The Holy Spirit and the Reformation Legacy. Группа авторов

Word of God and which, though utilizing critical or scientific methods of textual exegesis, nonetheless, sought to not only discern the divine message in the biblical text but also to render the biblical message meaningful for the contemporary communities of faith.137 As Lynn Poland remarks, concerning Luther’s hermeneutic, “the meaning of Scripture extends . . . hodie usque ad nos (even to us day).”138

      Post-Reformation Protestant Hermeneutics

Luther’s grammatical-historical method of biblical interpretation became the foundational paradigm for the development of Protestant biblical hermeneutics from the sixteenth century onward. However, whereas Luther espoused the grammatical-historical method in order rescue biblical interpretation from the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church and to provide a secure historical and rational foundation for biblical faith, the subsequent developments, under the influence of the eighteenth century European ‘Age of Reason’ (the Enlightenment), reduced the historical critical method to historicism. This ideologically -driven hermeneutical approach viewed biblical texts as mere historical phenomena which had value of their own without any relevance for the contemporary communities of faith. Thus, biblical faith was reduced to a preoccupation with historical phenomena.139 A variant of historicism, the so-called minimalist view of biblical history, held that the narratives contained in the texts of the Bible had little or no historical connection to the events they depicted. They were thus viewed as mere religious legends to be studied as literary artifacts from the past.140

Historicism, as it applied to biblical hermeneutics, was enunciated in the hermeneutic thought of the nineteenth-century German theological scholar, Friedrich Schleiermacher, who developed a universal hermeneutic. Schleiermacher’s universal hermeneutic posited that “a text is a text, whether secular or religious.”141 Schleiermacher’s universal hermeneutic thus maintained that the Bible did not require any unique interpretive approach. Schleiermacher, in effect, “collapsed the distinction between hermeneutica sacra and hermeneutica profana in order to create a universal hermeneutic.”142 Unlike Luther’s hermeneutica sacra which, though utilizing secular methods of textual exegesis, held that the biblical texts were divinely inspired and that they revealed God’s will for humankind in all time, the universal hermeneutic reduced biblical interpretation to a Religionsgeschichte Schule (history of religions school) approach which, akin to the minimalist view, argued that “the Bible represents only what certain people thought at a particular time about divine matters, but their thoughts carry no absolute truths for today.”143 Little wonder that Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, disparaged historicism, calling it “historical sickness.”144 Nietzsche observed that “we require history for life and action . . . but there is a degree of doing history and an estimation of it which brings with it a withering and degenerating life.”145

Historicism also postulated that the Bible was plausibly fallible as a historical source and diverse in its origins as a literary entity. The Bible was thus tendentiously atomized into various hypothetical source components.146 Moreover, historicism presupposed that the Bible, as a religious and theological document, might be less unique than had been supposed.147 The Bible was, hence, studied anti-supernaturally with “cold objectivity” and as mere religious literature.148 Moreover, the anti-supernaturalistic bias tended to privilege the hypothetical source components over the extant texts of the Bible, in their canonical form, in deciphering the meaning conveyed in the Word of God. As Hans Frei laments concerning the modern historical-critical approaches, “Interpretation was a matter of fitting the biblical story into another world with another story rather than incorporating that world into the biblical story.”149

In the course of its development, historicism also tended to disaggregate the texts of the Bible into what was considered to be authentic and inauthentic sources and, hence, introduced a hermeneutic of suspicion into the task of biblical interpretation.150 Furthermore, the idea of a canonical context for the study of the texts of the Bible was largely spurned by the tradents of historicism; they held that the texts of the Bible should be studied in their own right as independent texts freed from the “arbitrary constraints” imposed upon them by the Synagogue and the Church in the act of canonization.151 Failure to read the texts of the Bible in their canonical context negated Luther’s dictum that scriptura sacra sui ipsius intepres (sacred scripture is its own interpreter). This dictum, as noted above, meant that each text of Scripture should be interpreted in terms of the theology of the Bible as a whole.

The early part of the twentieth century saw the rise of a nuanced form of literary criticism, the new literary criticism, which, as Brevard Childs notes, “shifts biblical study away from historical referentiality.”152 As Gerald Bray observes, the new literary criticism “abandoned history as a model and insisted that works of art be judged primarily on aesthetic grounds.”153 Thus, the new literary approach tendentiously undermined the historical veracity of the biblical accounts. The new literary criticism also sought to break up the Christian canon by incorporating into its repertoire of texts extra-canonical epigraphic materials that were discovered in the course of the twentieth century. In particular, such epigraphic finds as the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nagi Hammadi texts were read as though they were at par in meaning and theological value as the texts of the Christian canon.154 In some extreme cases, the new literary criticism went as far as attempting to emend the texts of the Christian canon in the light of the twentieth century epigraphic finds.155 Hence Peter deVilliers’ notion of attempts to “contaminate” the Christian canon.156 As deVilliers observes, the attempts to emend the texts of the Christian canon in the light of the recently discovered texts is, in effect, an attempt to revise the Christian canon.

Some versions of the new literary criticism, notably the ideologically-driven reader-response critical approaches, argue that meaning is not derived from the texts of the Bible; meaning is “created by the readers in the act of reading.”157 Thus, as historicism privileged a hypothetical extra-biblical world over the texts of the Bible, the new reader-response critical approaches have tended to privilege the extra-biblical world of the reader who searches for the meaning conveyed in the Bible’s texts. The implication of this ‘privileging’ is that the extra-biblical worlds impose their meaning upon biblical texts. The biblical-textual meanings derived therefrom are, hence, idiosyncratic and indeterminate.158 Stanley Fish, an ardent reader-response proponent, argues that “Since the locus of meaning has proved so elusive, perhaps we should entertain the possibility that there is no determinate meaning in the text to begin with . . . The text yields no meaning. The only option is to play with the text.”159 Little wonder that the contemporary discipline of biblical studies is, in the words of Brevard Childs, “in crisis.”160

By ignoring the canonical context of the texts of the Bible, both historicism and the new literary-critical approaches have attempted to “de-canonize” the texts of the Bible.161 Also, as already noted above, both historicism and the new literary-critical approaches have misused textual criticism (which is usually the first stage in their methodological processes) by rewriting the texts through unwarranted emendations.162 The Bible reader who comes to the biblical text to hear the Word of God is therefore ill-served by the extant historical-critical and the new literary-critical methods of biblical interpretation. Hence a continuing search is needed for hermeneutical paradigms that serve the needs of the communities of faith, both in the academy or in the church.

      Echoes of Luther’s Hermeneutics in Canonical Criticism

      Some recent developments in the canonical-critical approach to biblical interpretation have been billed, in some quarters of biblical scholarship, as constitutive of a hermeneutical paradigm that seeks to interpret the Bible, not as an antiquarian artifact studied for its literary artistry only, but as the Word of God. As explained below, some aspects of the novel canonical criticism, particularly in the works of the Yale University biblical scholar, Brevard Childs, resonate with Martin Luther’s Reformation hermeneutics.

The canonical approach to biblical interpretation is often viewed as having had its modern provenance in the early twentieth century Anglo-American biblical theology movement. The movement appears to have been a reaction against the historicism of European theological liberalism, which, as noted above, tended to ‘de-canonize’ the Bible and atomize it into hypothetical source