but when the time comes, and what was prophesied takes place, it receives a most certain exegesis. And therefore when the Law is read by Jews at the pres-ent time, it is like a myth; for they do not have the explanation of everything, which is the coming of the Son of God as man. But when it is read by Christians, it is a trea-sure, hidden in the field but revealed by the  cross of Christ....... The true exegesis was taught by the Lord himself after his resurrection.3 Irenaeus also formulated the principle that obscure passages should be interpreted in the light of clear ones. In taking Valentinians to task for focusing on the obscure, he says, "If anything is clear in Scripture, it is that there is only one God who created the world through his Word."4 This is an article of scriptural faith which the Valentinians denied most vehemently. Irenaeus, in his battles against groups on the fringes of Christianity who had perverted its main teachings, also introduced the idea of authoritative exegesis. The true meaning of Scripture is invested in the church, he said, where apostolic authority is preserved. Although he was right to say that the church was invested with the knowledge of Scripture's meaning, this began a long tradition of finding authoritative interpretation in the early church leaders rather than in careful exegesis of the biblical text itself. This culminated after the Reformation in the Council of Trent's affirmations of ecclesiastical infallibility. THE DEVELOPING CHURCH: ORIGEN AND THEODORE Origen (d. 254) stood at the apex of a tradition of interpretation developed at Alexandria.5 Philo of Alexandria (d. ca. A.D. 50) had championed a highly developed allegorical approach to the OT by which he was able to find the philosophical ideas of Greek idealism in the Torah of Moses. Origen's immediate predecessor at Alexandria, Clement (d. 215), brought this allegorical method to Christian interpretation, especially at Alexandria. According to Clement, the true meaning of the Bible was hidden in allegories, so that the "higher" Christian, the one who had genuine understanding, would be able to discern things, whereas the common man would be kept from knowledge that might be harmful to him. Unlike the Valentinian Gnostics, however, Clement viewed "true knowledge" as equivalent to Christian doctrine, not secret knowledge of the hierarchies of spiritual beings. Knowledge, for Clement, was equivalent to salvation. He did therefore offer explanations of the true knowledge, and he laid down some principles of interpretation, namely: (1) Nothing is literally true which is unworthy of God. (2) No interpretation can be accepted which contradicts the Bible as a whole. (3) Literal meaning is meant to excite interest in understanding the deeper meaning.6 Origen did not share Clement's ideas about secret knowledge, and he devoted himself to making the Bible known to anyone who would listen. Unlike Philo, Origen was not concerned to show how the Bible taught Platonic philosophy, but he did use Platonic philosophy as a grid for understanding the Bible and for talking about and presenting Christ. Of course, that grid does not work too well. Since Origen's presuppositions about the Bible as God's word were more central to him than his Neoplatonic philosophy, it is arguable that Origen would have moved closer to a biblical worldview had he lived longer. In fact, in his later works (such as his commentary on Matthew and Against Celsus), he is not nearly as fanciful in his allegorizing as in his earlier works. Origen is important because he was the first to formulate his principles of biblical interpretation. These are recorded in book 4 of On First Principles. In chapters 1 and 2 of this fourth book, Origen states his principles as: Assumption 1: Scripture is divinely inspired. Therefore: a. Its legal precepts are superior. b. It is powerful in changing lives. c. Biblical prophecy comes true. d. Like Jesus, the Bible is divine, but in human form. e. The Bible contains hidden secrets. Assumption 2: Scripture should be interpreted according to its nature. Therefore: a. Not every text has a literal meaning, but every text does have a spiritual meaning. b. The spiritual meaning is not always plain or easily understood. c. Scripture has a threefold meaning: a literal meaning (the body), a psychical meaning relating to the will (the soul), and a spiritual meaning that speaks of Christ (the spirit). d. The problems in Scripture are there to hinder us from being too enamored of the literal meaning. Chapter three of book four is then a demonstration of the "impossibilities" that result from taking all Scripture literally. For example, if the sun was created on the fourth day, how could there have been evening and morning on the first three? Anthropomorphisms such as the "face" of God could not be literal. According to Origen, the prohibition of eating vultures, if taken literally, is ridiculous, because no one would think of doing it. The OT mentions several animals that Origen thought were mythological, and therefore had to be allegorical. Similarly, casting only the right eye out when it causes one to sin, becoming "uncircumcised," and other things in Scripture can only be interpreted as metaphors for something else. Origen also had an apologetic motivation for allegorical interpretation. For him, the prayer of Psalm 137:8-9 was so contrary to the gospel that it had to be explained this way: The infants of Babylon, which means "confusion," are the confused thoughts caused by evil which have just been implanted and are growing up in the soul. The man who takes hold of them, so that he breaks their heads by the firmness and solidity of the Word, is dashing the infants of Babylon against the rock.7 But Origen does wish to retain a literal interpretation for many things, especially the moral injunctions, and he admits that there are times when it is difficult to decide whether something bears a literal meaning, an allegorical meaning, or both. It is sometimes forgotten that Origen admits that "the passages which are historically true far outnumber those which are composed with purely spiritual meanings" (First Principles 4.3.4), and he found the literal truth of the Bible to be a support for its allegorical meanings (Against Celsus 8.67). Christianity is superior to paganism because Christ literally exists and literally rose from the dead.8 And when it came to defending the faith, Origen relied almost exclusively on the literal meaning.9 Origen's argument for an allegorically discerned divine meaning set the tone for most biblical interpretation up through the Middle Ages. Augustine of Hippo (d. 430), for example, could understand the door of Noah's ark as symbolizing the wound in Christ's side (City of God 15.26). By the time of Cyril (d. 444), the quadriga, or fourfold sense of Scripture, had developed. Scripture could have a literal meaning (what God did in the past), an allegorical meaning (having to do with faith), a tropological meaning (for moral guidance), and/or an anagogical meaning (pertaining to the Christian hope). But in the third century, Origen's approach to Scripture was not the only exegetical option. At Syrian Antioch, a different kind of Christian scholarship developed, whose best representative is probably Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428).10 Not much is known of Theodore, and few of his works remain. But he and others of the Antiochene school opposed the allegorism of Alexandria in favor of literal interpretation. He wrote a treatise against allegorism called Concerning Allegory and History Against Origen, in which he argued that Origen's approach deprived biblical history of its reality. If Adam was not a real person, argued Theodore, then how did death enter the world? The "allegorical interpretation" of Paul in Galatians 4 did not deny the historical events, but used them as an example or illustration. Theodore apparently attempted to achieve consistency in his commitment against allegorism. From his commentary on the minor prophets,11 his principle appears to be that unless the NT actually cites the text, it is not messianic. Allusion is not sufficient to establish a text as messianic. Even when the NT does cite an OT text, it may be only illustrative, rather than indicative of a messianic meaning. Hosea 11:1 itself, says Theodore, makes no reference to Christ in spite of Matthew 2:15. On the other hand, Joel 2 does contain information that is only unveiled in the coming of Jesus.12 Theodore does not deny that the NT gives indications of literal fulfillments of OT prophecy. The prophets actually foresaw Christ, and thus their prophecies had a double sense, a historical and a messianic. Psalms 2, 8, 95, and 110 literally refer to Christ. Theodore developed Irenaeus's idea of typology, but kept it limited to historical correspondence. The original meaning of a text was its historical meaning. Later in redemptive history, one might notice historical correspondences (types), which stem from patterns in God's plan. Thus, Psalm 22 in itself is only historical, and applies to Christ only tangentially, as it would to any sufferer. It does apply to Christ par excellence, but only because he is the ultimate sufferer. Unfortunately for the church, Theodore was declared heretical, partly because of the alleged Christological errors of his pupil, Nestorius, and partly because he rejected certain canonical books as not inspired, but his influence was widely felt for a while in Eastern Christianity. Especially the famous preacher John Chrysostom (d. 407) focused on the historical meaning. He did find Christ in the OT, but usually restricted himself to historical typology. Chrysostom found warrant for typological understanding of the OT in the conclusion of Psalm 117, which is sometimes translated, "The truth of the LORD endures forever" (see KJV). Thus, OT history has some meaning for today as well.13 For Chrysostom, the historical meaning is the outline of God's truth; the final form (the full portrait) is found in the typological meaning.14 THE MIDDLE AGES: AQUINAS15 The Middle Ages represents a mixture of different opinions on all issues (including the interpretation of Scripture). At the apex, however, and representative of medieval exegetical theory, stands Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). For Aquinas, the principal hermeneutical consideration was that the Catholic church was the authoritative interpreter of Scripture. Like most of his contemporaries and predecessors, Thomas held to the fourfold exegetical method. Thomas, however, insisted that the literal meaning should be the basis of the other three. He explains his position in Summa Theologica 1.1.10: The author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify his meaning, not by words only (as man also can do) but by things themselves. So, whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science has the property that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification. Therefore that first signification whereby words signify things belongs to the first sense, the historical or literal. That signification whereby things signified by words have themselves also a signification is called the spiritual sense, which is based on the literal, and pre-supposes it. For as the apostle says (Heb. x.1) the Old Law is a figure of the New Law and [Pseudo-]Dionysius says: "The New Law itself is a figure of future glory." Again, in the New Law, whatever our Head has done is a type of what we ought to do. Therefore, so far as the things of the Old Law signify the things of the New Law, there is the allegorical sense; so far as the things done in Christ, or so far as the things which signify Christ, are types of what we ought to do, there is the  moral sense. But so far as they signify what relates to eternal glory, there is the anagogical sense. Since the literal sense is that which the author intends, and since the author of Holy Writ is God, Who by one act comprehends all things by His intellect, it is not unfitting, as Augustine says (Confess. xii), if, even according to the literal sense, one word in Holy Writ should have several senses.16 Aquinas recognizes the problem with Scripture having several senses: Many different senses in one text produce confusion and deception and destroy all force of argument. Hence no argument, but only fallacies, can be deduced from a multiplicity of propositions. But Holy Writ ought to be able to state the truth without any fallacy.17 To this he responds: The multiplicity of these senses does not produce equivocation or any other kind of multiplicity, seeing that these senses are not multiplied because one word signifies several things; but because the things signified by the words can themselves be types of other things. Thus in Holy Writ no confusion results, for all the senses are founded on one-the literal-from which alone can any argument be drawn, and not from those intended in allegory, as Augustine says (Epist. xlviii). Nevertheless, nothing of Holy Scripture perishes on account of this, since nothing necessary to faith is contained under the spiritual sense which is not elsewhere put forward by the Scripture in its literal sense.18 Aquinas was remarkably close to the Reformation on the question of Scripture's meaning. Even though he and other late medieval theologians generally stressed deductive reason (reasoning from the generals to the particulars), rather than inductive examination, as the means to obtaining an objective exegesis, since most of the church's theology had been built up by Christians paying attention to Scripture, his framework was a Christian framework. But, on the other hand, his concerns were systematic and philosophical, and his questions were often drawn from an Aristotelian framework. Also, for Aquinas, interpretation of Scripture requires no special grace, because theology and the knowledge of God (which did require grace) were not the direct result of interpreting Scripture. The knowledge of God was more wedded to philosophy and tradition than to exegesis (unlike the Reformation, which thought of theology as strictly dependent on biblical exegesis). THE REFORMATION: LUTHER AND CALVIN The two watchwords of the Reformation were sola fide and sola Scriptura, "faith alone" and "Scripture alone." As Melanchthon pointed out, these were the material and formal principles of the Reformation. MARTIN LUTHER Martin Luther (d. 1546) derived several hermeneutical principles from these commitments.19 From the principle of sola Scriptura, Luther felt he must stress first of all that the historical sense is the true sense: "Only the historical sense gives the true and sound doctrine."20 In this, Luther followed the lead not only of the theory of Aquinas, but more particularly the practice of Nicholas of Lyra (d. 1340) and Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples (d. 1536). Holding to sola Scriptura and the historic sense also meant a rejection of traditionalism: "The teachings of the Fathers are useful only to lead us to the Scriptures as they were led, and then we must hold to the Scriptures alone."21 Hence, he rejected the fourfold method of interpretation, particularly allegorism as a source of doctrine:22 When I was a monk I allegorized everything. But after lecturing on the epistle to the Romans I came to have some knowledge of Christ. For therein I saw that Christ is not an allegory, and I learned to know what Christ actually was.23 Because esoteric allegorical interpretation was no longer primary, the Bible became accessible to ordinary thought, and so Luther saw the meaning of the Bible as simple and clear.24 Some difficult passages remained, of course, but the main matters of the Bible as a whole were understandable by ordinary people. Luther's second principle derived from sola Scriptura was that Scripture is its own interpreter. "Scriptura sui ipsius interpres," said Luther,25 citing Augustine's dictum. As A. S. Wood says:  Luther... insists that the Bible itself must teach us how to interpret the Bible. The first hermeneutical circle is to be drawn from the design of the Word. The sphere from which the methodology of hermeneutics is to be derived is that of Scripture itself. The true principles of biblical interpretation are themselves quarried from biblical sources. To break this circuit is to deprive interpretation of its essential dynamic and authority.26 The other Reformation principle was sola fide, from which Luther concluded, first, that true understanding of Scripture can only be gained by experiencing the Word, and, second, that the whole Bible is about Christ. Scripture can only be apprehended spiritually and experientially: "If God does not open and explain Holy Writ, no one can understand it; it will remain a closed book, enveloped in darkness."27 On the other hand, when God does open the human heart to the meaning of Scripture, it is a sure and certain word: "The Holy Spirit is no sceptic, and the things he has written in our hearts are not doubts or opinion, but assertions-surer and more certain than sense and life itself."28 Thus, in accord with passages such as Luke 24:44-46, there is a Christological meaning to the whole. Of course, a Christological reading of the OT was not new, but Luther focused on the fact that Christ, the true spiritual sense of Scripture, is communicated by the historical sense. Commenting on the fact that Paul uses Deuteronomy 30:12 in a different sense than the historical (in Rom. 10:6-8), Luther claims that Paul is "teaching us that the entire Scripture deals only with Christ everywhere, if it is looked at inwardly, even though on the face of it it may sound differently, by the use of shadows and figures."29 Again following Lefevre, who had insisted on a twofold literal sense, a literal historic sense, and a literal prophetic sense, Luther held to the historical sense in two ways, first as an account of the history of what God had done, and second as having a history that pointed to what God was going to do. For Luther, the importance of Christ was God's imputation to us of his righteousness, and so the Christocentric focus of the Word meant that the hermeneutical key was the imputed righteousness of God, which was given to the believer through faith alone.30  Occasionally Luther's understanding of the sola fide principle came into conflict with his understanding of the sola Scriptura principle. The conflict could be resolved in two ways: by submitting one's faith to Scripture, or by critiquing Scripture so that it conformed to one's faith. Now Luther's theory presupposes that Scripture is the Word, and therefore that Scripture is above all human thinking: Scripture is the Word of God.31 The Holy Scriptures have been spoken by the Holy Ghost.32 No living Christian can be forced to recognize any authority beyond the sacred Scripture, which is exclusively invested with divine right, unless indeed there should come a new and attested revelation.33 The God of Truth speaks to us in the Scriptures, and therefore we must simply accept what stands there.34 The Scripture is God's word, not man's, and not one jot or tittle of it is in vain.35 The more you distrust yourself and your thoughts, the better a theologian and a Christian you will become.36 In it [the Bible] not one word is of so small an account as to allow of our understanding it by reason.37 In theory, Luther differentiated between the magisterial and the ministerial use of reason. "Our intellect must adjust itself to the Word of God and to Holy Scripture." Thus, reason cannot adjudge the truth value of the Scriptures. But reason must be employed in order to understand the truth.38 However, in practice Luther treats some Scriptures as being more important or clearer than others, and some Scriptures do not fit his theological assumptions (e.g., James), so he practices criticism, placing reason above the Bible: We should throw the Epistle of James out of this school [Wittenberg], for it doesn't amount to much. It contains not a  syllable about Christ.... I maintain that some Jew wrote it who probably heard about Christian people but never encountered any.39 Luther thought that Esther, James, and Jude were unimportant because he could not see how they spoke of Christ, and he was dubious about Revelation, because of its "Jewish" imagery. Further, some Scripture was dismissed as no longer relevant. His distinction between law and gospel was so sharp that he argued, for example, that the Ten Commandments did not apply to Christians, since they were addressed only to the Jews who had come out of Egypt.40 Post-Reformation theologians of both Lutheran and Calvinist affiliation stressed Luther's theoretical commitments, and worked out the implications by rejecting Luther's unsubmissive criticism. The theology had to be brought in line with the Bible, rather than critiquing the Bible to fit the theology. But the Enlightenment in Germany stressed Luther's practice, and rejected his theoretical ideas about the Bible as retaining the trappings of medieval thought. It was not until some time later that such people realized they were thus bringing the Bible into line with their own theology, which undercut the Reformation principle of deriving theology from exegesis. It was the former group that was faithful to Luther. Those who follow through on the implications of someone's theory are the heirs to that person's thought, not those who reject the theory and develop a new theory out of inconsistencies in the person's practice. JOHN CALVIN One of the greatest early developers of Luther's theoretical principle of sola Scriptura was John Calvin (d. 1564).41 To a large degree, Calvin agreed with Luther, both on the formal principle of sola Scriptura and on the material principle of sola fide. On the authority of Scripture, he says: Before I go any farther, it is worthwhile to say something about the authority of Scripture, not only to prepare our hearts to reverence it, but to banish all doubt. When that which is set forth is acknowledged as the Word of God, there is no one so deplorably insolent-unless devoid also both of common sense and of humanity itself-as to dare impugn the credibility of Him who speaks. Now daily oracles are not sent from heaven, for it pleased the Lord to hallow his truth  to everlasting remembrance in the Scriptures alone [see John 5:39].42 The authority of Scripture "derives in general from the fact that God in person speaks in it,"43 and "Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color."44 Therefore, "it is not right to subject it to proof and reasoning."45 For Calvin, as for Luther, Scripture was inherently clear, and the job of the preacher or teacher was simply to present the clear and simple teaching of Scripture in a clear and simple manner. Calvin's last address before his death included this assertion: "Though I might have introduced subtle senses, had I studied subtlety, I cast that temptation under my feet and always aimed at simplicity."46 For Calvin, the ideal exposition was clear, simple, and brief. Some of the harshest language in Calvin is reserved for the convoluted verbal machinations and hermeneutical sophistry of the "schoolmen" of his day. Calvin was more consistent than Luther in working through a theology based solely on Scripture. In that sense, we can say he "out-Luthered" Luther. First, Calvin engaged in much less allegorizing than Luther. Although Luther railed against allegorism, he continued to indulge in it from time to time. But Calvin, almost in the spirit of Theodore of Mopsuestia, was slow to find direct references to Christ (even typologically) in the OT, unless the NT gives specific warrant for it or the passage is clearly in the context of the expectation of the future Messiah. And Calvin avoids even the "illustrative" or "adornment" use of allegorical interpretation. Furthermore, Calvin's adherence to sola Scriptura made him less free with his criticism of Scripture. Rather than rejecting James, Calvin attempted to synthesize James and Paul. His closer examination of what James was actually saying removed much of the apparent conflict between the two. And instead of focusing on the rather narrow matter of justification by faith, Calvin took the much broader rubric of the glory of God as his interpretive viewpoint, and was able to hold together the array of biblical teaching much more easily. Calvin, like Luther, did recognize problems in Scripture, and if he had no solution, he simply let a problem stand, rather than give an artificial solution or question Scripture's authority. For example, in his commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, he notes that Matthew 27:9 quotes Zechariah 11:13 as coming from Jeremiah. Calvin says, "How the name of Jeremiah crept in I cannot confess to know nor do I make much of it."47 On the other hand, where he can harmonize a difficulty, he does not hesitate. On the identity of "Zechariah son of Barachiah" in Matthew 23:35, he indicates that "there is no doubt about the matter at all that Christ refers to the impious stoning of that Zechariah which is described in II Chron. 24.22," i.e., Zechariah son of Jehoiada, and he suggests that perhaps this latter Zechariah held the name "son of Barachiah" (literally, "son of God's blessing") as an "honorific."48 At no time does Calvin suggest that the original text is in error. Distinctive to Calvin was his development of the doctrine of the conviction of the Holy Spirit: The testimony of the Spirit is more excellent than all reason. For as God alone is a fit witness of himself in his Word, so also the Word will not find acceptance in men's hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit. The same Spirit, therefore, who has spoken through the mouths of the prophets must penetrate into our hearts to persuade us that they faithfully proclaimed what had been divinely commanded.49 Even if it wins reverence for itself by its own majesty, it seriously affects us only when it is sealed upon our hearts through the Spirit. Therefore, illumined by his power, we believe neither by our own nor by anyone else's judgment that Scripture is from God; but above human judgment we affirm with utter certainty... that it has flowed to us from the very mouth of God by the ministry of men.50 Not only the conviction of the truth of Scripture, but its very understanding, is a gift to the elect: "Whenever we are disturbed at the paucity of believers, let us... remember that none but those to whom it was given have any apprehension of the mysteries of God."51 Thus, Calvin, like Luther, believed that the Word must ultimately be experienced in order to be truly and redemptively understood. THE MODERN CHURCH: FROM SCHLEIERMACHER TO BULTMANN Since the nineteenth century, there has been a great deal of development in the methods of interpreting the Bible, largely due to the ascendancy of the historical-critical method (see appendix B). Furthermore, much has been written on hermeneutics, especially from the point of view of modern philosophy. Several works give a detailed account of biblical interpretation during the modern period,52 but the two figures who set the tone for biblical hermeneutics during this time were Friedrich Schleiermacher in the early nineteenth century and Rudolf Bultmann in the early twentieth. FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER Although many Christian scholars had undertaken to interpret the Bible, and a few had attempted to spell out the methods for biblical interpretation, no one had thought about the relation of biblical interpretation to the processes of interpreting texts in general before Friedrich Schleiermacher (d. 1834). In fact, few had thought about the problem of how meaning was conveyed in texts. Prior to Kant, readers generally assumed that there was an objective content to a text, which was directly perceived by the interpreter. But Kant's dialectic, which set human freedom and understanding over against nature as an objective reality, had introduced a gap between an interpreter's understanding of a text and its "objective" or scientifically knowable reality. One of the great contributions of Schleiermacher was to think through some of these matters. Schleiermacher argued, first, that although the Bible was unique in some respects, the fact that it was written to humans meant that it must partake of the character of linguistic communication in general. "No text is intended in such a way that its hearers could not possibly have understood it."53 Therefore, the problem of understanding the Bible was not different from the problem of understanding texts in general. Second, he recognized that presuppositions and background determine understanding: "The understanding of a given statement [Rede] is always based on something prior, of two sorts-a preliminary knowledge of human beings, and a preliminary knowledge of the subject matter."54 The preliminary knowledge of human beings involves especially some awareness of the speaker or author. Where an author is remote in time and culture, or where the reader is unfamiliar with the subject matter, some work is necessary, and in all cases the gap between author and reader must be bridged. Schleiermacher thus identified two sides to the process of understanding a text: an objective side, which focuses on the text itself (its words, grammar, etc.), which he called "grammatical interpretation," and a subjective side, which attempts to "step out of one's own frame of mind into that of the author."55 This subjective side he called "technical interpretation." Strictly speaking, grammatical interpretation is the objective side; technical, the subjective. Consequently, grammatical interpretation plays a negative role in hermeneutical construction, marking the boundaries; technical interpretation is positive.56 Grammatical interpretation proceeds according to two canons. The first is: "One should construe the meaning from the total pre-given value of language and the heritage common to the author and his reader."57 In other words, the characteristics of the language in which the author and his readers operated must determine the semantic value of the author's statements. The second canon is: "The meaning of each word of a passage must be determined by the context in which it occurs."58 Essentially, Schleiermacher laid the methodological groundwork for grammatical- historical exegesis as it is practiced today, and which is described in chapter 5. Although this kind of investigation had been done intuitively before, particularly by Calvin, Schleiermacher was the first to codify the method and to present it as a means of overcoming the distance between the author and the present-day interpreter. This grammatical interpretation is complemented by technical interpretation: Technical interpretation is chiefly concerned with the over-all coherence and with its relation to the universal laws for combining thoughts. At the very beginning, therefore, one must immediately grasp over-all coherence. The only way to do this is by quickly reading over the whole text.59 Thus, Schleiermacher recognized one of the hermeneutical circles, "that each part can be understood only out of the whole to which it belongs, and vice versa."60 Elsewhere he identified this technical interpretation as the attempt to develop an empathic, "subjective" appreciation for the author: "The goal of technical interpretation should be formulated as the complete understanding of style."61 By "style," Schleiermacher meant not just the way an author handles language, but also the way of thinking that is bound up with his manner of speaking. To discover an author's unique style, Schleiermacher commended a two-pronged approach, a "divinatory" and a "comparative" method, which support each other. The divinatory method leads the interpreter "to transform himself, so to speak, into the author... to gain an immediate comprehension of the author as an individual."62 The comparative method, on the other hand, proceeds by comparing an author with similar authors and texts. It "tries to find [an author's] distinctive traits by comparing him with the others of the same general type."63 The divinatory method tries to gain an intuitive grasp of the author's "style," or way of thinking and speaking as a whole, while the comparative method tries analytically to identify an author's style by setting his work in contrast to the style of other authors. It was Schleiermacher's hope that, by "combining the objective and subjective... the interpreter can put himself 'inside' the author," even to the point of "understanding an author better than he understands himself."64 The problem, of course, is that "these two sides of interpretation cannot always coincide, for that would presuppose both a complete knowledge of and completely correct use of the language."65 Therefore, the process of interpretation is an art of balancing the two conflicting processes. "Because of this double-character of understanding, interpretation is an art. Neither aspect can be completed by itself."66 "The 'art' lies in knowing when one side should give way to the other."67 Schleiermacher anticipated much that would happen in our own time. It is significant that his work on hermeneutics, which existed only in the form of unpublished notes until the 1950s, has now taken on great importance, and is frequently cited in literature on hermeneutics. But Schleiermacher raised some issues more successfully than he answered them. Particularly, the emphasis on the "technical" or subjective side of exegesis led him to look for an "inner consciousness" within the NT, which Schleiermacher identified as the mind of Jesus being reflected in his disciples.68 The actual verbal structure of the Gospels and the letters of Paul was then subjected to this overall impression, which provided for Schleiermacher and other theologians of the nineteenth century an excuse for deriving their theology from reason, not from the text of Scripture. Scripture, then, was read in the light of reason, rather than being treated as the source of theological truth. Schleiermacher has often been called "the father of modern theology." He was not the first, of course, to apply a rational critique to the Bible, but he was a key early figure in the struggle to integrate a deep personal faith with the modern way of thinking. He marked out the twofold task of biblical interpretation that occupies hermeneutical thought up to the present day. Biblical interpretation is now seen as, first, a historical-critical study that attempts to establish a text's probable meaning in its original historical context, and, second, a believing, theological study that tries to understand the text and integrate it into the overall worldview of the interpreter.69 Schleiermacher was also a proponent of the so-called theological liberalism of the nineteenth century, which attempted to derive from a synthesis of historical and sympathetic study an understanding of the inner moral life and ideals of Jesus. The task of the interpreter, according to Schleiermacher, was to establish a link with the author through the scientific study of the text and the exercise of human empathy. A more rigorous application of Kant's dialectic of nature and freedom, however, would not allow for this, for the author is actually unknowable. Thus, at the end of the nineteenth century, W. Dilthey shifted attention away from the author and to the interpreter. He spoke of the interpreter as engaged in a mode of re-experiencing (Nacherleben) which is to be understood as a re-creation (Nachbildung) of an expressed meaning rather than as a psychologistically conceived re-production (Abbildung). The creative understanding involved in Nacherleben is a function of the historian's imagination.70  This set the stage for the present view of hermeneutics as ultimately a matter of self-understanding. Whereas Schleiermacher and nineteenth- century theologians tried to synthesize critical-historical investigation and theological thought, twentieth-century scholars increasingly realized their essential incompatibility. And with this we come to the most influential biblical interpreter of the twentieth century, Rudolf Bultmann. RUDOLF BULTMANN Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976)71 not only was extremely rigorous and thorough in his critical analysis of the NT documents, setting the stage for NT historical study up until the present day, but also attempted to form a massive theological synthesis, a description of Christianity as a whole, which continues to influence theologians. Bultmann's influence must be at least partly due to his success in relating his historical work to his theological enterprise through "demythologization," which we will discuss later. But the starting point for Bultmann's work is his acceptance of Kant's division of reality into two separate worlds. There is a phenomenal world that can be studied scientifically, and a noumenal world of meaning, but, contra Schleiermacher and the nineteenth-century theologians, these two realms cannot be directly synthesized. In 1896, Martin Kahler wrote The So-called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ.72 He pointed out that the Jesus which liberalism had constructed on the basis of Schleiermacher's program of attempting to recover the mind of Jesus on the basis of a modern reading of the Gospels was really a product of the modern spirit. The gospel texts themselves presented Jesus rather as a unique, fully sovereign Lord. Kahler argued that historical-critical methods are simply inappropriate for discovering the actual person of Christ who lives and reigns today just as he did then. The "Jesus" reconstructed by modern historical-critical methods is not the actual, historic Christ. In developing his argument, Kahler drew a distinction between a critical, scientifically demonstrable history, which he called Historie, and true, real, transcendent history, which he called Geschichte. Although Bultmann could not follow the orthodox Kahler in simply rejecting the historical-critical venture, he did pick up on this distinction. On the one hand, there is a "historical Jesus," about which we can know very little, but even if we knew more, it would not ultimately be helpful: All historical phenomena which are subject to this kind of historical investigation are only relative entities, entities which exist only within an immense inter-related complex. Nothing which stands within this inter-relationship can claim absolute value. Even the historical Jesus is a phenomenon among other phenomena, not an absolute entity.73 That is, the Jesus who is the object of historical-critical research is only a Jesus "after the flesh," and is irrelevant to faith. On the other hand is the Jesus Christ who speaks to us in the Bible, calling us to repentance and faith, which are ways of addressing our self- understanding and our awareness of who we are as historic beings (beings in context). So there is a dichotomy between factual knowledge and historic self-understanding: In all such factual knowledge or knowledge of principles the world is presumed to have the character of something objective, passive, accessible to simple observation. That is, the world is conceived in conformity with the Greek understanding of being.... In such a conception of the world as an objective entity, man himself is regarded as an object (as a fragment of the cosmos); his self- understanding is achieved along with the understanding of the world (and vice versa).... [But] the existence of man does not have the character of an objective entity but is historic existence; where it is recognized that man in his history can become a new person and consequently can also newly understand himself; where, therefore, it is recognized that the being of man is a potentiality to be. That potentiality to be is always at risk; its possibilities are grasped each time by man in resolve, in decision. An understanding of these possibilities of man's existence here and now would obviously be a new understanding each time, since a historical situation with its character of possibility is not understood if it is conceived as a "case" illustrating a general law. The historical situation cannot possibly be "seen" in the Greek sense as an objective fact; it can only be heard as a summons.74  Because such a sharp division was made between phenomenal, scientific, historical study and faith, Bultmann was free to engage in historical criticism that was as radical as he deemed necessary. His starting point was the results of the newly successful "history-of-religions" school in Germany, of which three are of special importance: 1. As other ancient religions began to be studied, scholars noticed certain parallels and similarities to Christianity in the religions of Hellenism and the Near East. Phenomena such as demon possession and "divine men" in the Greco-Roman world were said to be the context for the NT's teaching on demon possession and the Man who was also God. Christianity was not so unique after all, on this approach. From this, Bultmann developed a way of discerning the genuinely historical material from its later accretions. If something in the Gospels which Jesus says or does is not like what first-century Jews said or did, and not like what later Christians said or did, and if that saying or deed is probable within the strictures of a scientific worldview, then it may be genuinely authentic. This was called "the criterion of dissimilarity." 2. Research in the Gospels by J. Weiss, W. Wrede, and A. Schweitzer suggested that the Jesus which genuine historical research uncovers is not a nineteenth-century liberal moralist, but a charismatic rabbi of first-century Hellenistic Judaism who foresaw the imminent end of the world and himself as its judge. 3. Finally, the history-of-religions school noted that in primitive societies, the mythology and legends of that society are a dynamic store of lore, which grows and adapts itself to ever-changing situations. The oral "literature" of such groups is thus constantly relevant. From this, Bultmann developed his most significant contribution to the historical-critical venture. He began to look at the Gospels not for historical material about Jesus (the criterion of dissimilarity effectively eliminated most of it), but for indications of how the early church used the traditions about Jesus. To do this meant identifying within the Gospels the pieces of the oral tradition that were elaborated and developed, and asking how such elaboration met the needs of the early Christian communities. Although certain other individuals also developed this approach independently at about the same time, Bultmann was the most successful and thorough, and he became the chief proponent and exponent of this "form-critical" approach to historical study of the Gospels. No longer did historical research look for the historical Jesus, about whom we have little data; it began looking at the way the early church used the stories about Jesus. Bultmann was not concerned only about historical criticism, however; he regarded himself as a Christian, and wanted to be able to talk about faith in God. He did this by reference to the existentialism being put forward by M. Heidegger.75 This existentialism found the meaningfulness of life in continuous acts of decision. Man's existence is not so much what man is, as what man can be. It is not what man has, but what man does. As R. C. Roberts puts it, "The authentically and specifically human kind of reality... has its true being only in 'decisions,' which he also calls 'acts.' A human being has his true reality so exhaustively in his acts that Bultmann can say 'only in act are we ourselves.' "76 Bultmann regarded it as the genius of Christianity to recognize that, for man to have a meaningful life, he cannot look for that life in the world or in security within what can be physically experienced, but must look for it in the will, in his self-realizing decisions: Whereas to ancient man the world had been home-in the Old Testament as God's creation, to classic Greece as the cosmos pervaded by the deity-the utter difference of human existence from all worldly existence was recognized for the first time in Gnosticism and Christianity, and thus the world became foreign soil to the human self.77 In the modern understanding of history reality is understood in another way than in that of objectifying sight, namely as the reality of historically existing man. The being of man is fundamentally different from the being of nature which can be perceived in objectifying sight. Today we are accustomed to designate the specifically human kind of being as existence.78 Bultmann found the NT's emphasis on the future especially compatible with existentialism's insistence on the potential, the possibilities of the future. For him, NT eschatology becomes no longer the end of the physical world, but the end of the existential world-that is, the end of my world. Therefore, the "end" of the visible, quantifiable world is a deliverance from sin:  The world indeed is simply the sphere which men have made into a power over themselves by whatever they have done in the past. To live on the basis of the world, that is, of the past, is what is called sin. To live on the basis of the future is called living in dependence on God.79 Therein is the basis for the Christian hope. By deciding to grasp the future firmly as possibility, rather than finding security in the past, man finds true freedom. Life determined by the world is bondage to the flesh; true freedom comes "when he can free himself from the world and soar up to the eternal as his home."80 Thus, the Christian cannot delight in what has happened or what he has accomplished in the past. Not even his knowledge of "existential truth" is a "possession." One cannot "carry its truth with him as a possession. Such a mistaken opinion would turn Christian truth precisely into a general truth.... The truth has to be laid hold of ever anew."81 Bultmann therefore believed that a worldview is counter to existence, since it seeks to grasp everything under controllable categories. "It is the effort to find security in generalizations, whereas insecurity is what characterizes the real nature of human existence."82 Here is perhaps the heart of existentialism. All effort to seek the meaning of one's life in this world, whether by money, or relationships, or accomplishments, or tradition, or anything else that one can have, is inauthentic existence, doomed to death. Only when one looks to one's future possibility, to what one can be, and continually decides to act on the basis of that future possibility, does one live authentically. This, says Bultmann, is love. Love seeks nothing for itself, but always denies oneself, not seeking one's own security, but in faith choosing insecurity, the insecurity of faith in what is not phenomenally experienced. Of course, there are many passages in the NT which do not conform to Bultmann's ideas of true Christian existence. In particular, the NT writers put a decisive emphasis on the past historical event of Christ's physical resurrection as the keystone in their preaching. While Bultmann acknowledges a "spiritual" resurrection as the escape from worldly thinking, he regards a worldly resurrection as going counter to the gospel. Furthermore, the biblical writers held to a view of the physical world which, according to Bultmann, modern man can no longer hold. They retained a primitive cosmology and expressed much of their existential truth in mythological terms. "Sometimes we are told that human life is determined by cosmic forces, at others we are challenged to a decision."83 Thus, according to Bultmann, the form of the NT teaching (its Christology) is bound up with the worldview of its authors, which is primitive and mythological. Bultmann describes the NT cosmology in this way: The cosmology of the NT is essentially mythical in character. The world is viewed as a three-storied structure, with the earth in the centre, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath. Heaven is the abode of God and of celestial beings-the angels. The underworld is hell, the place of torment. Even the earth... is the scene of the super-natural activity of God and his angels on the one hand, and of Satan and his daemons on the other. These supernatural forces intervene in the course of nature and in all that men think and will and do. Miracles are by no means rare. Man is not in control of his own life. Evil spirits may take possession of him. Satan may inspire him with evil thoughts. Alternatively, God may inspire his thought, and guide his purposes. He may grant him heavenly visions. He may allow him to hear his word of succour or demand. He may give him the supernatural power of his Spirit. History... is set in motion and controlled by these supernatural powers. This aeon is held in bondage by Satan, sin, and death... and hastens toward the end. That end will come very soon, and will take the form of a cosmic catastrophe. The judge will come from heaven, the dead will rise, the last judgement will take place, and men will enter into eternal salvation or damnation.84 Bultmann insists that this myth is entirely incompatible with modern man, and that there can be no picking and choosing: "The mythical view of the world must be accepted or rejected in its entirety," and to accept the mythical view is to sacrifice one's intellect.85 Now "meaning," as Dilthey pointed out, is a function of the interpreter, and thus is determined by the interpreter's understanding of life: "Every interpretation incorporates a particular prior understanding, namely, that which arises out of the context of living experience to which the subject belongs."86 So what is needed, according to Bultmann, is an interpretation of the Bible that expresses its (existential) truth in terms that modern man can accept. Thus, for Bultmann, "hermeneutics" is not just explaining the original meaning of a passage and showing how it applies to life generally, but is interpreting the event of Jesus in the existential framework of the contemporary believer. Bultmann's primary means of accomplishing this was his program of demythologization. This meant not simply removing the mythology of the NT, but restating the existential truth contained within the myth in a modern way. Now, in the twenty-first century, we can recognize that even modern man operates with certain myths-cosmologies and philosophies that are not yet nor ever will be "at the bottom of things," even with respect to physical science. It is unclear whether Bultmann ever made it to that realization. But he certainly recognized that our understanding right now, as it always has been, is determined by our "context of living experience," and the gospel must be expressed in terms of that context to be understandable.87 Hence, the effort to replace the "primitive cosmology" of the Bible is, in Bultmann's thought, entirely compatible with, and even demanded by, the gospel: Demythologizing is the radical application of the doctrine of justification by faith to the sphere of knowledge and thought. Like the doctrine of justification, de-mythologizing destroys every longing for security. There is no difference between security based on good works and security built on objectifying knowledge. The man who desires to believe in God must know that he has nothing at his disposal on which to build his faith, that he is, so to speak, in a vacuum.88 The restatement of mythology is a requirement of faith itself. For faith needs to be emancipated from its association with every world view expressed in objective terms, whether it be a mythical or a scientific one.... It has tried to project God and his acts into the sphere of objective reality.89 Perhaps we can see why, in Bultmann's eyes, the idea of a literal, physical resurrection is not only ridiculous from a scientific point of view, but undesirable from an existential point of view. A physical resurrection would be a datum of security in the world, and would take away man's freedom. Likewise, "the incarnation should not be conceived of as a miracle that happened about 1950 years ago, but as an eschatological happening which, beginning with Jesus, is always present in the words of men proclaiming it to be a human experience."90 In ethics, the idea of God's law is anathema to Bultmann, who believes he is following Paul here. To adhere to an ethical standard is inauthentic existence: "He cannot in a moment of decision fall back upon principles, upon a general ethical theory which can relieve him of responsibility for the decision; rather, every moment of decision is essentially new."91 Even God himself must not be thought of as an object for discussion, and hence language about God is not authentic faith. "If 'speaking of God' is understood as 'speaking about God', then such speaking has no meaning whatever, for its subject, God, is lost in the very moment it takes place."92 In other words, when we try to speak about God, we "objectify" him, which makes him no longer God. Many writers from many sides have responded to Bultmann.93 Perhaps the most important critique is that, although Bultmann decries "worldview" as something that limits possibilities and is incompatible with faith, it is precisely his post-Kantian worldview that has prohibited him from accepting what the NT actually says. Bultmann, along with his contemporaries, derided the early church's allegorical interpretation of Jesus' teaching, but Bultmann's program of demythologizing turns out to be a "remythologizing" that has imposed just as alien a framework for understanding as that of Origen or Augustine-in fact, more so, because Origen and Augustine believed in the literal, historical truth of the gospel stories. It is also curious that Bultmann, for all his consistency in applying a strict historical method, is still left with historical imponderables. By means of radical skepticism and form criticism (including the criterion of dissimilarity), he denies historicity to any statement in the Gospels which indicates that Jesus claimed to be the Christ. But then he is left with an enigma: how the disciples ever came to think that he was the Christ, so as to invent the stories. He even acknowledges this as "the great enigma of New Testa-ment theology."94  Further, although the NT writers depicted their hope and their doctrine in the language of a prescientific worldview, it is not at all clear that the substance of their worldview or thinking was so limited that we cannot accept it today. For example, the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 appears to be expressed in terms of a new and different world order; no mention is made of going up or down. And even in 1 Thessalonians 4, where resurrected believers "meet the Lord in the air" (v. 17), how is this made impossible by thinking of heaven as a spiritual reality rather than a place in outer space? Paul did not think of heaven as physically located somewhere above the sky, or at any physical location, for he says in Ephesians 2:6 that believers are now seated with Christ in heavenly places. The real reason why Bultmann considers the biblical worldview to be unacceptable to modern man is his presupposition that the spiritual and physical worlds have nothing to do with each other. This presupposition is not demanded by the successes of modern science, but by the necessity of the Kantian dialectic, which itself devolved from a commitment to human autonomy. It all comes back to man's decision to regard his own thought as his authority in life, rather than what God says. Because he committed himself to a presuppositional framework of understanding apart from the Bible, and then disallowed any incompatibility with the Bible to reorient his framework, he was unable to proceed toward true understanding of the text. Bultmann demonstrates by way of counterexample the need for the Christian interpreter of the Bible to allow his or her presuppositional framework of understanding to be molded and corrected by the Bible itself. THE LITERARY TURN: FROM LITERARY CRITICISM TO POSTMODERNISM95 In the latter half of the twentieth century, the focus in philosophy generally shifted from history to language. Human beings are now thought of not so much as creatures of the past as creatures of language. As a result, the interest of hermeneutics has shifted away from the quest for the processes that led to a text, and toward questioning how a text as a piece of language determines who we are and how we think. Further, in biblical studies, there has been increasing frustration with the fruitlessness of the old historicist approach.  This concern was well expressed in 1974 by Hans Frei, who published a book entitled The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.96 He called into question the helpfulness of much "modernist" study of the Bible, pointing out that the "scientific" methods that were developed for biblical criticism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were actually obscuring the ability of the text to communicate. In particular, he observed that most of the Bible is storytelling, and that the stories were being lost in the analysis. He therefore issued a call to recover an appreciation for the coherence of story in the Bible. He did not question the legitimacy of critical scholarship in evaluating the historicity of biblical materials, but he argued that such study is religiously irrelevant. His concern, along with others, sparked a renewed interest in the literary character of the Bible, and an appreciation for its art and its capacity to address the human condition. LITERARY APPROACH The new approach took up again the tools of literary criticism and applied them to biblical literary genres, particularly narratives. Character development, plot lines, tension building, genre markers, use of metaphor, rhetorical structure, rhythm and balance, thematic coherence, and other such issues that literature students raise with Shakespeare started to be applied to the Bible. Of course, the Bible has been appreciated as literature for centuries, and the church has not always been oblivious to its aesthetic qualities. And earlier in the twentieth century a few individuals, such as James Muilenberg,97 were already exploring the literary features of biblical narrative. But in recent years there has been a great resurgence of interest in the literary study of the Bible, and much light has been shed on the message of Scripture. The several articles compiled by Tremper Longman and Leland Ryken98 give some indication of the extent to which consciousness has been raised, both in and out of academia, of the affective dimensions of the Bible. The genre and the artistic dimensions of a piece of literature are increasingly recognized, not just as ornamentation, but as an important aspect of the message a text conveys. Literature helps us understand ourselves in ways that most newspaper reporting and textbooks do not, and God gave us literature, not a textbook.  This area of study is a much more fruitful avenue for evangelicals than some of the older critical methods, because texts are treated as having integrity, and are not divided up into hypothetical sources. Rather than psychoanalyzing the author, or looking for the needs of the formative communities, or isolating successive levels of editing, literary criticism takes a text as it exists, and asks how it affects people. This is exactly what hosts of Christian preachers have been doing for centuries, because the stories and poems and wise sayings and histories of the Bible communicate to humans as humans. It is often the beauty of Scripture that comforts us as much as the propositions it contains, and it is often the affective rhetorical power of the commands of Scripture that moves us more than the bare knowledge of the rightness of those commands. Not just among evangelical scholars, but in scholarship generally, literary approaches have become de rigueur in scholarship today, for at least two reasons. First, they are both far more theologically fruitful and much more useful to the pastor who has to find something to say on Sunday mornings that might be of help to his audience. Second, they allow scholars to develop what they view as some relevance of their study to the world in which they live. Providentially, this movement has recovered a great deal of the inherent meaning of parts of the Bible, as well as an increased appreciation for its beauty. But there is a fly in the ointment, or maybe even a termite in the woodwork. In order to have this luxury of both accepting the results of modern historical criticism and also finding wonderful theology in the narrative of the text, the reader is compelled to divorce scientific history from literary truth, and bring to full expression the edict of Lessing that began the separation two centuries earlier. And indeed, even much modern historical, as well as literary scholarship has begun to question the nature of the historical task. History is sometimes now thought of as being not a quest for an account that accurately represents actual space-time events of the past, but rather a literary task that reframes material from and about the past in a way that affects readers and stirs them to desired actions and attitudes. To be sure, not many practicing historians feel this way yet, but this attitude is now dominant among philosophers of history, including those who think about the history contained in Scripture. Consequently, it is dominant among many of the biblical scholars who are now promoting literary approaches as the way to find something of value in the Bible. As a result, it appears that the growth of interest in the literary study of the Bible is for some a result of the loss of confidence in any historical work, not the recovery of confidence in the historical value of the Bible.99 In the 1970s, a development called structuralism tried to hold onto both an extreme historical skepticism and the insights of linguistic study. Structuralism started with the insight of F. de Saussure that each element of language functions as part of a system of language that defines it. These elements are all ultimately reducible to binaries or polar opposites in some way or another. The anthropologist C. Levi-Strauss applied this linguistic principle to the behavior and thinking of people generally. Everything we do and think has, within a particular culture, a symbolic value, which is set over against its opposite in either a dominant or subdominant relationship. Although much of this binary structuring was seen to be culturally determined, structuralists thought that there were certain ultimate experiential realities that were shared by all human beings, and they attempted to find these ultimate "deep structures" in, or rather under, texts. It was a short-lived enterprise that soon gave way to poststructuralism, because no one could actually find any ultimate experiential realities that were not culturally conditioned. And even if one did find them, as soon as one started talking about them, they were immediately cast into a real language and culture of today, with its own linguistic and cultural polarities. POSTMODERNISM AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM The late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries are sometimes called "postmodern" in their outlook. That's an odd word that sounds as if it ought to mean "future," but the notion is that modernism, which thought it could explain everything and systematize everything by analyzing everything, is now defunct. Further, there is a democratization and splintering of knowledge, so that truth is no longer considered a uniform standard to which logic will inexorably lead everyone eventually, and which is the provenance of specialists. Rather, it is regarded as an interactive organism that is variable and dynamic. Knowledge is a shared social entity, and that social context of knowledge is now extremely diverse, fragmented, and heavily mediated. Reality itself is only weakly experienced directly; it is mostly mediated and therefore preinterpreted. We experience a war via TV and satellite links. And the distinction between reality and entertainment is increasingly blurred. This was true in late modernism as well, but there was still a knowledge establishment called "the media," which interpreted and doled out predigested bits of "reality" as it saw appropriate. Now, however, there is no longer a monolithic media to control exposure to knowledge. The World Wide Web and the booming of alternative television channels and satellite broadcasts has made possible a myriad of interpretive voices. Anyone can publish a Web page that is instantly available to a billion people. And anyone with a computer and desktop-publishing software can publish a book. This postmodern situation has been well illustrated by D. Clines in an essay entitled "The Pyramid and the Net,"100 in which he compares modernism's notion of knowledge to a pyramid, and that of postmodernism to a net, especially the Internet. In modernism, knowledge, like a pyramid, started with an ineluctable foundation, upon which layer after layer would be constructed by the great architect Reason, until all that was knowable comprised a huge, unassailable monolith overseen by a priesthood of scientists, who would make sure that everyone fit the building blocks together in the same way and gave allegiance to the master plan. But now, largely because of the recognition of the fluidity of the words that lie behind all conceptualizing, there is no longer any foundation upon which everyone can agree and which can be regarded as a given. So knowledge is not built up layer upon layer, but is interconnected, node to node, and there is no priesthood to control what node gets connected to what other node. No group controls the perceptions of reality anymore, not even the media, because of the World Wide Web. Biblical study, too, is no longer working with a single scholarly paradigm for a standard way of reading Scripture. Instead of looking for a rational construction, whether of the post-Reformation scholastic variety or of post-Enlightenment criticism, the new way of understanding the Bible looks for interconnections and "surfs" the Bible. Even more significant for scholarly study in the postmodern world is the increased focus on language. Skepticism about history that led to the linguistic turn now has its counterpart in skepticism about language, and, as we have already seen, structuralism discovered that on its own principles even the most basic of structures were linguistically relativized. The result was a transformation of structuralism into a postmodern form, which embraced the inability to "get to the bottom" as a good thing. The new approach to language, then, is not to try to isolate the deep structures that touch our very essence, but to disrupt the cultural binaries that keep us thinking in old ways. This enterprise of disruption is called poststructuralism or deconstruction, and its leading proponent is the atheistic French writer J. Derrida.101 Derrida, though not primarily concerned with the Bible, has set the questions that now dominate academic literary study, at least in the United States. Derrida focuses on the fact that every text has within it certain things that do not quite "fit." These tensions within a text, or aporia, are not simply oddities to be glossed over, but keys to unlocking meanings (plural) in the text that undermine dominant viewpoints. Not only is history entirely relativized, but reading of all sorts is entirely relativized. Texts are no longer considered a means by which one person communicates some truth or reality to another; rather, they are considered simply means of self- actualization by readers. ("Texts" are not just printed pages, but all linguistic and symbolic artifacts that encompass our existence as human beings.) Derrida is rather hard to understand, and is given to a lot of wordplay, which requires an uncommon command of the subtleties of French discourse.102 Nevertheless, the main lines of his thought are now fairly well known, and we will attempt to summarize them here. First, as we noted above, deconstruction begins with some of the notions of structuralism. It accepts the structuralist notion that all reality is perceptual, and it is governed by the fact that each piece of language divides up the world, ultimately into binary oppositions, and these binary oppositions are always hierarchical, which means that one-half of the binary will be regarded as inferior. In Western society, for example, sanity is regarded as dominant, and insanity is inferior; heterosexuality is dominant, and homosexuality is inferior; rationality is dominant, and intuition is inferior. These binaries need to be broken down. Second, unlike structuralism, deconstruction does not aim for some kind of at-bottom understanding of our language as revealed in a text. It is consistently antimetaphysical, rejecting any system, and hence it opposes any determinate meaning, even in the deep structure. Meaning is always "in the making," further determining the previous text, and itself being determined by the subsequent text.  The basic notion of deconstruction, however, is not destruction, but the loosening up of meaning so that its dynamic character is revealed. Though not all would agree with this summary, J. Culler has described the task of deconstruction as "to show how [a discourse] undermines the philosophy it asserts, or the hierarchical opposition on which it relies."103 In other words, the interest is not in ascertaining any particular meaning, but in how a text subverts its own meaning, undercutting the oppressive binaries that the text seems on the surface to support. The goal of this approach is thus not to ascertain any particular meaning (which would simply set up a new system of oppressive binaries), even for a particular reader, but to overthrow even the illusion of any absolute, determinate meaning, thus keeping meaning in process. Interpretation is the process of uncovering the hesitancy of a text as much as possible. It looks for the hidden voices by paying close attention to details, particularly in the peripheral issues of a text. This interest in the hidden or suppressed voices in a text that run counter to the text's own worldview makes deconstruction hermeneutics attractive to a plethora of specialized hermeneutical applications. By drawing attention away from any inherent meaning of a text and focusing instead on the undermining of orthodoxies, the philosophical path is laid for such things as a Marxist hermeneutic, a feminist hermeneutic, a gay hermeneutic, and even an atheistic hermeneutic. According to this approach, the most valid hermeneutical endeavors are those which most radically challenge the current perceptions, the prevailing orthodoxies, and the truths we take for granted, and hence it is the radical antimetaphysical philosophies that gravitate toward this approach.104 In a certain way, there appears to be some genuine insight in this approach. Meaning seems to remain personal (it is not turned into some quantifiable object for scientific analysis). The deconstructionists also want to transcend the old subject-object dialectic that led either to rationalism, which stressed the objective, or to romanticism, which focused on the subjective. Deconstructionists tell us that the way out of the dilemma is to focus on language, which transcends and encompasses both subject and object. In our estimation, however, this approach is not truly interpersonal; people become not individuals in relationship, but rather linguistic entities, separate unto themselves, yet without particularity, creating their own "world" as they encounter speech and texts. Further, the absolutizing of language severs the connection between texts and life.105 Even the objective of transcending subject and object is not reached, because this approach becomes in practice an exaltation of subjectivity. Finally, the whole idea of the constant undermining of meaning also runs completely counter to the acceptance of God speaking in a Word,106 which of course holds hands with a bias against metaphysical truth. But the rejection of the idea of metaphysical truth cuts straight across biblical assumptions, which ground truth not in man, but in an absolute God. Deconstructionism is antithetical to the idea of an absolute knower.107 We may conclude by pointing out that the dissolution of meaning in its traditional sense is now just about complete. It is worth noting, though, that the seeds of this dissolution lay within modernism itself. What is often called postmodernism, that is, the attitude that rejects all foundations, all knowledge of systemic truth, and all recognition of inherent knowing,108 is simply the result of the consistent application of the principles of modernism. The hubristic modernist attitude that thought it could totally control and define meaning in strictly scientific and humanly autonomous terms has taken away the very possibility that meaning is objectively knowable. The effect of this on biblical interpretation is both good and bad. It is wonderful to see the dissolution of the all-powerful bastions of "critical scholarship," which from its Enlightenment position pontificated on what was possible and where God could not tread. It puts the Bible back in the hands of ordinary people, and tells them to read it for what it says, not for what its historical sources might have said. On the other hand, postmodernism has so undermined the very notion of truth and communication that God is sometimes gagged even more effectively than he was under modernism.109 SUMMARY Our historical survey has shown how the question of the relationship between the historical, human meaning of the Bible and the transhistorical, divine meaning has run throughout the history of the church. It is a misfortune that so often the divine and human meanings have been seen to be in tension or opposition. However, we also doubt whether the modern evangelical tendency to regard them as identical is the best solution. It is our contention that, rather than being either in tension or identical, the human meaning (which is accessible) is the key to God's meaning, and a genuinely submissive approach to the Bible as God's word and a sincere inquiry into its historical meaning are mutually enhancing. Rather than allegorize like Origen, or demythologize like Bultmann, or deconstruct like Derrida, if we truly understand the historical meaning, this will direct us to the relevant message for today. So the next two chapters will examine how to ascertain what the original human meaning was (through grammatical- historical exegesis), and how we can see the greater relevance of God's meaning in the larger context of the whole Bible and the whole of life.  5 THE GRAMMATICAL- HISTORICAL METHOD: KNOWING WHAT IT MEANT When we read an ordinary text, we unconsciously use a variety of methods to discern meaning, and with works of our own age and culture this ordinarily presents no problems at all. These unconscious methods are a floating repertoire of facilitating devices that are applied unreflectively in the process of perceiving meaning. We simply supply the meaning that makes sense in the social and textual context. Ordinarily, only if we "get stuck" do we then proceed through a more methodical application of techniques. If we get badly stuck, we are likely to cast further and further afield of our usual stock of techniques until we hit upon something that enables the text to make sense to us. With a text as remote from us culturally as the Bible, parts of it are bound to fall into this category of demanding some techniques that are on the fringes of our interpretive repertoire, and even when our ordinary methods seem to work, they may appear to work imperfectly. The problem is that when we start going to the fringes of our usual stock of methods, and when a text is uniquely tied to its original culture, our interpretations become less secure. So it is appropriate to specify the methods that are likely to yield results in line with the biblical writers' intent. We are of course assuming that before we can ask, "What is God teaching me now through this passage?" we must first ask, "What did God teach the original hearers through this text?" If God speaks to us in Scripture, he certainly spoke as well to the original readers in a way that they could understand. Grammatical-historical exegesis attempts to uncover the meaning that a text would have had to its original human author and readers. This involves a consideration of the cultural, social, geographical, linguistic, and historical background to the original situation, the usual significance of the words, phrases, and idioms used, any special circumstances or problems faced by the author or his original hearers, how the passage fits in with what the author says elsewhere, what type or genre of speech/writing this is, the purpose of the book as a whole, how the passage functions literarily in the larger text, and where the original hearers stand in redemptive history. We have reduced this handful to four basic classes of problems to be faced in exegesis: 1. the problems of semantics, 2. the problems of cultural distance, 3. the problems of context, and 4. the problems of genre.1 MEANING AND UNDERSTANDING: SEMANTICS The problem of semantics, or the meaning of words, sentences, etc., is of particular concern to translators and other professionals who use the biblical languages. Even for those without knowledge of these languages, however, some knowledge of how language works, and the meaning of words and sentences, is important. In chapters 1 and 2, we argued vigorously that God is the ultimate author of Scripture, and pointed out some of the implications of that fact. But here we are focusing on the fact that human beings wrote the Scriptures, and did so in ordinary human language, using language in ordinary ways. Their subject matter was indeed extraordinary, but their tool of telling, if it was going to tell truly, had to function in ordinary ways so that ordinary people would be able to understand it. Of course, the study of how language works (linguistics) is a science in itself, with many philosophical and technical problems and controversies. This is not the place to delve into this subject very far, but in this section we are going to focus on six issues that pertain to language use and are especially important in biblical interpretation. They are: (1) the priority of synchrony over diachrony, (2) the meaning of words as opposed to the meaning of sentences, (3) the distinction between sense and reference, (4) the fixity and flexibility of language (its precision and its ambiguity), (5) the difference between literal and nonliteral (above all, metaphor), and (6) the problem of transcendent thought and concrete language. SYNCHRONY VERSUS DIACHRONY The father of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, made a distinction between the diachronic development of a language and the synchronic use of a language.2 Modern linguistics has fairly universally accepted the dictum that any speaker or author's meaning is governed strictly by the state of the language at the time of speaking or writing (synchrony). The process by which the language came into that state (diachrony) may be interesting, and may inform the synchronic analysis, but users of a language are usually not conscious of where or how words or phrases took on the meaning they presently have. Hence, with respect to lexical analysis (the meaning of the words used) and grammatical analysis (the syntax used), the only thing that matters is the contemporary usage, or synchrony. Saussure illustrates this by reference to a chess game.3 After several moves, a particular position is reached. Now in considering the best or even an appropriate move, it does not matter how the board acquired its present state; all that matters is the position and interrelationships of the pieces as they now stand. Language works the same way. When evaluating the meaning of an utterance, only the state of the language at the time of utterance provides the linguistic framework for the meaning of that utterance. But the emphasis on synchrony can be pressed too far. People do not often use language to talk about language itself, but they do speak about words spoken in the past. Biblical authors in particular are extremely concerned with God's past utterances as well as his past deeds, sometimes citing directly, and more often alluding directly or indirectly, to previous Scripture. And even when not clearly alluding to previous Scripture, virtually the entire NT appears to be self-conscious of being the fulfillment of God's previous words in the OT. So in terms of content, diachrony is inescapable, because it informs the synchrony. Such diachrony occasionally affects the use of words, as well as the content or meaning of sentences. For example, the word translated in the NT as "covenant" or "testament," which in contemporary Hellenistic Greek meant "will" (as in "last will and testament"), was used in the Greek OT to translate the word berith, which in En-glish we translate with "covenant." Consequently, in the NT the word "covenant" can only be understood by reference to the history of its use in the Greek OT. (Note how the author of Hebrews plays on the two meanings of the Greek word ["will" and "covenant"] in Hebrews 9:15-22.) Where the biblical authors are clearly conscious of history of a term, diachronic analysis must be used in addition to synchronic study. In other words, when a biblical writer picks up on a certain word which earlier Scripture has given a specialized meaning, we must go back to the earlier uses of the word to see what content that word had for the later writer.4 A special application of diachrony is etymology, the study of the origins and derivations of words. Etymology is sometimes useful in helping to establish the meaning of rare words.5 But etymological analysis is extremely dangerous when used to read more meaning into words that are already known. Users of a language are hardly ever conscious of the etymological origin of words when they use them, and hence etymology has very little role in establishing meaning.6 Few English speakers, when they use the word nice, are conscious of the derivation of the word from the Latin nescius, which means "ignorant." WORD AND SENTENCE When we speak of the meaning of a word, this is a different matter than the meaning of a sentence. A sentence actually says something. It is, to be sure, understood according to its context, but it nevertheless does say something. A word, unless it constitutes a sentence by itself, does not say anything; it is only a building block used to construct a sentence that says something. Words by themselves simply imply potential fields of concepts, which are made specific by the sentences in which they occur.7 This may be obvious, but it is worth stating, because a great deal of biblical interpretation tries to find what is effectively sentence-meaning in the use of particular words, and these words are then thought to suggest theological truth by themselves. Much of the scholarly world was led astray in this direction during the first part of the twentieth century. Scholars found theological meaning in the fact that, for example, the Hebrew word dabar could mean either "thing," "event," or "word," which was taken as an indication that the OT writers viewed words and deeds as the same thing. This has now been given an undignified burial,8 but it still crops up in popular works, where excessive information is sometimes found in a single