Stone's Fence

©2005, Lawson G. Stone

Before moving on to the next aspect of the literal sense of scripture, understood through the history of interpretation, I thought I should tell you where this is coming from. I teach a course at Asbury Theological Seminary entitled simply "Old Testament Theology." I like that. Not "The Theology of the Old Testament"--that would force me to say that my course provided a definitive picture of precisely what the OT teaches, which strikes me as hubris, unless you are Walther Eichrodt. I also like it that my class is not even entitled "A Theology of the Old Testament," because that would commit me--if not to being definitive, at least to being comprehensive. That's something I just can't do. Something always gets away. But by calling it simply "Old Testament Theology" I get to focus on two things I love: the Old Testament and Theology.

Now, the academicians reading this already know about the long, ponderous, and boring debate about "the purpose of biblical theology" and "what is the center of Old Testament theology?" Somehow these guys can go down deeper, stay down longer, and come up drier than anyone else. They manage to bury a vital topic under layers and layers of theory and counter-theory.

One day as I was starting my usual lecture on this boring stuff, suddenly I just stopped. As the students woke up and realized something was wrong, I just asked them "What is this really about? What is biblical theology for anyway?" And in a flash, I had my own answer. My question is simply this: "How does God use the Bible to rule the church?" I then went back through all I had learned about the history of interpretation, looking for the ways in which great readers of scripture got traction on that question, the question of scripture being the executive means of God's lordship over the church. That is when I noticed a constant dialectic between two moments. One was a moment of remoteness, of remove, in which the Bible spoke from a time, place, and perspective that was not the reader's position. Right alongside this, though, was a moment of address, in which scripture was heard speaking a transformative word to the church. This unified, but distinct dialectic between remoteness and address, distance and directness, became my central interest. The dimension or movement of remoteness is what came to be called the literal sense: the reader intentionally recognizes the otherness of scripture, its alienness. In a way, this makes concrete the transcendance of God, who is Other, and Alien, as much as he is Immanuel. In the moment of remove we rub our eyes and say "Is that in the Bible?" In the moment of distancing, we realize it is we who must adjust to the Bible, not it that must adapt to us. That is why I tell students "The greatest obstacle to knowing what the Bible says is thinking we know what the Bible says." This is not about coming to the text without presuppositions. Rather, it is a tuning of the ear, a purifying of ourselves to listen to the text.

Then there is--consequentially, but also simultaneously--the moment of address, the movement of proximity and approach. Scripture speaks in and to the faith of the church, becoming a criterion of identity, of truthful witness, and concrete obedience. The quest to respond faithfully sends us back to the text, of course, where the whole dialectic continues in a rhythm of straining to listen above the jangle of our own agendas, questions, and demands, and at the same time, having those very agendas, questions, and demands addressed, spoken to, and transformed by the alien word. This would be what the ancients saw as the "spiritual sense" of the text, or the applied sense, or senses. Ironically, pre-modern interpreters saw the literal sense as "simple," but saw the applied sense as complex and multiple. So we hear of anagogical, moral, tropological, etc. senses "on top" of the literal sense. One suspects behind the multiplicity lies not a complex hermeneutic, but perhaps no hermeneutic: maybe we simply see here the varied ways of the Spirit in causing the inspired Word to become exhalation, address, Rede.

In my admittedly amateurish adventures in the history of interpretation, I found over and over that interpreters struggled with that pole of remoteness, the literal sense. They seemed at once to know what it was, and yet defined it differently. So in my class, I walk students through the history of interpretation, mainly through primary readings, "in search of" the literal sense. Towards the end, I try to summarize by pulling together the strands and themes that always seem to come up whenever the great readers of scripture speak of sensus litteralis. That summary is what I'm trying to present here, but in doing it without the narrative on which it is based, I'm a little bit stuck, which is why I have taken some time to look at interpreters like Origen, Bernard, Nicholas, etc.

So...how's that for a not-very-important blog! I promise to pick up the thread again real soon now.

©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 a 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." In my own study of the history of this concept, I think I have also identified three or four dimensions of the literal sense that persist through the whole history, and which increasingly form the matrix in which my own interpretation happens.

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 litteralis of the Bible.

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