The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis
Article
Originally appeared in "Theology Today" Vol. 37, April 1980, No.1,
pages 27-28. All rights belong to Theology Today. Published here with permission.
IN
1859 Benjamin Jowett, then Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford,
published a justly famous essay on the interpretation of Scripture.1
Jowett argued that "Scripture has one meaning-the meaning which it had in
the mind of the Prophet or Evangelist who first uttered or wrote, to the hearers
or readers who first received it."2
Scripture should be interpreted like any other book and the later accretions and
venerated traditions surrounding its interpretation should, for the most part,
either be brushed aside or severely discounted. "The true use of
interpretation is to get rid of interpretation, and leave us alone in company
with the author."3
Jowett
did not foresee great difficulties in the way of the recovery of the original
meaning of the text. Proper interpretation requires imagination, the ability to
put oneself into an alien cultural situation, and knowledge of the language and
history of the ancient people whose literature one sets out to interpret. In the
case of the Bible, one has also to bear in mind the progressive nature of
revelation and the superiority of certain later religious insights to certain
earlier ones. But the
David
C. Steinmetz is Professor of Church History and Doctrine at the Divinity School
of Duke University and the author of Misericordia Dei: The Theology of
Johannes von Staupitz in Its Late Medieval Selling (1968) and Reformers
in the Wings (1971). He also contributed an article, "Reformation and
Conversion," to the April 1978 issue of THEOLOGY TODAY.
1 Benjamin Jowett, "On the Interpretation of Scripture," Essays
and Reviews, 7th ed. (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 186 1),
pp. 330-433.
2 Ibid., p. 378.
3 Ibid., p. 384.
interpreter,
armed with the proper linguistic tools, will find that "... universal truth
easily breaks through the accidents of time and place"4
and that such truth still speaks to the condition of the unchanging human heart.
Of
course, critical biblical studies have made enormous strides since the time of
Jowett. No reputable biblical scholar would agree today with Jowett's
reconstruction of the gospels in which Jesus appears as a "teacher...
speaking to a group of serious, but not highly educated, working men, attempting
to inculcate in them a loftier and sweeter morality."5
Still, the quarrel between modern biblical scholarship and Benjamin Jowett is
less a quarrel over his hermeneutical theory than it is a disagreement with him
over the application of that theory in his exegetical practice. Biblical
scholarship still hopes to recover the original intention of the author of a
biblical text and still regards the pre-critical exegetical tradition as an
obstacle to the proper understanding of the true meaning of that text. The most
primitive meaning of the text is its only valid meaning, and the
historical-critical method is the only key which can unlock it.
But
is that hermeneutical theory true?
I
think it is demonstrably false. In what follows I want to examine the
pre-critical exegetical tradition at exactly the point at which Jowett regarded
it to be most vulnerable-namely, in its refusal to bind the meaning of any
pericope to the intention, whether explicit or merely half-formed, of its human
author. Medieval theologians defended the proposition, so alien to modern
biblical studies, that the meaning of Scripture in the mind of the prophet who
first uttered it is only one of its possible meanings and may not, in certain
circumstances, even be its primary or most important meaning. I want to show
that this theory (in at least that respect) was superior to the theories which
replaced it. When biblical scholarship shifted from the hermeneutical position
of Origen to the hermeneutical position of Jowett, it gained something important
and valuable. But it lost something as well, and it is the painful duty of
critical scholarship to assess its losses as well as its gains.
I
Medieval
hermeneutical theory took as its point of departure the words of St. Paul:
"The letter kills but the spirit makes alive" (II Cor. 3:6). Augustine
suggested that this text could be understood in either one of two ways. On the
one hand, the distinction between letter and spirit could be a distinction
between law and gospel, between demand and grace. The letter kills because it
demands an obedience of the sinner which the sinner is powerless to render. The
Spirit makes alive because
4
Ibid.,
p. 412.
5 Helen Gardner, The Business of Criticism (London: Oxford
University Press, 1959), p. 83.
it
infuses the forgiven sinner with new power to meet the rigorous requirements of
the law.
But
Paul could also have in mind a distinction between what William Tyndale later
called the "story-book" or narrative level of the Bible and the deeper
theological meaning or spiritual significance implicit within it. This
distinction was important for at least three reasons. Origen stated the first
reason with unforgettable clarity:
Now
what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the
third day, and the evening and the morning existed without the sun and moon and
stars? And that the first day, if we may so call it, was even without a heaven?
And who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, "planted
a paradise eastward in Eden," and set in it a visible and palpable
"tree of life," of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with
his bodily teeth would gain life; and again that one could partake of "good
and evil" by masticating the fruit taken from the tree of that name? And
when God is said to "walk in the paradise in the cool of the day" and
Adam to hide himself behind a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these
are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance
of history and not through actual event.6
Simply
because a story purports to be a straightforward historical narrative does not
mean that it is in fact what it claims to be. What appears to be history may be
metaphor or figure instead and the interpreter who confuses metaphor with
literal fact is an interpreter who is simply incompetent. Every biblical story
means something, even if the narrative taken at face value contains absurdities
or contradictions. The interpreter must demythologize the text in order to grasp
the sacred mystery cloaked in the language of actual events.
The
second reason for distinguishing between letter and spirit was the thorny
question of the relationship between Israel and the church, between the Greek
Testament and the Hebrew Bible. The church regarded itself as both continuous
and discontinuous with ancient Israel. Because it claimed to be continuous, it
felt an unavoidable obligation to interpret the Torah, the prophets, and the
writings. But it was precisely this claim of continuity, absolutely essential to
Christian identity, which created fresh hermeneutical problems for the church.
How
was a French parish priest in 1150 to understand Psalm 137, which bemoans
captivity in Babylon, makes rude remarks about Edomites, expresses an
ineradicable longing for a glimpse of Jerusalem, and pronounces a blessing on
anyone who avenges the destruction of the temple by dashing Babylonian children
against a rock? The priest lives in Concale, not Babylon, has no personal
quarrel with Edomites, cherishes no ambitions to visit Jerusalem (though he
might fancy a holiday in Paris), and is expressly forbidden by Jesus to avenge
himself on his enemies. Unless Psalm 137 has more than one possible meaning,
6
Origen,
On First Principles, ed. by G. W. Butterworth (New York: Harper and Row,
1966), p. 288.
it
cannot be used as a prayer by the church and must be rejected as a lament
belonging exclusively to the piety of ancient Israel.
A
third reason for distinguishing letter from spirit was the conviction, expressed
by Augustine, that while all Scripture was given for the edification of the
church and the nurture of the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love,
not all the stories in the Bible are edifying as they stand. What is the
spiritual point of the story of the drunkenness of Noah, the murder of Sisera,
or the oxgoad of Shamgar, son of Anath? If it cannot be found on the level of
narrative, then it must be found on the level of allegory, metaphor, and type.
That
is not to say that patristic and medieval interpreters approved of arbitrary and
undisciplined exegesis, which gave free rein to the imagination of the exegete.
Augustine argued, for example, that the more obscure parts of Scripture should
be interpreted in the light of its less difficult sections and that no
allegorical interpretation could be accepted which was not supported by the
"manifest testimonies" of other less ambiguous portions of the Bible.
The literal sense of Scripture is basic to the spiritual and limits the range of
possible allegorical meanings in those instances in which the literal meaning of
a particular passage is absurd, undercuts the living relationship of the church
to the Old Testament, or is spiritually barren.
II
From
the time of John Cassian, the church subscribed to a theory of the fourfold
sense of Scripture.7
The literal sense of Scripture could and usually did nurture the three
theological virtues, but when it did not, the exegete could appeal to three
additional spiritual senses, each sense corresponding to one of the virtues. The
allegorical sense taught about the church and what it should believe, and so it
corresponded to the virtue of faith. The tropological sense taught about
individuals and what they should do, and so it corresponded to the virtue of
love. The anagogical sense pointed to the future and wakened expectation, and so
it corresponded to the virtue of hope. In the fourteenth century Nicholas of
Lyra summarized this hermeneutical theory in a much quoted little rhyme:
Littera
gesta docet,
Quid credas allegoria,
Moralis quid agas,
Quo tendas anagogia.
This
hermeneutical device made it possible for the church to pray directly and
without qualification even a troubling Psalm like 137. After all, Jerusalem was
not merely a city in the Middle East; it was, according to the allegorical sense,
the church; according to the tropological
7
For a brief survey of medieval hermeneutical theory which takes into account
recent historical research see James S. Preus, From Shadow to Promise (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 9-149; see also the useful
bibliography, pp. 287-93.
sense,
the faithful soul; and according to the anagogical sense, the center of God's
new creation. The Psalm became a lament of those who long for the establishment
of God's future kingdom and who are trapped in this disordered and troubled
world, which with all its delights is still not their home. They seek an abiding
city elsewhere. The imprecations against the Edomites and the Babylonians are
transmuted into condemnations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. If you
grant the fourfold sense of Scripture, David sings like a Christian.
III
Thomas
Aquinas wanted to ground the spiritual sense of Scripture even more securely in
the literal sense than it had been grounded in Patristic thought. Returning to
the distinction between "things" and "signs" made by
Augustine in De doctrina christiana (though Thomas preferred to use the
Aristotelian terminology of "things" and "words"), Thomas
argued that while words are the signs of things, things designated by words can
themselves be the signs of other things. In all merely human sciences, words
alone have a sign-character. But in Holy Scripture, the things designated by
words can themselves have the character of a sign. The literal sense of
Scripture has to do with the sign-character of words; the spiritual sense of
Scripture has to do with the sign-character of things. By arguing this way,
Thomas was able to show that the spiritual sense of Scripture is always based on
the literal sense and derived from it.
Thomas
also redefined the literal sense of Scripture as "the meaning of the text
which the author intends." Lest Thomas be confused with Jowett, I should
hasten to point out that for Thomas the author was God, not the human prophet or
apostle. In the fourteenth century, Nicholas of Lyra, a Franciscan exegete and
one of the most impressive biblical scholars produced by the Christian church,
built a new hermeneutical argument on the aphorism of Thomas. If the literal
sense of Scripture is the meaning which the author intended (presupposing that
the author whose intention finally matters is God), then is it possible to argue
that Scripture contains a double literal sense? Is there a literal-historical
sense (the original meaning of the words as spoken in their first historical
setting) which includes and implies a literal-prophetic sense (the larger
meaning of the words as perceived in later and changed circurnstances)?
Nicholas
not only embraced a theory of the double literal sense of Scripture, but he was
even willing to argue that in certain contexts the literal-prophetic sense takes
precedence over the literal-historical. Commenting on Psalm 117, Lyra wrote:
"The literal sense in this Psalm concerns Christ; for the literal sense is
the sense primarily intended by the author." Of the promise to Solomon in I
Chronicles 17:13, Lyra observed: "The aforementioned authority was
literally fulfilled in Solomon; however, it was fulfilled less perfectly,
because Solomon was a
son
of God only by grace; but it was fulfilled more perfectly in Christ, who is the
Son of God by nature."
For
most exegetes, the theory of Nicholas of Lyra bound the interpreter to the dual
task of explaining the historical meaning of a text while elucidating its larger
and later spiritual significance. The great French humanist, Jacques Lefevre
d'Etaples, however, pushed the theory to absurd limits. He argued that the only
possible meaning of a text was its literal-prophetic sense and that the
literal-historical sense was a product of human fancy and idle imagination. The
literal-historical sense is the "letter which kills." It is advocated
as the true meaning of Scripture only by carnal persons who have not been
regenerated by the life-giving Spirit of God. The problem of the proper exegesis
of Scripture is, when all is said and done, the problem of the regeneration of
its interpreters.
IV
In
this brief survey of medieval hermeneutical theory, there are certain dominant
themes which recur with dogged persistence. Medieval exegetes admit that the
words of Scripture had a meaning in the historical situation in which they were
first uttered or written, but they deny that the meaning of those words is
restricted to what the human author thought he said or what his first audience
thought they heard. The stories and sayings of Scripture bear an implicit
meaning only understood by a later audience. In some cases that implicit meaning
is far more important than the restricted meaning intended by the author in his
particular cultural setting.
Yet
the text cannot mean anything a later audience wants it to mean. The language of
the Bible opens up a field of possible meanings. Any interpretation which falls
within that field is valid exegesis of the text, even though that interpretation
was not intended by the author. Any interpretation which falls outside the
limits of that field of possible meanings is probably eisegesis and should be
rejected as unacceptable. Only by confessing the multiple sense of Scripture is
it possible for the church to make use of the Hebrew Bible at all or to
recapture the various levels of significance in the unfolding story of creation
and redemption. The notion that Scripture has only one meaning is a fantastic
idea and is certainly not advocated by the biblical writers themselves.
V
Having
elucidated medieval hermeneutical theory, I should like to take some time to
look at medieval exegetical practice. One could get the impression from Jowett
that because medieval exegetes rejected the theory of the single meaning of
Scripture so dear to Jowett's heart, they let their exegetical imaginations run
amok and exercised no discipline at all in clarifying the field of possible
meanings opened by the biblical text. In fact, medieval interpreters, once you
grant the presuppositions
on
which they operate, are as conservative and restrained in their approach to the
Bible as any comparable group of modern scholars.
In
order to test medieval exegetical practice I have chosen a terribly difficult
passage from the Gospel of Matthew, the parable of the Good Employer or, as it
is more frequently known, the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matt.
20:1-16). The story is a familiar one. An employer hired day laborers to work in
his vineyard at dawn and promised them the standard wage of a denarius. Because
he needed more workers, he returned to the market place at nine, noon, three,
and five o'clock and hired any laborers he could find. He promised to pay the
workers hired at nine, noon, and three what was fair. But the workers hired at
the eleventh hour or five o'clock were sent into the vineyard without any
particular promise concerning remuneration. The employer instructed his foreman
to pay off the workers beginning with the laborers hired at five o'clock. These
workers expected only one-twelfth of a denarius, but were given the full day's
wage instead. Indeed, all the workers who had worked part of the day were given
one denarius. The workers who had been in the vineyard since dawn accordingly
expected a bonus beyond the denarius, but they were disappointed to receive the
same wage which had been given to the other, less deserving workers. When they
grumbled, they were told by the employer that they had not been defrauded but
had been paid according to an agreed contract. If the employer chose to be
generous to the workers who had only worked part of the day, that was, in
effect, none of their business. They should collect the denarius that was due
them and go home like good fellows.
Jesus
said the kingdom of God was like this story. What on earth could he have meant?
VI
The
church has puzzled over this parable ever since it was included in Matthew's
Gospel. St. Thomas Aquinas in his Lectura super Evangelium Sancti Matthaei
offered two interpretations of the parable, one going back in its lineage to
Irenaeus and the other to Origen. The "day" mentioned in the parable
can either refer to the life-span of an individual (the tradition of Origen), in
which case the parable is a comment on the various ages at which one may be
converted to Christ, or it is a reference to the history of salvation (the
tradition of Irenaeus), in which case it is a comment on the relationship of Jew
and Gentile.
If
the story refers to the life span of a man or woman, then it is intended as an
encouragement to people who are converted to Christ late in life. The workers in
the story who begin at dawn are people who have served Christ and have devoted
themselves to the love of God and neighbor since childhood. The other hours
mentioned by Jesus refer to the various stages of human development from youth
to old age. Whether one has served Christ for a long time or for a brief moment,
one will still receive the gift of eternal life. Thomas
qualifies this
somewhat
in order to allow for proportional rewards and a hierarchy in
heaven.
But he does not surrender the main point: eternal life is given to late converts
with the same generosity it is given to early converts.
On
the other hand, the story may refer to the history of salvation. Quite frankly,
this is the interpretation which interests Thomas most. The hours mentioned in
the parable are not stages in individual human development but epochs in the
history of the world from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to
David, and from David to Christ. The owner of the vineyard is the whole Trinity,
the foreman is Christ, and the moment of reckoning is the resurrection from the
dead. The workers who are hired at the eleventh hour are the Gentiles, whose
complaint that no one has offered them work can be interpreted to mean that they
had no prophets as the Jews have had. The workers who have borne the heat of the
day are the Jews, who grumble about the favoritism shown to latecomers, but who
are still given the denarius of eternal life. As a comment on the history of
salvation, the parable means that the generosity of God undercuts any advantage
which the Jews might have had over the Gentiles with respect to participation in
the gifts and graces of God.
Not
everyone read the text as a gloss on Jewish-Christian relations or as a
discussion of late conversion. In the fourteenth century the anonymous author of
the Pearl, an elegy on the death of a young girl, applied the parable to infancy
rather than to old age. What is important about the parable is not the
chronological age at which one enters the vineyard, but the fact that some
workers are only in the vineyard for the briefest possible moment. A child who
dies at the age of two years is, in a sense, a worker who arrives at the
eleventh hour. The parable is intended as a consolation for bereaved parents. A
parent who has lost a small child can be comforted by the knowledge that God,
who does not despise the service of persons converted in extreme old age, does
not withhold his mercy from boys and girls whose eleventh hour came at dawn.
Probably
the most original interpretation of the parable was offered by John Pupper of
Goch, a Flemish theologian of the fifteenth century, who used the parable to
attack the doctrine of proportionality, particularly as that doctrine bad been
stated and defended by Thomas Aquinas. No one had ever argued that God gives
rewards which match in exact quantity the weight of the good works done by a
Christian. That is arithmetic equality and is simply not applicable to a
relationship in which people perform temporal acts and receive eternal rewards.
But most theologians did hold to a doctrine of proportionality; while there is a
disproportion between the good works which Christians do and the rewards which
they receive, there is a proportion as well. The reward is always much larger
than the work which is rewarded, but the greater the work, the greater the
reward.
As
far as Goch is concerned, that doctrine is sheer nonsense. No one can take the
message of the parable of the vineyard seriously and still
hold
to the doctrine of proportionality. Indeed, the only people in the vineyard who
hold to the doctrine of proportionality are the first workers in the vineyard.
They argue that twelve times the work should receive twelve times the payment.
All they receive for their argument is a rebuke and a curt dismissal.
Martin
Luther, in an early sermon preached before the Reformation in 1517, agreed with
Goch that God gives equal reward for great and small works. It is not by the
herculean size of our exertions but by the goodness of God that we receive any
reward at all.
But
Luther, unfortunately, spoiled his point by elaborating a thoroughly
unconvincing argument in which he tried to show that the last workers in the
vineyard were more humble than the first and therefore that one hour of their
service was worth twelve hours of the mercenary service of the grumblers.
The
parable, however, seems to make exactly the opposite point. The workers who
began early were not more slothful or more selfish than the workers who began
later in the day. Indeed, they were fairly representative of the kind of worker
to be found hanging around the marketplace at any hour. They were angry, not
because they had shirked their responsibilities, but because they had discharged
them conscientiously.
In
1525 Luther offered a fresh interpretation of the parable, which attacked it
from a slightly different angle. The parable has essentially one point: to
celebrate the goodness of God which makes nonsense of a religion based on
law-keeping and good works. God pays no attention to the proportionately greater
efforts of the first workers in the vineyard, but to their consternation, God
puts them on exactly the same level as the last and least productive workers.
The parable shows that everyone in the vineyard is unworthy, though not always
for the same reason. The workers who arrive after nine o'clock are unworthy
because they are paid a salary incommensurate with their achievement in picking
grapes. The workers who spent the entire day in the vineyard are unworthy
because they are dissatisfied with what God has promised, think that their
efforts deserve special consideration, and are jealous of their employer's
goodness to workers who accomplished less than they did. The parable teaches
that salvation is not grounded in human merit and that there is no system of
bookkeeping which can keep track of the relationship between God and humanity.
Salvation depends utterly and absolutely on the goodness of God.
VII
The
four medieval theologians I have mentioned-Thomas Aquinas, the author of the
Pearl the Flemish chaplain Goch, and the young Martin Luther-did not exhaust in
their writings all the possible interpretations of the parable of the Workers in
the Vineyard. But they did see with considerable clarity that the parable is an
assertion of God's generosity and mercy to people who do not deserve it. It is
only against the background of the generosity of God that one can under-
stand
the relationship of Jew and Gentile, the problem of late conversion, the meaning
of the death of a young child, the question of proportional rewards, even the
very definition of grace itself. Every question is qualified by the severe mercy
of God, by the strange generosity of the owner of the vineyard who pays the
non-productive latecomer the same wage as his oldest and most productive
employees.
If
you were to ask me which of these interpretations is valid, I should have to
respond that they all are. They all fall within the field of possible meanings
created by the story itself. How many of those meanings were in the conscious
intention of Jesus or of the author of the Gospel of Matthew, I do not profess
to know. I am inclined to agree with C. S. Lewis, who commented on his own book,
Till We Have Faces: "An author doesn't necessarily understand the meaning
of his own story better than anyone else...."8 The act of
creation confers no special privileges on authors when it comes to the
distinctly different, if lesser task of interpretation. Wordsworth the critic is
not in the same league with Wordsworth the poet, while Samuel Johnson the critic
towers over Johnson the creative artist. Authors obviously have something in
mind 'when they write, but a work of historical or theological or aesthetic
imagination has a life of its own.
VIII
Which
brings us back to Benjamin Jowett. Jowett rejected medieval exegesis and
insisted that the Bible should be read like any other book.9
I agree with Jowett that the Bible should be read like any other book. The
question is: how does one read other books?
Take,
for example, my own field of Reformation studies. Almost no historian that I
know would answer the question of the meaning of the writings of Martin Luther
by focusing solely on Luther's explicit and conscious intention. Marxist
interpreters of Luther from Friedrich Engels to Max Steinmetz have been
interested in Luther's writings as an expression of class interests, while
psychological interpreters from Grisar to Erikson have focused on the
theological writings as clues to the inner psychic tensions in the personality
of Martin Luther. Even historians who reject Marxist and psychological
interpretations of Luther find themselves asking how Luther was understood in
the free imperial cities, by the German knights, by the landed aristocracy, by
the various subgroups of German peasants, by the Catholic hierarchy, by lawyers,
by university faculties-to name only a few of the more obvious groups who
responded to Luther and left a written record of their response. Meaning
involves a listener as well as a speaker, and when one asks the question of the
relationship of Luther to his various audiences in early modern Europe, it
becomes clear that there was not one Luther in the sixteenth century, but a
battalion of Luthers.
8
W.
H. Lewis, ed., Letters of C S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
Inc., 1966), P. 273.
9
Jowett, "Interpretation," p. 377.
Nor
can the question of the meaning of Luther's writings be answered by focusing
solely on Luther's contemporaries. Luther's works were read and pondered in a
variety of historical and cultural settings from his death in 1546 to the
present. Those readings of Luther have had measurable historical effects on
succeeding generations, whose particular situation in time and space could
scarcely have been anticipated by Luther. Yet the social, political, economic,
cultural, and religious history of those people belongs intrinsically and
inseparably to the question of the meaning of the theology of Martin Luther. The
meaning of historical texts cannot be separated from the complex problem of
their reception and the notion that a text means only what its author intends it
to mean is historically naive. Even to talk of the original setting in which
words were spoken and heard is to talk of meanings rather than meaning. To
attempt to understand those original meanings is the first step in the
exegetical process, not the last and final step.
Modern
literary criticism has challenged the notion that a text means only what its
author intends it to mean far more radically than medieval exegetes ever dreamed
of doing. Indeed, contemporary debunking of the author and the author's explicit
intentions has proceeded at such a pace that it seems at times as if literary
criticism has become a jolly game of ripping out an author's shirt-tail and
setting fire to it. The reader and the literary work to the exclusion of the
author have become the central preoccupation of the literary critic. Literary
relativists of a fairly moderate sort insist that every generation has its own
Shakespeare and Milton, and extreme relativists loudly proclaim that no reader
reads the same work twice. Every change in the reader, however slight, is a
change in the meaning of the text. Imagine what Thomas Aquinas or Nicholas of
Lyra would have made of the famous statement of Northrop Frye:
It
has been said of Boehme that his books are like a picnic to which the author
brings the words and the reader the meaning. The remark may have been intended
as a sneer at Boehme, but it is an exact description of all works of literary
art without exception.10
Medieval
exegetes held to the sober middle way, the position that the text (any literary
text, but especially the Bible) contains both letter and spirit. The text is not
all letter, as Jowett with others maintained, or all spirit, as the rather more
enthusiastic literary critics in our own time are apt to argue. The original
text as spoken and heard limits a field of possible meanings. Those possible
meanings are not dragged by the hair, willy-nilly, into the text, but belong to
the life of the Bible in the encounter between author and reader as they belong
to the life of any act of the human imagination. Such a hermeneutical theory is
capable
10
This quotation is cited by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 1, at the beginning of a chapter
which sets out to elaborate an alternative theory.
of
sober and disciplined application and avoids the Scylla of extreme subjectivism,
on the one hand, and the Charybdis of historical positivism, on the other. To be
sure, medieval exegetes made bad mistakes in the application of their theory,
but they also scored notable and brilliant triumphs. Even at their worst they
recognized that the intention of the author is only one element-and not always
the most important element at that-in the complex phenomenon of the meaning of a
text.
IX
The
defenders of the single meaning theory usually concede that the medieval
approach to the Bible met the religious needs of the Christian community, but
that it did so at the unacceptable price of doing violence to the biblical text.
The fact that the historical-critical method after two hundred years is still
struggling for more than a precarious foothold in that same religious community
is generally blamed on the ignorance and conservatism of the Christian laity and
the sloth or moral cowardice of its pastors.
I
should like to suggest an alternative hypothesis. The medieval theory of levels
of meaning in the biblical text, with all its undoubted defects, flourished
because it is true, while the modern theory of a single meaning, with all its
demonstrable virtues, is false. Until the historical-critical method becomes
critical of its own theoretical foundations and develops a hermeneutical theory
adequate to the nature of the text which it is interpreting, it will remain
restricted-as it deserves to be-to the guild and the academy, where the question
of truth can endlessly be deferred.