We are about to study the history of biblical interpretation. A devout reader may find this strange and may ask why it should be considered important. Why devote so much time to studying how the Bible has been understood? If the Bible is the word of God, then surely its message is the same in every age. There should be no need to speak about its “interpretation.” If the Bible is the word of God, surely we should be able simply to pick it up and understand it. All this talk about interpretation—is it not merely complicating what is at heart a simple matter of faith?
Faced with the bewildering variety of biblical interpretations, one can understand this objection. However, it is fundamentally mistaken. For better or for worse, there is no such thing as a simple reading of the Bible. The Bible is always interpreted, even when it is read by an unsophisticated reader who would never think of being an interpreter. If we do pick up the Bible and understand it immediately, without any conscious reflection on its meaning, it is not because we are failing to interpret. It is because the act of interpretation is spontaneous: it happens so quickly that we fail to realize it has occurred. There is no reading of the Bible without interpretation, even if that interpretation is performed in an entirely unself-conscious manner.
While this idea may be surprising to many who think of themselves as “simple believers,” it should not be a cause for alarm. Even if one believes that the Bible is God’s word, it remains true that this divine word has been revealed in human words. The Second Vatican Council embraced this idea in its statement on divine revelation (Dei Verbum) where it insisted that “God speaks to men and women in sacred Scripture in human fashion.”
Indeed the Council went further, writing that there is a certain parallel between the humanity of Sacred Scripture and the doctrine of the incarnation. Just as the eternal Word of God took upon himself the weakness of human nature, so in Scripture the words of God are expressed in human language. While the Bible may be God’s word, it is also an artifact, a product of human culture.
Not only is the Bible a human artifact, as a written work it is also a collection of signs. For this reason it requires interpretation. A sign by definition is something that refers beyond itself. It has a double existence. First of all, it is a physical object (in this case, marks on a page) that can be seen, touched, tasted, heard, or smelled. But as a sign it points beyond the impression it makes on our senses: it acts as a bearer of meaning. When someone speaks to us, a sound is uttered that can be analyzed as a pattern of wave-like disturbances in the air. But that is not normally what we think of when we are addressed. What we think of are those realities to which the speaker’s words refer. Similarly, when we look at a painting, it is not normally to admire the texture of the canvas on which it is painted. It is to appreciate the impression the painting is meant to convey. The sound of the speech and the paint on the canvas are physical realities that the physicist or chemist could describe. But they are much more than that. As products of human culture, they refer beyond themselves to other realities that they in some sense represent.
We may illustrate this fact by a famous example, first given by the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle. When we see someone rapidly close and open an eyelid, we must immediately decide whether this was a mere twitch—an involuntary act, perhaps in response to a floating grain of dust—or a deliberate act. If it was an involuntary act, then it can be described scientifically as a physiological reaction. In this case it remains simply a physical act, although it may have been triggered by a number of events. There is nothing more that needs to be said about it. But if it was a deliberate act, then it becomes a gesture, a wink, a small but significant artifact of human culture. As such it carries a meaning.
The problem is that it is not immediately clear what meaning it carries. This will depend very much on the situation in which it was performed. Was it a friendly gesture, directed to ourselves, intended to establish a rapport? Was it not only a friendly gesture but a sexually loaded gesture, an invitation to greater intimacy? Or was it an ironical gesture, a warning that there is something in the present situation that is not quite what it appears? On the other hand, perhaps the wink was not directed to us at all. Perhaps it was directed to someone else. If so, it may have been a signal, an indication that the other person should initiate some course of activity, one perhaps detrimental to us. Even so simple a gesture as a wink is deeply ambiguous. It requires interpretation.
Gilbert Ryle points out how complex this process can become. Suppose that the person winking is merely imitating another person. Suppose that the gesture is really a parody of someone who is prone to giving significant winks. It might be performed behind someone’s back as a way of causing amusement to the onlookers. In this case, the wink takes on a new level of meaning that the interpreter will have to take into account. Suppose, once again, that the gesture is being performed by someone alone, in front of a mirror. He may, perhaps, be intending to practice his parody of someone’s habit of winking so as to amuse his friends later on. In this case, there is a third level of meaning. Someone wanting to interpret the act of winking, to say what it means in this context, would have to take all three levels of meaning into account.
Unfortunately the task of interpretation is still more complex in the case of a written work. In the examples just given, the winker and the observer have at least one situation in common, namely, that in which the wink is being performed. In this situation the significance of the wink may appear obvious to the observer. It is understood immediately, without any apparent need for interpretation. (Once again, however, this does not mean that the gesture is not being interpreted. It means only that the act of interpretation is very rapid, perhaps automatic.) But when it comes to the interpretation of a written work, the situation may be very different. Such a work endures even after the death of its author and the loss of the context in which it was written.
The prophet Isaiah may be dead, but we have his words collected in the biblical book that bears his name. In this case the writer and the interpreter are far removed from one another in time. The prophet Isaiah’s words may make reference to realities in the situation in which he was living. He will refer, for instance, to reigning Israelite monarchs and to the political situation in which his nation found itself. To understand what this text meant when it was written, the interpreter will have to reconstruct the context in which it was written, the situation in which it first served as an act of communication. As we will see shortly, it was a new awareness of the distance between the author and the interpreter of biblical texts that contributed to the rise of a self-consciously historical approach to biblical interpretation in the seventeenth century.
Discussions of these matters generally go under the heading of the term “hermeneutics,” from the Greek verb meaning “to interpret.” Hermeneutics, that is, the theory of interpretation, should be distinguished from exegesis, which refers to the very act of interpreting particular texts themselves. (The word “exegesis” comes from a Greek phrase meaning “to draw out,” in the sense that one “draws meaning out” of a text.) Neither term is limited to discussions of biblical interpretation; they can be used with regard to the interpretation of any body of literature. Hermeneutical discussions can become very complex as we will see later when we consider what are sometimes called postmodern approaches to biblical interpretation.
For the moment I wish only to indicate that there is no reading of the Bible without some kind of interpretation. Indeed to read a translation of the Bible is to take for granted other peoples’ interpretations, for at many points their translations will be based on interpretive decisions. For this reason alone it is important to appreciate the many and various ways in which the Bible has been interpreted throughout Christian history. It is to this task that we must now turn.