Stone's Fence

©Lawson G. Stone, 2005

After several weeks away from Genesis, I want to return to the issues surrounding interpreting the creation and fall issues for several articles. The main controversy turns on whether or not we should "take the Bible literally" as we read Gen 1-3. This question defines the very heart of the problem, and merits several installments.

For as long as the Bible has been interpreted, readers have accepted, often unreflectively, a basic axiom: the movement from the "back then" of the text to the "right now" of contemporary faith must deal faithfully with something that has generally been called the "literal sense" of the text. But what exactly is this? Early Jewish interpreters spoke of the most rudimentary sense of the text, the minimum sense that every reader would have to accept, as the peshat, or simple sense. This really was not what we would call woodenly the "literal" meaning, but rather something like the consensual recognition by competent readers as to the demands placed by the language on the reader. Later the Christian interpreter Origen referred to the literal sense as the body that contained the soul and spirit of the text, referring to "higher" or applied senses. The Latin term sensus litteralis became the cipher for this most basic sense of the text. The grand tradition of biblical interpretation has always argued that a postive, derivative relationship must exist between our hearing of the text in the framework of our current faith and life, and the sensus litteralis (literal sense) of the text.

Ironically, interpreters have varied in accounting for just what this is. Anyone wanting a fine survey and provocative analysis of the history of this idea should look at Brevard Childs' article, "The Sensus Litteralis of Scripture: An Ancient and Modern Problem." I spend the first third of my seminary class on "Old Testament Theology" working through this history with students, mainly from primary sources, in order to frame an understanding of "literal sense" that is in step with the interpretive traditions that gave us the term in the first place. While defining sensus litteralis remains difficult, throughout the history of interpretation at least four features of the text have woven in and out of the idea of sensus litteralis.

Literal Sense includes first the range of possibility revealed by a study of the original language of the text. Nothing takes the place of weighing the full scope of the word-choice, grammatical features, and syntactical weave of a passage. Interpretation that fails here fails decisively. Interpreters won this insight only after hard battle. Origen, in the second century, insisted on the importance of reading the OT in the original and strove to learn Hebrew. His passion for the original text led him to compile a massive six-column Bible that compared the Hebrew with then-existing Greek translations of the OT. He even provided a transliteration of the Hebrew pronunciation into Greek so that Christians could actually pronounce the Hebrew words in their discussions with Jews! This hand-copied manuscript exceeded 7000 pages and accompanied Origin through all his flights from persecution around the eastern Mediterranean world. While some early interpreters such as Augustine disputed the necessity of Hebrew, St. Jerome in the late 4th and early 5th century decisively won the point that the Hebrew text be the primary point of reference for anyone claiming to interpret the OT normatively.

Translations, even good ones, can betray their originals, often by their very effectiveness. A translation can actually eclipse the source text, so that readers begin to imagine that the text always spoke their language, always referred to their world. So at home in the new world of the translation, the text's immigrant status fades from view. Jerome's Vulgate eclipsed the Hebrew text, by virtue of its excellence. The Latin speaking church soon forgot the alienness of the Bible, and presumed the biblical writers spoke and thought largely as medieval latin churchmen might. The popularity of the Vulgate and its apparent super-adequacy caused many to lose interest in pursuing the study of the text in Hebrew. "If the Vulgate's Latin was good enough for Jesus and Paul, it's good enough for me!" would have been their battle cry. Slowly, however, the text of the Vulgate became corrupted by additions, modifications of the translation, and uncertainty about even the accuracy of many passages, leading to a renewed interest in Hebrew. In the 11th and 12th centuries, Hugh and Andrew of St. Victor in Paris picked up Jerome's challenge, opened a dialogue with the great rabbi Rashi, and returned to the study of Hebrew. By the 1400's nobody in learned christendom seriously questioned the necessity of Hebrew. Nicholas of Lyra, the "William Barclay" of the Middle Ages, actually began trimming out the patristic quotations from his commentaries, replacing them with rabbinic quotations! Challenged about this then-controversial step, he observed that a rabbi who knew Hebrew was more helpful than a church father who did not!

Needless to say, the renewal of interest in Hebrew in the late medieval era prepared the way for the leaders of the Reformation to take a fresh stand on the meaning of scripture, claiming to present the "plain sense" (i.e. sensus litteralis) of scripture, as the primary testimony to the will of God. The study of the Bible in the original languages assumed an unquestioned place in the normative interpretation of God's Word.

To Be Continued...

©Lawson G. Stone, 2005

This series of articles has looked at Genesis 1 from a perspective that many would think is "non-literal," since we have suggested that journalistic description probably does not fit the author's purpose in this chapter. So this is a great moment to explore the concept of the literal sense of the Bible. Remember, this is not a biblical term but is part of the tradition of biblical interpretation, a term we have inherited, and therefore its meaning cannot be defined from the Bible, but from those who bequeathed it to us. The great tradition of Christian interpretation of the Bible from the early church fathers to the present has always insisted that the contemporary, applied, or spiritual use of the text must correlate positively with a sense of the text that interpreters termed the sensus litteralis, roughly translated "literal sense" or "plain sense." But how is that defined? Again, if we are interested in interpeting the Bible in step with the best and most effective interpreters through all periods of history, our definition needs to come from how that term and concept actually guided the process of understanding. And--surprise!--different interpreters used the term in different ways during different periods of history. At the very least, we can say that vast number of Christian readers have discerned a clear distinction between contemporary application and what the text says "on its own." This more distant meaning, the one immanent in the text, especially in the case of the Old Testament, has always seemed in need of some kind of re-framing and re-presentation in order for its pertinence to the contemporary faith of the readers to emerge clearly. This more remote sense, felt in some way to be closer to the text's own voice was the "literal sense."

By following the history of biblical interpretation, by learning from the masters, we can discern the facets of the sensus litteralis. The first, we noted last time, is that the literal sense resides most fully in the text read and studied in the original languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. For that reason, any quest for, the meaning of Genesis 1-3 for our day, or its significance for the origins debate, or gender roles, will flounder and fail in utter frustration if it recoils from the challenge and benefits of reading the text in Hebrew.

Our apprenticeship to the great readers of scripture through history discloses a second second dimension of the sensus litteralis, which I would name the literary shape of the text. Ancient interpreters referred to the text's plot, main line of argument, dialogue, poetic movement, or narrative flow by the latin term res gestae ("things done, matters conveyed"). The term denotes simply what transpires in the text. This is, perhaps, the most persistent feature of the text that comes up in discussions of literal sense. Ironically, early interpreters did not always feel the need to describe the literary shape of the text as a perfect unity, nor did they always assume it was historically "true". Unlike modern self-styled literalists, they often noted points where the stories lacked narrative coherence, and felt no need artificially to harmonize the narratives. For example, consider the following ancient interpreter:

What intelligent person can believe that there was a first day, then a second and third day, evening, and morning, without the sun, the moon, and the stars; and the first day…even without a sky? Who is foolish enough to believe that, like a human farmer, God planted a garden to the east in Eden and created in it a visible, physical tree of life from which anyone tasting its fruit with bodily teeth would receive life; and that one would have a part in good and evil by eating the fruit picked from the appropriate tree? When God is depicted walking in the garden in the evening and Adam hiding behind the tree, I think no one will doubt that these details point figuratively to some mysteries by means of a historical narrative which seems to have happened but did not happen in a bodily sense.

These words issued not from the mouth of a 19th century German Higher-Critic intent on destroying the Bible, but from the greatest theologian and exegete of the early patristic era, Origen, in his basic theology textbook First Principles. For Origen, points of inconsistency in the res gestae or storyline served as divinely inspired road-signs cautioning readers to adjust the semantic level of their interpretation from journalistic historical reportage to a figurative reading pointing beyond the text to the Christian reality experienced in the Church. Contrary to the popular parody, Origen's allegory did not lack controls: it was triggered by a "hitch" in the surface of the text, and it was guided by the larger vision of divine truth afforded by the whole Bible. So important was the surface level of the text that Origen, as we noted before, learned Hebrew and compiled the first text-critical database and apparatus in Christian history.

With a sophisticated theological method relating the surface content of the text to its spiritual sense, Origen could be fearless in confronting the phenomena of the text. Of the Garden of Eden story, Origen wrote in Contra Celsum:

The story of Adam and his sin will be interpreted more abstractly by those who know that 'Adam' means 'human being' in the Hebrew language, and that in what appears to be concerned with Adam, Moses is speaking of the nature of man.

Many dismiss Origen as a kind of fruitcake who ignored the text's plain sense. But in fact, he represents the consensus view of early Christian Bible readers, that the text of the Bible, and specifically, the Old Testament, exists simultaneously in two dimensions: it arises from the faith of ancient Israel, it is a "back then," and it ontologically participates in the total faith reality disclosed in the entire Christian Bible. On such a view, reading the text in Hebrew, sorting through variant readings, and interpreting it allegorically cohere entirely.

The coherence of Origen's method for his day rested in his recognition that the figural reading emerged as a clear extension from the phenomena of the text, which he called the "letter" or literal sense. This same distinction figured strongly in the interpretation of the opposite ancient school of interpretation, the Antiochenes. While they rejected allegory as the method for developing the spiritual sense, the Antiochenes nevertheless distinguished between the plain sense of the text and a "higher" sense that they termed theoria. Their way of shaping this higher sense diverged from Origen and the Alexandrians dramatically, but both recognized the distinction between the "story" in the text, and the story of which the text was a part.

Worthwhile also here is the point that the literary shape of the text, its plotline, argument, etc., did not pre-decide the question of genre. That is, the literal storyline of Genesis 1 or 2 did not automatically lead to seeing the stories as journalistic reportage. That is, a positive relationship between the text and its ultimate theological referent did not presuppose only one kind of relationship between the text and its ostensive or apparent referent. I should stress here that the ancients were not indifferent to historicity where the text clearly requires it, but they were much more versatile than most contemporary interpreters at this vital point.

The mediveal era showed simultaneously a tendency on the one hand, for the "higher" sense of scripture to preclude and even dictate the terms of the plain sense, and a growing concern to understand the plain sense more carefully. The former tendency emerges in Bernard of Clairvaux, the latter in Nicholas of Lyra. Bernard, in commenting on the Song of Solomon, speaks solely about the mystical relationship between the believer and Christ, seen in the context of the rules of Bernard's order. Nicholas seriously worries about the erotic component of the song and wonders how in the world such a celebrative and erotic sensuality can serve as a vehicle of Christian truth. Medievals began increasingly to seek to grasp the situation of the biblical story in its past context. The Victorenes learned Hebrew and speculated about the actual physical construction of the Tabernacle, and soon the emerging Universities produced an array of critical tools all aimed at defining the sensus litteralits of the Bible.

hmmmm...there is more to say...but I don't want to go too long...so g'bye till next time!