Jens Zimmermann
The practice and character of biblical hermeneutics, tied as they are to cultural history, are presently undergoing a postmodern phase of reassessing a long hermeneutic development. This history of interpretation began with the premodern theological exegesis of the church fathers and medieval commentators, moved to a modern historical-critical focus which grew out of the Renaissance and Reformation periods to flourish during the nineteenth century, lasting well into the twentieth, and is now, at least in certain quarters, moving back to theological interpretation. The philosophical and cultural changes underlying this trajectory are too complex to portray in detail, but many commentators agree that the relation of human consciousness to the world plays a central role.1 From the ancient to the late medieval world, interpreters assumed a participatory model of human knowledge. Embedded in a meaningful cosmos, human consciousness participated in a natural, rational order and moral law that provided common reference points for self-understanding. For example, the Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, summed up the natural order of the universe by appealing to a common Logos: “For there is one Universe out of all, one God through all, one substance and one law, one common Reason of all intelligent creatures and one truth” (1992, 45; CE 121–180).
Regardless of its variations in Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic philosophies, this classical metaphysics of participation assumed a “preexisting correspondence” between mind and reality, between soul and being, between the knower and the known. The formation of Christian theology and biblical hermeneutics occurred within the same participatory framework, but Christians transformed Greco-Roman notions of participatory philosophies in light of the incarnation. With the belief that God's eternal word and wisdom, the perfect image of God, had indeed become human, the self's participation in the formerly impersonal, abstract Greek Logos changed into something more historical and concrete. From patristic to medieval biblical interpretation, the human interpreter, as made in the image of God, was considered to be the “uniquely endowed, conscious and co-operating link between the created universe in space and time, and the divine intelligence in eternity” (Southern 1995, 44). This correspondence between mind and being established the foundational trust in the universe's intelligibility, and in the correlation of reason and faith which characterized premodern biblical interpretation.
As the following developmental sketch aims to show, the history of biblical interpretation is largely determined by the loss of this correspondence in modernity, and by the postmodern attempts to recover this crucial link between mind and being through the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and the hermeneutic philosophies of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) and Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), among others. While these philosophers no longer ground the correspondence between consciousness and being in God, they nevertheless insist that language testifies to such a correspondence. For the postmodern, post-metaphysical interpreter, language becomes “the medium through which consciousness is connected with beings” (Gadamer 1976, 76).
Premodern biblical hermeneutics was by no means “pre-critical,” if this term is intended to indicate a lack of critical tools for assessing texts. Of course, patristic and medieval commentators were unfamiliar with “form criticism,” “redaction criticism,” or “narrative criticism,” in the specific senses in which these methods were developed by modern historical critics of the Bible. It is equally evident, however, that premodern interpreters carefully distinguished among literary genres, and that they differentiated between historical and spiritual meanings of the text. As patristic scholar Frances Young explains, what really sets modern and premodern biblical interpreters apart is not the quality of critical methods but different plausibility structures for how texts and language relate to reality:
An authoritative text is understood to refer to the world in which people live, and so its meaning is bound to be received or contested in the light of the plausibility structures of the culture which receives the text. A culture which can conceive of the material universe as interpenetrated by another reality, which is transcendent and spiritual, will read the reference of scripture in those terms. That is far more significant for the differences between ancient and modern exegesis than any supposed ‘method.’ Methodologically, exegesis involves many of the same procedures.
(Young 2007, 139)
Thus, the difference between premodern and modern biblical hermeneutics has to do with diverging cultural horizons. Unlike modern Western biblical critics, Jewish and later Christian interpreters of the Hebrew scriptures assumed a world interpenetrated by the divine, and a sacred text inspired by a personal, sovereign creator God, who worked in and through history. We can see this belief at work in the redaction process within the Hebrew scriptures themselves, as events and prophecies are renarrated and reinterpreted, often in the hope of future fulfillment. For example, the Davidic promise of a perfect king and everlasting throne continues to be deferred. Isaiah's grand vision for one of David's descendants, Hezekiah, as “Wonder-Counselor God Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace” (Isa. 9:6), was cruelly shattered by the ruler's alliance with Israel's oppressor Egypt. The prophet, however, nonetheless looks forward to a “distant King, on whom the Spirit of the Lord would truly rest” (Isa. 11:1). Isaiah thus demonstrates an intra-biblical dynamic by which events and prophecies are transferred and re-narrated in anticipation of future fulfillment. This inner-biblical transfer of past events was well in place before Christians read the Hebrew scriptures as an “Old Testament” prequel to the arrival of their Messiah, Jesus (Montague 2007, 14).
Along with this sense of the scripture's evolving narrative, Judaism bequeathed a number of interpretive models of lasting influence to early Christian interpreters. Jewish exegesis in the first century may be roughly divided into four basic approaches with considerable overlap among them: literalist, midrashic, pesher, and allegorical (Longenecker 1999, 14). The main interpretive groups providing evidence of these practices within Judaism are Rabbinic schools (Talmud),2 the Qumran Community or Essenes (Dead Sea Scrolls), and the Jewish Diaspora or Hellenistic Jews, especially the Jewish community in Alexandria, Egypt (Philo of Alexandria) (Froehlich 1984, 3–6). Literal interpretation was common among all groups and pertained mainly to the straightforward application of laws, such as circumcision, to the lives of their people. Extreme literalism was not uncommon. One rabbinic school, for example, interpreted the command to reflect on and teach God's law when “sitting in the house, when walking by the way, and when rising up,” to mean that believers should recite the Shema standing up in the morning, but lying down in the evening (Longenecker 1999, 15).
Midrashic interpretation was the interpretive exposition of either legal texts (halakah) or non-legal, generally edifying material (haggadah) for the purpose of actualizing God's word for the life of the present community (Porton 1992, 819). In discerning God's word, midrashic interpretation went beyond the strictly literal sense, offering interpretations that were not immediately obvious. For example, rabbis read Hosea 9:10, “Your fathers seemed to Me like the first fig to ripen on a fig tree,” back into Genesis to argue that God already had the patriarchs in mind when contemplating creation. Such seemingly random exegesis was based on the rabbis’ belief that scripture is an organic, inspired whole, allowing for a high degree of inter textuality and requiring philological attention to every word and its association with similar words elsewhere in the narrative.3
In contrast to the midrashic formula “that has relevance to this,” pesher interpretation followed a fulfillment pattern of “this is that” (Longenecker 1999, 28). Pesher exegesis favored prophetic texts and has an eschatological bent. The Qumran community, for example, was characterized by pesher interpretation (Froehlich 1984, 5), which was primarily “revelatory and charismatic. Certain prophecies had been given in cryptic and enigmatic terms, and no one could understand their true meaning until the Teacher of Righteousness was given the interpretive key” (Longenecker 1999, 28–29). By bringing prophecy and interpretation together, this teacher could discern the deeper sense of scriptural prophecies and reveal the true message of scripture for contemporary events.
The fourth Jewish antecedent of Christian biblical hermeneutics is the allegorical exegesis of diaspora Hellenistic Jews such as Philo of Alexandria. A well-known example of this method is Philo's allegorical reading of the Genesis narrative through the grid of Platonic anthropology. Convinced that God has no recreational need to walk in paradise in the cool of the evening, Philo rejects such “fabulous nonsense.” Paradise stands for “celestial virtue” planted in “Eden,” a word connoting the “luxury” of peace, ease, and joy (Philo 1993, 29). The main actors of the Genesis narrative, Adam, Eve, and the snake, represent human faculties. In God's perfect arrangement of creation, “he placed the mind first, that is to say, man, for the mind is the most important part in man; then outward sense, that is the woman; and then … the third, pleasure… . And pleasure has been represented under the form of the serpent” (Philo 1993, 45).
If one assumes that Jesus's recorded sayings are faithful representations rather than distortions offered by later redactions, the gospel writers depict the founder of Christianity himself as using literal, midrashic, and pesher treatments of scripture. When dealing with human affairs and people's relation to God, Jesus read scripture quite literally, rebuking Pharisees for failing to honor their fathers and mothers (quoting Exod. 20:12), or affirm the binding nature of marriage (quoting Gen. 2:24). Jesus also employed the midrashic exegetical rule of qal wahomer (light to heavy) in saying “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more (πóσω μáλλον) shall your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him?”4
It is significant, however, that Jesus employs the pesher exegetical method most prevalently (Longenecker 1999, 54 ff). The Gospels portray Jesus as expounding prophetic texts and pointing to himself as their fulfillment. In Luke 4:16–21, for example, during worship in a synagogue, he is invited to read the lesson from the prophet Isaiah. He reads 61:1–2, hands the scroll back to the attendant, sits down, and proclaims: “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your ears” (Longenecker 1999, 54 ff). Similarly, he tells the Pharisees who assert their Mosaic authority against Jesus's interpretation of the tradition, “If you believed Moses, you would have believed me, for he wrote of me” (John 5:39). Countless other examples show that Jesus interprets the Torah with an uncommon authority that takes up the mantle of the most eminent ancient prophets, but goes beyond them in arrogating to himself the role of master over and embodiment of central aspects of Jewish religious life, such as the Sabbath (Luke 13:10–17; 14:16) and, even, the Temple.5 By appropriating these prophecies to himself, Jesus prepares the way for later Christian typological readings.
New Testament writers continued the Judaic tradition of reading the scriptures as an evolving story of God's dealings with Israel and identified Jesus as the Messiah who embodied this story's climax. Christians who penned the Gospels and epistles that make up the New Testament believed not that they were in a different narrative from that of Israel, but rather experienced “a new moment in the same story” (Wright 1996, 219). This sense of continuity informs Paul's understanding of the gospel as an event “promised beforehand through [God's] prophets in the holy scriptures, an event fulfilling God's messianic promises” (Rom. 1:1–4, NRSV).
The Christian apologists and exegetes in the second and third centuries adopted this sense of narrative continuity to defend their reading of the Bible against Christians such as Marcion, who on a strictly literal understanding of Hebrew scripture posited two gods (Origen 1985, II, 4, 329). The first one was YHWH, a jealous, law-obsessed tribal deity and demiurge, responsible for the material universe, who punishes people for their sins. The second was a nameless god of universal love and compassion represented by Jesus, who redeemed people from their sins.6 The Gnostics had a different premise but arrived at a similarly dualistic conclusion. Gnostic teaching denigrated materiality and asserted a pneumatic core in human beings that could be found and liberated from bodily needs through knowledge of the divine mysteries. According to Irenaeus of Lyon (2nd century CE), who wrote a large work against Gnosticism, Gnostics believed that, having reached this goal, they were beyond ordinary moral laws and could behave accordingly.7 On the basis of the same dualism, Gnostics rejected the incarnation, the Christian belief that the same God who created and transcends the material world has taken on human nature (not just human form) in order to redeem and sanctify it.
From a hermeneutic perspective, the most interesting point about the Christian assertion of one sovereign creator God presiding over spirit and matter (and unifying Old and New Testament) is Christians’ awareness that the different readings of scripture depend on the interpretive framework one brings to it. Irenaeus, for example, argues that heretics misconstrue the “words of the Lord (τὰ λóγια τοῦ κυρíου) by interpreting (εἰρημένοων) badly what was said rightly” (Irenaeus 2004, Preface 1, 315).8 Irenaeus recognizes that the essential issue is not whether one interprets allegorically or literally; after all, “the laws and the prophets do contain many parables and allegories, which one can pull in various directions.” The problem is to interpret these polysemic texts correctly by possessing the appropriate hermeneutical horizon. The Gnostics distort Christianity because they conform these texts “by means of perverse interpretations and deceitful expositions” to “their own wicked inventions” (Irenaeus 2004, 1.3.6., 320.). It is important to note that premodern exegetes do not respond to the Gnostic argument simply by resorting to allegory. Origen, for example, argues that, even according to the letter (secundum litteram), the Gnostic tribal God seems unjust when he punishes children for the sins of their parents even into the third and fourth generation. Referring to Ezekiel 18: 2–3, Origen argues that scripture itself indicates the parabolic nature of such statements. The Gnostics, he contends, cannot grasp the true meaning of scriptural passages because they read too literally within a spiritualizing framework that pays little attention to the overall narrative coherence and meaning of the Bible (Origen 1985, II 5, 1–2, 343–345).
Reading the scriptures rightly required what patristic exegetes termed the rule of truth (τὸ κανóνα τῆς ἀληθεíας, regula veritatis) (Irenaeus 2004, 194) or rule of faith (regula pietatis) (Origen 1985, IV, 3.14., 775., Praef. 1–2), which rooted the reading of scripture in the Christian community with its cardinal Christian doctrines as taught and handed down by Jesus and his apostles (Origen 1985, I, Praef. 2, 85.). Irenaeus summarizes this interpretive framework as follows:
God, Father, unmade, incomprehensible, one God, the creator of all; this is the first point of our faith; the second point is the Word of God, the Son of God, Christ Jesus, our Lord, who appeared to the prophets in accordance with the form of their prophecies and the consequences of the Father's counsel, through whom everything came into being; who also at the end of the ages, in order to recapitulate and complete all things, became visible and tangible, human being among human beings, in order to destroy death and point to life, and to effect communion of unity between God and human beings. And the third point is the Holy Spirit, through whom the prophets prophesied and the fathers learned divine things, and the righteous were led onto the path of righteousness and who poured himself out in an entirely new manner onto humanity and all the earth, by renewing human beings for God.
(Irenaeus 1993, 37)
It cannot be our task here to discuss the plausibility of the high Christology evidenced by this “rule of truth,” which identifies the radically transcendent God with Jesus the Messiah. It is important, however, to note that today several New Testament scholars counter much biblical criticism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by arguing that Christ's identity with God, and thus the doctrine of the incarnation, did not develop slowly but existed before the New Testament texts were written; they also maintain that this Christology was not a Hellenistic innovation, but rather was deeply rooted in a Jewish understanding of God.9
In order to understand premodern biblical hermeneutics, one does need to grasp, however, that the “measure of faith” is not merely a formal frame for narrative unity but describes a reality determined by a God who appears in history as well as encompasses it. Biblical exegetes from the New Testament times, through the patristic era and all the way to the Middle Ages and Reformation assumed a sacramental world, because in Christ “all things have held together and continue to do so.”10 Christ became the Christian replacement of the Stoic Logos and neo-Platonic nous that made all human truth possible. Given this comprehensive understanding of reason, “all things” included the best of non-Christian learning, so that premodern exegetes from Origen to Melanchton insisted on the cultivation of the liberal arts and of philosophy as aids to biblical interpretation. Given this Christological understanding of reality, it was a small step to imagine the biblical text as a sacrament in itself, fundamentally oriented toward and directed by Christ. Did not the apostles teach that “the end of the law is Christ,” that the law is prefigured and finds its completion in him (Rom 10:4 RSV)? Did not Paul also find Christ in the events of Israel's history, arguing that these “occurred as examples (τύποι)” and were written down to instruct the Christian “on whom the ends of the ages have come (1 Cor. 9:22 RSV)?”11 Moreover, it is Paul who interprets the narrative involving Abraham's wives, a slave and a freewoman, as “allegory” (ἀλληγορούμενα) of the divine covenants or testaments. Paul thus regards allegory as “spiritual understanding” of events read in the light of Christ (de Lubac 2000, 20).
The core principle of premodern exegesis is aptly summarized by the historian of patristic and medieval exegesis, Henri de Lubac: “Jesus Christ effects the unity of the Scripture because he is its end and its fullness. Everything in Scripture is related to him. And he is its unique object. We could even say that he is the totality of exegesis” (de Lubac 2000, 105). Encouraged by the apostle Paul, patristic exegetes transformed the Hebrew writings into the “Old Testament,” by understanding Christ as the “end of the law,” in the sense that Christ is the ultimate purpose for and fulfillment of God's promises and dealings with his people. Existing before history, but arriving in and through history, the Word and Wisdom of God become flesh “effects a mutation of meaning inside the ancient Scripture” (Ricoeur 1980, 50). As the final Word of God, Christ's own person and his teachings, as conveyed through the apostles, become the spirit in which the historical “letter” of Old Testament law and prophets have to be understood.12 On the one hand, this makes the Old Testament indispensable, but, on the one other hand, a living document only in the light of Christ. As Brevard Childs points out, this was already the case with peshat or “plain sense” in Jewish exegesis, in which the literal sense corresponded not to a modern historical-literal reading but to “that familiar and traditional teaching of Scripture which was recognized by the community as authoritative” (Childs 1977, 81).
Premodern interpreters regarded the Bible as inspired by God, but not in the sense of divine dictation; rather, they believed that, just as in the incarnation God had joined himself to true humanity, so He had accommodated divine meaning to human narrative and language in the scriptures. Thus, following the pattern of the incarnation, spiritual meaning lay hidden in the historical meaning as recorded in the text, because history itself was a communal narrative endowed with purpose, and, in the participatory ontology of the ancient world, history and its textual record and prophetic interpretations were themselves sacramental vessels, however fragile, that carried divine meaning.13 Indeed, history itself is a medium for divine activity. For premodern readers, the Bible was not an isolated piece of revelation but merely part of God's greater educational plan for humanity. They believed that God had expressed his love for humanity throughout history in a continual process of divine instruction through visitations of the incarnate Word. Thus, Irenaeus believes, for example, that when God visits Abraham (Genesis 17), he was visited by Christ, “the Word of God, that always was with humanity and who foretold things of the future, which were to come to pass, and taught human beings things of God” (Irenaeus 1997, [45], 70).14
Allegory, typology, and the medieval fourfold exegesis (literal, allegorical, moral, and eschatological) are thus variations on the common theme that the spiritual meaning of biblical texts derives from a Christological metaphysics that gives scriptural texts unity even before a scriptural canon existed.15 The modern reader is rather removed from the premodern correlations of faith and reason in a sacramental world in which history and texts are vehicles of divine meaning. Yet without at least understanding this viewpoint, the modern interpreter will regard the premodern predilection for a seemingly indiscriminate and arbitrary use of rational, literal, literary, and text-critical criteria as the workings of confused precritical minds, struggling to find their way toward a more sober historical-critical exegesis (de Lubac 1998, 212).
In contrast to what became known as the historical-critical method, for premodern readers, the biblical texts were not historical “sources” but living documents, read for spiritual edification and personal, moral transformation.16 Indeed, the same Christology that provided the scriptures’ narrative unity also integrated exegesis into the overall divine pedagogy or paideia toward Christ-likeness that premodern exegetes regarded as the goal of the Christian faith. Biblical interpretation was, in brief, a means for deification, that is, for the kind of transformation God intended for his human creature. Augustine describes this goal in his exposition of John's gospel: “Yes, brothers and sisters, God wanted to be a son of man, and he wanted human beings to be sons of God! He descended because of us; let us for our part ascend because of him… . So then, are not those he makes sons of God going to ascend into heaven? They certainly will ascend; this is what we have been promised: They shall be equals of the angels of God” (Luke 20:36; Augustine 1990b, 235; original emphasis). In the most influential hermeneutic manual in the history of Western Christianity, De doctrina Christiana, Augustine explains that reading the scriptures ought to shape Christ's followers into philanthropists themselves, loving both God and neighbor (Augustine 1990a, 123 [1.35]).
The premodern participatory hermeneutic continued to inform Bible reading well into the Reformation period. Even with his gradual (but never complete) abandonment of medieval fourfold exegesis and allegorical reading,17 Martin Luther continued to believe that the husk of historical and literary narrative contained a spiritual kernel of Christological truth. Calvin, too, retained this important confluence of literal and spiritual sense.
The remaining history of biblical hermeneutics from the Reformation to the present is defined by the gradual disintegration of participatory ontology, and thus also of the Christological, unifying reality of the biblical texts, accompanied by the separation of exegesis from spiritual and transformative reading of the scriptures as a communal, ecclesial text. With the gradual recession of a Christological understanding that unified reality, text, and reader, the unity of letter and spirit also fell apart. The changing meaning of the plain or literal sense (sensus literalis) demonstrates the impact of an increasingly immanent worldview. From the church fathers to the Reformation, the “literal” comprised the grammatical and historical aspects as well as their theological referent, God's dealings with this people, and through them, with the world. Reformers such as Luther and Calvin continued to hold onto a literal sense that held together theological and historical meaning. It was not until the rationalist hermeneutics of the eighteenth century drove a wedge between the historical sense and its theological referent that the literal sense became reduced to “the original meaning of the text as it emerged in its pristine situation” (Childs 1977, 89). The letter becomes reduced to the historical meaning, in accordance with what the modern reader considered an accurate reconstruction of the original author's and audience's cultural horizon. Historical context and tradition formation thus became the provenance of historical criticism. And the spiritual sense, hived off from the letter, becomes an ahistorical, timeless faith, whose content also becomes subject to the theological range of the interpreter's imagination. Consequently, the area of spiritual significance was taken up by theology, and thus largely separated from biblical criticism.
In his magnificent study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century biblical hermeneutics, Hans Frei has summed up these changes in biblical interpretation as a reversal of the relations between text and interpreter. For premodern readers, the biblical narratives constituted God's overarching story with humanity and thus interpreted the experiences of every reader in any age. For modern readers, by contrast, the biblical narrative has to conform to interpreter's horizon and understanding of history (Frei 1974, 5–7). As nature and history became self-contained entities set over against spirit and meaning, the relationship between historical description and transcendent reality became inverted. For premodern interpreters, recorded events were subservient to the reality that made history meaningful. For modern interpreters, by contrast, the historical event had to establish the credibility of transcendent realities (Frei 1974, 84–85). What has become known as “the historical-critical method” has effectively redrawn “the ground rules for meaning-as-reference. A historical criterion has now come to adjudicate the meaning of history-like narrative biblical texts” (Frei 1974, 84–85). Once divided, both literal and spiritual senses disintegrated under the hands of specialists. Professional exegetes, increasingly detached from the church and housed in the academies, dug deep to determine the “real” historical bedrock beneath biblical writers’ cultural and mythological imaginations. Similarly, literary analysis tried to determine the most original forms and fragments of biblical sayings, culminating in the quest for the historical Jesus and his actual sayings. Another casualty of the modern hermeneutics was figurative or typological interpretation as practiced by ancient Jewish and early Christian exegesis. Typology depended on the confluence of history and divine meaning, of letter and spirit, and thus was destroyed when the historical and narrative world moved apart.
That the modern reader's own imagination—together with his conception of history, truth, and knowledge—is itself historically contingent, that his mind is tradition-dependent and thus not necessarily normative or reliable, did not become a topic of reflection until the early twentieth century. The spiritual meaning, divorced from history, also deteriorated first into the general moral truths of deism and, within Protestantism, finally into a positivist notion of revelation as independent from ontology or history. The first move divorced biblical content, such as loving one's enemy, for example, from the biblical narrative and transferred such ethical values into the realm of universal morality, accessible to reason apart from historical experience. On the basis of this fact–value split, biblical history and miracles could now be subjected to the increasing skepticism of critics, without losing ethical content. In a valiant effort, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834) sought to recover biblical truth for its “cultured despisers,” by presenting Christianity not as belief in miracles, untenable to an increasing rationalist age, but as a sense of god-consciousness or a sense of utter dependence on the infinite, rooted ultimately in Christ. Yet even Schleiermacher could not prevail against the increasingly rationalist hermeneutic which accepted as true only that which passed the critical bar of scientific objectivism.
In a countermove to shelter the Bible from historical criticism, some Christians asserted the infallibility and inerrancy of the scriptures. Reinforced by the Protestant need for a self-interpreting, autonomous Bible (sola scriptura), which was pitted in Enlightenment fashion against communal authority, revelational positivism could go as far as asserting the verbal inspiration of every biblical word to ensure the scripture's infallibility and authority. Given these developments, the conflict between science and biblical revelation became inevitable and emerged with full force when mechanistic and evolutionary scientific paradigms challenged received beliefs in miracles and creationist cosmologies. Rudolf Bultmann's demythologizing hermeneutic remains the most famous attempt to preserve the importance of scripture while acknowledging the radically different cultural presuppositions governing the text's and the modern interpreter's intellectual horizons. That he ended up “remythologizing the gospel into the categories of existential philosophy” only demonstrates the illusion of scientific objectivity for biblical interpretation (Montague 2007, 92). Supposedly objective interpretive approaches are compromised by succumbing to contemporary prejudices in the name of hermeneutic honesty.
In the twentieth century, beginning with Karl Barth (1886–1968) in theology, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) in philosophy, and Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) in science, the basic philosophical premises of historical criticism—an autonomous self, uninfluenced by authority or tradition, and a scientific epistemology as normative for all human knowledge—were challenged and slowly overturned. Heidegger, his student Hans-Georg Gadamer, the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, and Polanyi (and Thomas Kuhn after him) have shown the implausibility of the scientific ideal that posits a neutral, uninvolved observer over against a passive object of investigation. Heidegger and Gadamer argued that interpretation is not a theoretical undertaking that establishes meaning after objective facts have been ascertained, but is rather a defining characteristic of our existence. Heidegger and Gadamer, in particular, have retrieved the premodern emphasis on language as mediator between mind and reality. Gadamer even acknowledges the historical importance of the incarnation for recovering the link between mind and being: “Christology prepares the way for a new anthropology, which mediates in a new way between the mind of man in its finitude and the divine infinity. Here what we have called the hermeneutical experience finds its own, special ground” (Gadamer 2004, 428). This hermeneutical experience is primordially linguistic because language grounds “the correspondence between soul and being” (Gadamer 1976, 75). For Gadamer, meaningful existence, reasoning, and communication both within and across cultures are inseparably bound up with language.
Moreover, as Polanyi has demonstrated for the process of discovery in the natural sciences, human knowing is more than merely ascertaining facts and determining their meaning afterward; we do not first neutrally construct what a text says and then determine what it means in a second step. Explanation is always already understanding and interpretation because we establish facts already within a tacit and culturally determined framework of meaning (Polanyi 1996, 32–34). Karl Barth advances a similar argument against the historical-critical method's self-description as an exact science concerned merely with establishing what the text says. After all, “how uncertain, how dependent on often highly questionable assumptions are historians already when determining ‘what the text says’ ” (Barth 1999, xvii). Even historical critics, argues Barth, try to understand the text, and the quality of their commentary will depend on how theologically informed they are about the subject matter brought forward by a given author. Historical critics, Barth argues, often advance premature judgments based on their own cultural predilections smuggled in under the cover of objective historical criticism (Barth 1999, xviii). Historical critics responded by accusing Barth of Biblicism, to which he replied that “the Biblicism of which I am accused may be said to consist in my prejudice that the Bible is a good book and it is well worth taking its thoughts at least as seriously as one's own” (Barth 1999, xxiii).
During the 1970s, Barth's conviction that one ought to enter into a text's subject matter and thus allow it speak on its own terms was taken up by Yale theologian Hans Frei's (1922–1988) plea for “narrative realism” and approximation of the traditional sensus literalis. Similar to literary New Critics such as I.A. Richards (1893–1979), Frei distinguishes between the text's internally coherent meaning and the question of whether what it claims is also externally true. The text's own coherent world, its narrative realism and internal meaning, is valid apart from the question of factual truth (McConnell 1986, 64) and the text's “hermeneutical status” from its “reality status or reference” (Frei 1992, 141). Hence, a realist reading is content to maintain a narrative's “history-like” quality without worrying about its factual historicity (Frei 1992, 62).
What Barth said about divine revelation, Frei claims for biblical narrative: the text itself determines the criteria of truth and reality (Frei 1992, 65). As self-referential narrative, “the text means what it says, and so the reader's redescription is just that, a redescription and not the discovery of the text as symbolic representation of something else more profound” (Frei 1992, 44). In suspending the question of actual reality, Frei acknowledges the cultural distance between the Bible and the modern reader. His theological concern, however, is to return to a premodern attitude by letting the narrative of the text establish Jesus’ identity and the content of the Christian faith.18
Frei acknowledges that modern philosophical hermeneutics as presented by Gadamer and Ricoeur have prepared the ground for returning to the “embattled” traditional sense of the literal sense by exposing the ideological elements in a supposedly value-free historical biblical criticism. In the end, however, he criticizes philosophical hermeneutics as just one more theory that undermines the text's ability to define the categories of religious experience by subsuming the Bible's narrative meaning into a general human religiosity. The existential hermeneutics of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur represent such generalizing approaches to understanding, because they simply assume a universal “doctrine of the core of humanity, self-hood, and the grounds of inter-subjective experience” (McConnell 1986, 71). Moreover, Frei is also suspicious of hermeneutic theories’ emphasis on “understanding.” For philosophical hermeneutics, “understanding” entails the translation of the text's meaning into the interpreter's cultural horizon, and thus becomes too subjective and undermines the otherness of the text (McConnell 1986, 51). Rather than take the text at face value, hermeneutics tends to assimilate the text's meaning to general theories of human religious yearnings (McConnell 1986, 50). Yet by subsuming every text, and especially religious texts, under a “shared interior experience” of an explanatory theory of understanding assumed to be valid for all human experience, any challenge to this experience is excluded. Under the auspices of such hermeneutic theories, “the literal reading of the Gospel narrative vanishes” into the vague incoherence of generalities. Frei sees some promise in Paul Ricoeur's “second naiveté,” that is, in first taking the narrative at face value, and then re-reading it with a critical distance. On the whole, however, Frei favors the hermeneutics of suspicion, such as Derridean deconstruction, because this approach does not simply assume a shared world of experience and thus allows the text truly to confront and challenge the reader (McConnell 1986, 51).
The positive aspect of Frei's biblical hermeneutic is his recovery of biblical realistic narrative and his insistence that the Christian Bible belongs historically to a particular community of faith whose plausibility structures serve as a “rule of faith,” that is, a cultural consensus by which the plain sense is defined (McConnell 1986, 68, 71). The negative side of Frei's hermeneutic is that, not unlike Karl Barth's divine revelation, Frei's self-referential text constitutes an alien object, standing apart from general human experience, and from general reason. For theological reasons, Frei defends the text's autonomy, but in doing so, he appropriates the sensus literalis of premodern hermeneutics without providing a philosophical grounding for doing so. He simply brackets any ontological questions concerning the nature of human understanding.
Frei's narrative realism has not galvanized a critical mass of scholars to change biblical interpretation, and the same must be said of Brevard Child's canonical criticism, another approach that sought to overcome the limitations of historical criticism. From the mid-1970s onward, Childs sought to return biblical exegesis to the communal context that shaped the canon and therefore also ought to shape the parameters for historical-critical reading. His work has contributed to the general sense in biblical studies that the Bible is more than a cultural artifact but was written by and for an identifiable interpretive community. Even efforts by scholars such as Childs and Frei have not resulted in a wholesale return of biblical hermeneutics to theological exegesis; critical approaches are undergoing important changes. For example, the prominent historical critic Raymond E. Brown argues that the classic historical criticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with its anti-supernaturalism and “barren analyses of sources, composition, and history” is no longer credible (Benedict XVI 1989, 24). Even though historical critics ferret out the earliest or “original” historical sources and forms, such detective work is not their main business. Rather, they seek to establish the “plain sense,” that is, what the text meant within its original context and as a literary unit.
The Old Testament specialist John Barton also denies that historical critics understand themselves as “scientists,” who dissect the text dispassionately. On the contrary, they do not just “process the text” but seek to understand it (Barton 2007, 57), entering “into the text at a deep level, recognizing the shared humanity of the author so that heart speaks to heart” (Barton 2007, 59). Against the caricature of historical criticism as biblical anatomy, Barton asserts that the critic's work is based more on appreciation for literary qualities and narrative unity than on historical detective work. James Barr, another renowned Bible scholar, equally affirms the basis of biblical criticism to be “essentially literary and linguistic rather than historical in character” (Barr 1983, 105).19 Yet there are telltale signs that Barton's outlook remains strongly influenced by the impartial observer mentality which had characterized the rationalist approach of the historical-critical school.
Barton claims, for example, that understanding an ancient text entails simply the reconstruction of its original meaning on the page without any reference to the interpreter's own cultural horizon. He declares that “the texts mean what they mean, what they have always meant” (Barton 2007, 102) and thus rejects the classical premodern axiom, recovered by philosophical hermeneutics, that understanding and application are inseparable. Barton dismisses the hermeneutical claim that understanding a text entails its translation into the present by fusing past and present horizons (Barton 2007, 113). Instead, he champions Emmanuel Hirsch's distinction between meaning and significance (Barton 2007, 179). “Meaning before application” is the motto of the critical exegete, who understands first what the text meant and then applies that meaning to modern issues (Barton 2007, 103). For this very reason, Barton suspects any “special hermeneutic,” such as theological or canonical readings, which distort the simple “givenness” of the text by reading their theological convictions into it. Yet by defining “attention to givenness” as a theologically agnostic reading, and thereby failing to acknowledge that theologically engaged reading within an interpretive community can be objective, he remains attached to the epistemological model of scientific objectivism.20
While Barton's stance remains representative for biblical interpretation in the academy, there is also an increasing trend among biblical scholars toward theological interpretation. Encouraged by Gadamer's insight that the reader's convictions are not a barrier but, if made explicit, the very gateway into a deeper understanding of the text, a number of Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic exegetes are returning to theological and ecclesial readings of the Bible. In the late twentieth century, an ecumenical conference by professional theologians and exegetes committed to the Christian community diagnosed a crisis of biblical interpretation, and argued for the recovery of premodern interpretive practices without relinquishing the importance of historical-critical research. Assembled by John Neuhaus and addressed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the scholars’ goal was a “better synthesis between higher criticism and church doctrine,” and the suggested path a greater philosophical reflection on the interpretive frameworks that governed historical criticism on the one hand and dogmatic interpretation on the other. A number of Christian thinkers have responded to this challenge of balancing historical and theological criticism.21
Post-liberal theologians, such as George Lindbeck, emphasize the communal context for interpreting the scriptures, and argue for rebuilding the church's “instinct of faith” or sensus fidelium as the cultural consensus for textual meaning (Lindbeck 1989, 91). Others urge a return to premodern principles of interpretation. Andrew Louth, for example, in Discerning the Mystery, argues for a return to Christological reading, employing the participatory hermeneutics of Gadamer and also of Polanyi to legitimate an ecclesial hermeneutic in the mystery of Christ, which gives life to the historical text but also links the narrative to the inner life of the reader who participates in the same reality (Louth 1983, 120–121). Theodore Stylianopoulos follows this lead by affirming the incarnation as the best analogy for biblical hermeneutics. The text's divine message emerges from historical and linguistic events and thus requires historical criticism in conjunction with the voice of the Christian tradition (Stylianopoulos 1997, 12 ff). The Roman Catholic Church, in addition to the Vatican II document Dei Verbum: The Dogmatic Constitution of Divine Revelation (1965), has produced an important statement on The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (1994). In this text, the Pontifical Commission gives full weight to historical and literary scholarship in interpretation, but, in contrast to a merely narrative approach, insists that exegetes “arrive at the true goal of their work only when they have explained the meaning of the biblical text as God's word for today” (Houlden 1995, 73).22 Among Evangelicals, Joel Green, Stephen Fowl, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Francis Watson also advocate a biblical hermeneutic that upholds the importance of literary and historical criticism, but regards the Bible not as a cultural artifact or historical source, but as central to “the faith and formation of persons and ecclesial communities” (Green 2011, 4).
Clearly, biblical hermeneutics in the academy is no longer simply dominated by a modernist paradigm. Yet hermeneutic theory and sheer theological need for a coherent biblical text have at least initiated a modest trend away from the misapplication of scientific objectivism to the biblical text back toward more theological and, indeed, ecclesial frameworks of interpretation that are reminiscent of premodern reading practices. John Barton's deep suspicions of this trend are still shared by the majority of biblical scholars, and only the future will tell whether a return to reading the Bible as the book of the church for personal and communal transformation is here to stay.