A Kentucky drystone masonry fence has no mortar. The artisan places the stones so that their own weight and peculiar shapes hold them together from within. At first sight the stones can seem ill-fitted. Small stones occupy odd spots, loose fill can be seen spilling out. But the stones are placed to shift over time. Weather, oddly shaped stones, shifting ground, incidental damage, rather than undermining the fence, actually compact it together through the years, so that the fence grows even stronger and more beautiful. These fences have stood for over 150 years. Sometimes I feel my own thoughts to be ill-fitted, uncemented, and loose, but I trust under the pressure of the years and the forces of life, they can somehow fit together as well...
Take Scripture Literally-4
©Lawson G. Stone, 2005
My thinking about the creation story in Genesis 1-3 has spun me off into thinking about the concept of "literal" interpretation of the Bible. The term "literal sense" has such authority in interpretation because the greatest biblical interpreters through the history of Christianity have insisted that our contemporary use of scripture for spiritual formation, ethical guidance, and normative instruction in the church be commensurate in some way with the "literal sense" of the text. In the last 150 years, "literal" has come to mean popularly "journalistic description" in the case of narrative, and "propositional exposition" in the case of discourse, all seen in terms of "common sense" as defined by an era sorely lacking in just that. But the authority of the literal sense emerged from interpreters who used the term in a richer way than our contemporary usage. We have seen first that sensus litteralis came to involve, after centuries of debate, an insistence on reading the Bible in its original languages. Second, the literal sense meant the res gestae or literary shape of the text in terms of its narrative flow, line of argument, and subject mater.
The interpreters who established the concept of the authority of the literal sense also spoke of a third dimension, which exists inherently in the preceding. This has to do with the transaction thought to have taken place between the writer of the text and the readers, often discussed under the heading of "author's intended meaning" or "authorial intention." How relevant to us today! If you want to see a fist-fight break out among biblical theologians, just raise the cry of authorial intentionality in a group of scholars! Passions run high on this subject, with epithets and anathemas hurled against both for insisting on it and for repudiating it. The name-calling alone is almost worth the price of admission. Conservatives are blasted as "modernists" while post-modern theologians who don't even believe in timeless, transcendant truths that we can know claim that their hermeneutic alone is "theological exegesis." Those who actually believe the tenets of the faith are pilloried as modernists by post-modern revisionists! On the other hand, self-styled evangelical supernaturalists who claim to believe in divine revelation glibly assert the criteria of modern historiography as the controlling standard for theological exegesis. Theological faculties become polarized, with anyone failing to adhere to the party-line hermeneutic finding themselves frozen out of the club and either accused of lacking faith altogether or coldly consigned to the limbo of not practising "theological exegesis."
First of all, we need to realize that the concern for the authors of scripture and the meanings they attached to their words is not the result of modernist historiography, nor is the refusal to make authorial intention the sole or controlling criterion particularly post-modern. Both positions appear in the history of interpretation. In fact, if anything in the history of interpretation is a criterion of responsible (I'll hold back on valid) exegesis, it would be finding the proper place for our concerns about the biblical authors and their aspirations in their writing.
No period of biblical interpretation has lacked great interpreters concerned with the authors of scripture and the aims they sought to achieve in their writings. But this concern did not emerge immediately in the history of interpretation. The earliest Christian interpreters such as Barnabas and Justin Martyr clearly assumed that the OT presented a witness to Jesus Christ. Justin found nothing in the actual historical, religious experience of ancient Israel to nourish Christian faith directly, but saw it directly as a testimony to Christ. For the 2nd century apologists, there was no "problem of the Old Testament." Rather, they discerned the distance between the OT and the Christian message in terms of Jewish mis-interpretation, understood as the "letter" over against the gospel, seen as the "spirit." Still, in his debates with his Jewish adversary, Trypho, Justin appeals to the scriptures they held in common, the OT, and shows himself strongly influenced by the text's own witness about the character and actions of God, the sacred history, and the essential will of God seen in the OT-in short, its plain sense in summary form. Seldom, though, does Justin ever reflect hermeneutically on this fact. It was Irenaus who definitively described the Christian Bible in terms of a single witness in two testaments, related primarily by a process of pedagogy in which the world was being trained to the point of receiving Christ.
Rather than methodically work through the history of interpretation, I want to take a couple of case-studies to flesh out the issues that great Christian readers of scripture wrestled with as they strove to do justice to the sensus litteralis of scripture, particularly at the point of the meaning intended by the author. Few ancient Christian writers provide a more intriguing--and vexing--case study than St. Augustine. While he provides an extensive descripion of his interpretive approach in On Christian Doctrine I prefer here to look at an actual swatch of the Bishop's actual work. In Books 11-13 of his Confessions, Augustine climaxes his personal narrative of faith with an exposition of the creation narrative. In Book 12, Augustine specifically wrestles with the complaint that some might offer that his reading of Genesis 1 misses the meaningt intended by Moses. This chapter rewards close study, and I have found the translations of Philip Burton (the Everyman's Library edition) and Henry Chadwick (in the Oxford World's Classics series) most helpful.
In Book 12 Augustine, in what Robin Lane Fox calls a "wild tour de force on meanings supposedly present in Scripture," addresses the variety of possible interpretations of Genesis 1:1-2. He points out that either we have here the first actual creative actions of God, in which certain "things" (heaven and earth) are made, or we have a kind of initial summary, of which the "week" narrative is the specific detailing. Preferring the first, Augustine then identifies another problem: how can the "heavens" be created in Gen 1:1, and then be created again on Day Two? He concludes that the "heavens" of 1:1 are the highest heaven, the dwelling place of God, which, though not eternal, does precede the creation of time and form. The point here is that Augustine's reflections turn on problems with the res gestae of the text, read closely (albeit in Latin!). He constantly worries about what interpretations the words will bear in the context of the total story--the literary shape of the text. Clearly, Augustine is in sensus litteralis territory. As an amateur at reading Augustine, I find him hard to analyze, but will try to set out a few theses that seem to capture his approach to how "what Moses (or any biblical author) meant" relates to the process of interpretation.
First, Augustine clearly takes seriously the need to search for the meaning that Mose intended in Genesis 1. In Confessions 12.18.27 Augustine declares
All of us who read [Moses] are striving to hunt down and comprehend his meaning, and, believing him to speak truly, we dare not suppose him to have said anything that we know or think is false.
In the same vein, in Confessions 12.23.32 he writes:
...I see two sorts of dissent can arise when a messenger proclaims a true message using symbols. The first is over the truth of the matters reported, the second over the messenger's intended meaning. We go about our enquiry into the establishment of creation, asking what is true, in one way; but it is in another way that we go about asking what Moses, the great servant in the household of your faith, intended his reader and hearer to understand by those words. ...let them all depart from me who think that Moses said things that are false...Let us together approach the words of your Scripture, and seek your meaning through the meaning of him by whose pen you dispensed those words.
Augustine also affirmed, at least in theory, that the author's intended meaning, if known, should be the pre-eminent meaning. He wrote in Confessions 12.42.33:
...whatever you were intent on revealing to future readers through those words, if even he through whom they were spoken did have in mind only one of the many true interpretations? If this is so, let the interpretation that he had in mind be exalted over all the rest.
SO...Augustine clearly thought interpretation had to be conditioned by the author's intention, right? Well, not so fast! All of these quotations come from contexts in which, as a matter of fact, Augustine seeks to broaden the interpreter's horizon, not beyond the intention of Moses, but beyond the question of our certainty about Moses' intended meaning. The total context of the first quotation above is revealing. Augustine says:
…what hindrance is it to me as I make my ardent confession, that these words may be understood in such diverse senses, seeing as they are none the less true for it? What hindrance is it if I take them to mean something other than Moses took them to mean? All of us who read him are striving to hunt down and comprehend his meaning, and, believing him to speak truly, we dare not suppose him to have said anything that we know or think is false. As long, therefore, as each of us endeavours to get from the Holy Scriptures the same meaning as the writer's, what harm does it do if someone takes it to mean something that you, light of all true-speaking minds, show him is true--even if this was not the meaning of the writer whom he is reading, seeing as Moses too meant something true, even though it was not the same thing?
So...who's right? The modernist-orthodox protestant who insists on authorial intent as the criterion of meaning, or the post-modern revisionist who insists on something called "theological exegesis" which ends up stipulating in advance what we cannot or do not need to know about the author?
Rats! I'm out of space for this article. Stay tuned...
