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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In Reading Scripture with the Reformers, Timothy George takes readers through the exciting events of the sixteenth century, showing how this dynamic period was instigated by a fresh return to the Scriptures. George immerses us in the world of the Reformation, its continuities with the ancient and medieval church, and its dramatic upheavals and controversies. Most of all, he uncovers the significant way that the Bible shaped the minds and hearts of the reformers.This book shows how the key figures of the Reformation read and interpreted Scripture, and how their thought was shaped by what they read. We are invited to see what the church today can learn from the fathers of the Reformation, and how these figures offer a model of reading, praying and living out the Scriptures.
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READING SCRIPTUREWITHTHE REFORMERS
ForThe Honorable Albert P. BrewerandThe Reverend Charles T. Carter
άλλήλων τὰ βάρη βαστάζετε, καὶ οὕτωςάναπληρώσετε τὸν νόμον τοῦ ΧριστοῦGALATIANS 6:2
CONTENTS
ABBREVIATIONS
ANF
A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, eds. Ante-Nicene Fathers. 10 vols. Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1885-1896. Reprint, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951-1956. Reprint, Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994.
ARG
Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte. Archive for Reformation History, Gütersloh, Westf; G. Mohn, 1904-.
CC
Calvin’s Commentaries. 22 vols. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003.
CNTC
Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries. 12 vols. Edited by D. W. and T. F. Torrance. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959-1972.
CO
Ioannis Calvini Opera Quae Supersunt Ommia. 59 vols. Corpus Reformatorum 29-88. Edited by G. Baum, E. Cunitz and E. Reuss. Brunswich and Berlin, 1863-1900.
CR
Corpus Reformatorum. Edited by C. G. Bretsjchneider. Halle, 1834-1860.
CWE
Collected Works of Erasmus. 86 vols. planned. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969-.
EE
P. S. Allen, ed. Opus espistolarum Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami. 12 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906-1947.
HCC
Philip Schaff. History of the Christian Church. 8 vols. New York: Charles Scribner, 1882-1910.
JETS
Journal of Evangelical Theological Society. Published by the Evangelical Theological Society, Louisville, Ky. 1958-.
LB
J. Leclerc, ed. Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Opera Omnia. 10 vols. Leiden [Lugduni Batavorum], 1703-1706.
LCC
J. Baillie et al., eds. The Library of Christian Classics. 26 vols. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953-1966.
LCL
Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: Heinenmann, 1912-.
LW
Luther’s Works [“American Edition”]. 55 vols. St. Louis: Concordia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1955-1986.
MBW
Melancthons Briefwechsel: Kritische und Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977-.
OER
Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation. 4 vols. Edited by Hans J. Hillerbrand. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
PG
J. P. Migne, ed. Patrologia cursus completus. Series Graeca. 166 vols. Paris: Migne, 1857-1886.
PL
J. P. Migne, ed. Patrologia cursus completus. Series Latina. 221 vols. Paris: Migne, 1844-1864.
WA
D. Martin Luther Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. 66 vols. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1883-1987.
WA, Br
D. Martin Luther Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Briefwechsel. 18 vols. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1930-1985.
WA, DB
D. Martin Luther Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Deutsche Bibel. 12 vols. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1906-1961.
WA, TR
D. Martin Luther Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Tischreden. 6 vols. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1912-1921.
WLS
What Luther Says: A Practical In-Home Anthology for the Active Christian. 3 vols. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2006.
WML
Works of Martin Luther with Introductions and Notes. 6 vols. Philadelphia: A. J. Holman & Castle, 1915-1932.
Z
Emil Egli, George Finsler, et al., eds. Huldreich Zwinglis Sämtliche Werke. Corpus Reformatorum. Vols. 88-101. Berlin-Leipzig-Zürich, 1905-1956.
PREFACE
G. R. ELTON, AN ESTEEMED HISTORIAN OF AN EARLIER GENERATION, once wrote that “if there is a single thread running through the whole story of the Reformation, it is the explosive and renovating and often disintegrating effect of the Bible.”1 This book is the story, or at least part of the story, of how the Bible came to have a central role in the sixteenth-century movement for religious reform that we call the Protestant Reformation. There had been many Bible-based reform movements throughout the history of the church, beginning with monasticism, in which the Scriptures had a prominent place in the daily liturgy of the hours. Closer to the Reformation, the Bible had also been championed by late medieval movements of dissent—the Lollards in England, the Hussites in Bohemia and the Waldensians spreading from the Italian Alps to every corner of Europe. There were the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life who copied, read and taught the Bible in their many communities throughout Germany and the Low Countries. The old myth that there was complete ignorance of the Bible between the death of Augustine and the birth of Luther has long been exploded.
And yet there was something unique in the way the Bible took center stage at the time of the Reformation. Nearly a century after King Henry VIII allowed the first royally sanctioned Bible to be published in English, William Chillingworth, a Catholic who became a Protestant only to return later to the Church of Rome, declared in 1638: “The Bible, the Bible only I say, is the religion of Protestants.” While much controversy would surround that little word only, it was manifestly true that the translation and dissemination of the Scriptures had profoundly shaped the spiritual lives of many people. John Foxe tells of a farmer who gave a wagonload of hay for a copy of the epistle of James. And John Knox relates the story of a believer in Scotland who was so excited to have the Bible in English that he left his wife alone in bed at night to read from his treasured volume. And there was the incomparable John Bunyan who asked, “Have you never a hill Mizar to remember? Have you forgot the close, the milk house, the stable, the barn, and the light, where God did visit your soul? Remember also the Word—the Word, I say, upon which the Lord hath caused you to hope.”2 These examples and many others speak of the transformative effect of the Bible on many who read it eagerly for the first time.
It would be easy to find similar testimonies of the Bible’s power and influence from earlier periods in the history of the church. But two developments on the eve of the Reformation made the Protestant appropriation of the Bible more encompassing than anything that had happened in the previous fifteen hundred years. One was the advent of printing, which effected a communications revolution comparable to that brought about by the computer and the Internet in our day. Bibles had to be chained in the Middle Ages, not to prevent their being read but to keep them from being stolen. Bibles were expensive and rare, and it took many months for one copy to be made by hand. The printing press changed all of this almost overnight. By the time of Luther’s death in 1546, it is estimated that half a million copies of his Bible were in circulation. The other development was the product of the “new learning” brought about by the recovery of classical languages and the critical study of ancient sources. This made possible a new approach to biblical scholarship and exegesis.
In the following pages we touch on three recurring tensions that came to the fore in the Reformation understanding of the Bible. First, there is the question of Scripture and tradition. The reformers insisted that the Word took precedence over the church. Because of this all decisions, decrees and traditions had to be normed by “the proper touchstone” of Scripture. But it was never simply a question of Scripture or tradition, holy writ or holy church. The sufficiency of Scripture functioned in the context where the Bible was regarded as the book given to the church, gathered and guided by the Holy Spirit. In many ways, the Reformation was as much a struggle over the writings of the church fathers as it was over Scripture itself. Which Ambrose? Whose Augustine? Why Origen and not Chrysostom? The question of biblical authority and theological continuity helped to frame the issue of Protestant identity in the Reformation.
Another tension of the period grew out of the desire to make the Bible available to everyone in the common languages of the day. On this issue, Erasmus and Luther, and indeed some of the Catholic reformers, stood together. Early Reformation initiatives were driven by the call to translate the Bible into the vernacular so that farm boys at their ploughs and milkmaids at their pails could hold the Word of God in their hands and read it with their eyes. It soon became evident, however, that godly pastors and teachers were necessary to help interpret the Bible in responsible ways. The old joke was that down in Rome there was one pope sitting on seven hills while up in Germany there were a hundred popes sitting on every little ant hill, and the joke had enough truth behind it to make Protestants wince. The disaster of the Peasants’ War and the later debacle of the Anabaptist kingdom of Münster prompted Protestant reformers to develop programs for pastoral training and theological resources for those charged with handling the Word of God.
A third issue related to how the Bible was used in the life and worship of the Protestant churches. For the Bible was meant to be not only read, studied, translated, memorized and meditated on. It was also to be embodied in preaching, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, singing, praying and service in the world. The distinct traditions of the Protestant Reformation often grew out of the diverse ways the Word was embodied in what might be called the practicing of the Bible.
It is fitting that we open this book with a hymn that is also a prayer. Though written in modern times, these words breathe the spirit of the Reformation:
Thanks to God whose word incarnate
came to save our human race.
Deeds and words and death and rising
testify to heaven’s grace.
God has spoken:
praise him for his open word.
Thanks to God whose word was written
in the Bible’s sacred page,
record of the revelation
showing God to every age.
God has spoken:
praise him for his open word.
Thanks to God whose word is published
in the tongues of every race.
See its glory undiminished
by the change of time or place.
God has spoken:
praise him for his open word.3
ONE
WHY READTHE REFORMERS?
Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods. . . . A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village:the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the pressand the microphone of his own age.
C. S. LEWIS
THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION WAS A TIME OF TRANSITION, vitality and change that gave us the compass, the printing press, the telescope, gunpowder, the first map of the New World, the revival of the visual arts and letters (Michelangelo and Shakespeare), widespread inflation, the rise of the modern nation-state, wars of religion—and a word to describe all of this, revolution, from Nikolaus Copernicus’s famous work, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543). The Protestant Reformation was a revolution in the original scientific sense of that word: the return of a body in orbit to its original position. It was never the desire of Luther to start a new church from scratch. He and the other reformers who followed in his tracks wanted to re-form the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church on the basis of the Word of God and to do so by returning to the historic faith of the early church as they found it set forth in the pure teachings of the Scriptures. This led to a fundamental reorientation in Christian theology. Luther’s rediscovery of justification by faith alone, Zwingli’s insistence on the clarity and certainty of the Bible, Calvin’s emphasis on the glory and sovereignty of God and the Anabaptist quest for a true visible church all found expression in numerous new confessions, catechisms, commentaries, liturgies, hymns, martyrologies and church orders. Like a great earthquake that continues to generate seismic aftereffects long after the first shock is over, the Reformation set in motion a revolution in religious life the effects of which are still being felt half a millennium later.
The reformers of the sixteenth century shared with ancient Christian writers and the medieval scholastics who came before them a high regard for the inspiration and authority of the Bible. Already in the New Testament the writings of the Hebrew Bible, which Christians would later come to know as the Old Testament, are regarded as divinely inspired, God-breathed (2 Tim 3:16). On more than one occasion, Paul identified the Scripture with God’s own speaking (see Gal 3:8; Rom 9:17; 10:11). It is God who speaks in the Scripture, and for this reason it has an unassailable validity for the people of God. What J. N. D. Kelly wrote about the early church is equally true for biblical exegetes in the medieval and Reformation eras: “It goes without saying that the fathers envisaged the whole of the Bible as inspired.”1
There were many debates about the Bible in the sixteenth century: Should it be translated and, if so, by whom and into which languages? What is the extent of the canon? How can one gauge the true sense and right interpretation of Scripture? How was the Bible to be used in the preaching and worship of the church? What is the relative authority of Scripture and church tradition? These and other questions about the Bible were debated not only between Catholics and Protestants but also among scholars and theologians within these two traditions. Such disputes should not be minimized, for some of them proved to be church-dividing. But it is also important to recognize that the exegetical debates of the sixteenth century were carried out within a common recognition of the Scriptures as divinely given. Referring to the books of the Old and New Testaments as “sacred and canonical,” the First Vatican Council (1869-1870), looking perhaps backward more than forward, summarized the Catholic view of the Bible in words that would have been warmly embraced by both Protestant and Catholic reformers in the sixteenth century:
These books are held by the Church as sacred and canonical, not as having been composed by merely human labour and afterwards approved by her authority, nor merely because they contain revelation without error, but because, written under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, they have God for their author.2
It was a core conviction of the Reformation that the careful study and meditative listening to the Scriptures, what the monks called lectio divina, could yield a life-changing result. For the reformers the Bible was a treasure trove of divine wisdom to be heard, read, marked, learned and inwardly digested, as the Book of Common Prayer’s collect for the second Sunday in Advent puts it, to the end that “we may embrace, and ever holdfast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou has given us in our Savior Jesus Christ.” In his commentary on Hebrews 4:12, “The Word of God is living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword,” Calvin declared, “Whenever the Lord accosts us by his Word, he is dealing seriously with us to affect all our inner senses. There is, therefore, no part of our soul which should not be influenced.”3 The study of the Bible was meant to be transformative at the most basic level of the human person, coram deo. It was meant to lead to communion with God.
But for the reformers the Bible had public as well as personal consequences. The Bible was not merely a text to be observed, analyzed and internalized. It was also an event, a “happening” of earth-shattering moment. In 1522, one year after his famous confession, “Here I stand, God help me,” at Worms (April 18, 1521), Luther described, with a twinkle in his eyes no doubt, how the Reformation had been brought about solely by the Bible while he had been taking a snooze or having a drink with his friends.
Take me, for example. I opposed indulgences and all papists, but never by force. I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And then while I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my Philip and my Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that never a prince or emperor did such damage to it. I did nothing. The Word did it all.4
The reformers knew, of course, that the expression “Word of God” referred in its most basic sense to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the substantial Word, the eternal Logos who was made flesh—verbum incarnatum—for us and for our salvation. And Word of God was also the spoken word, so that the preaching of the gospel is a sacramental event, a means of grace. As Heinrich Bullinger put it boldly in the Second Helvetic Confession (1566): “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.”5 Yet the Word of God was also a canon of texts, a collection of books (biblia), something that could be written down, copied, translated, edited, published, disseminated, commented on and taught. In the quotation cited above, when Luther said that he “wrote God’s Word,” he was referring to his recently completed translation of the New Testament from Greek into German. Soon William Tyndale would follow suit in English, and others in French, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Hungarian, even Arabic, so that the written Word of God resounded from the lecture rooms, debate halls and pulpits of all parts of Europe.
IMPERIALISMSOFTHE PRESENT
I first came to the study of the Reformation during my undergraduate studies at a state university in Tennessee where I majored in history and took many courses in philosophy and religion. I had wonderful professors who taught me to think critically, to weigh historical sources carefully, to appreciate the long sweep and complexity of what was called in those days western civilization. I remain grateful for what I learned in that institution, but the reigning paradigm was shaped by the assumptions and icons of modernity whose works we read—Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Hume, Heidegger, Husserl, Tillich, Bultmann and (just a little snippet of) Barth. I still have my well-marked, blue-backed copy of John Herman Randall’s The Making of the Modern Mind, a major textbook in one of my courses. This book, first published in 1940, offered a sweeping overview of the intellectual background of the modern world. The Reformation was presented as a form of medieval supernaturalism, a regressive reaction against the growing naturalism and humanism that was increasingly to mark the modern age. In this schema, Erasmus was a proto-modernist at once liberal and liberating in his appeal to reason and free will; Luther was a Fundamentalist with a capital F. The book closed with a quotation from Bertrand Russell extolling Thought, with a capital T (read “autonomous human reason”), in exalted religious tones: “Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence; yet it bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were Lord of the universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.”6
When I arrived at Harvard Divinity School in the 1970s, I met Harvey Cox, like me a former Baptist youth evangelist. Cox was then in his post-Secular City, pre-postmodern phase and was much enamored with Buddhism and spiritualities of the East. In 1977 he published a book titled Turning East in which he argued for what he called the “principle of genealogical selectivity.”
As late twentieth-century Christians trying to work out a viable spirituality, there are two principal historical sources to which we should look. They are the earliest period of our history and the most recent, the first Christian generations and the generation just before us . . . the ransacking of other periods for help in working out a contemporary spirituality soon becomes either antiquarian or downright misleading.7
Cox’s counsel against “ransacking” the past reflects an attitude common in American culture in general, especially within evangelicalism. It reflects what might be called the heresy of contemporaneity or, in less theological terms, the imperialism of the present. What do I mean by this term? In the Middle Ages, everyone believed that the earth was at the center of reality, that the whole created cosmos was ordered in relation to what we now know, thanks to Copernicus, is a mere speck of dust among myriads of constellations and galaxies. The Copernican revolution was a paradigm shift. It radically altered our view of space. But we have yet to experience a similar revolution with respect to time. We still place ourselves, our values, our worldview at the center of history, relegating whole epochs to the Dark Ages or pre-Enlightenment culture. Thus the Christian past, including ways earlier generations of believers have understood the Bible, becomes not so much something to be studied and appropriated as something to be ignored or overcome.
Reading Scripture with the fathers, the scholastics and the reformers finds no place in the polarizing dialectic recommended by Cox. The dialectic of primitivism or presentism establishes two centers of scriptural engagement—the first Christian generation, which means the writings of the New Testament, and the most recent generations, notably my generation. This dichotomy governs the way Scripture is read in much of the Christian community today, both in liberal mainline churches and in conservative evangelical ones. There is, we might say, a presentist imperialism of the left and a presentist imperialism of the right.
Cox’s statement clearly stands in continuity with the liberal Protestant theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of modern hermeneutics, who defined religion as the feeling of absolute dependence and understood Scripture as a detailed expression of that faith which was present in a feeling of need.8 Schleiermacher displaced the central teachings and dogmas of the church with Christian self- consciousness. This allowed him to relativize the doctrines of traditional orthodox belief by “entrusting them to history for safekeeping,” as he once put it.9 It is not surprising to find Schleiermacher’s entire treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity relegated to a brief appendix at the end of his nearly eight-hundred-page textbook of systematic theology, On the Christian Faith.
If the reader’s own religious self-consciousness and that of the immediately preceding generations form one pole of biblical interpretation, then the other consists in the experience of the first Christians, reconstrued by means of presumably objective and disinterested scholarship. At the heart of this enterprise is the effort to identify what we might call the Bible behind the Bible. In this critical approach, one part of Scripture is played off against another (most obviously, the two Testaments). Discrete units within the Bible are further dissected in terms of competing hypotheses of authorship, literary form, original context, source of origin, and so forth, so that any sense of Scripture as a coherent narrative unity is negated. Historical-critical exegesis arose as an effort to release the Bible from the shackles placed on it by the intervening two millennia of biblical interpretation. In his famous 1885 Bampton Lectures, Frederic W. Farrar so described the critical scholarly enterprise:
And how often has the Bible thus been wronged! It has been imprisoned in the cells of alien dogma; it has been bound hand and foot in the grave clothes of human tradition; it has been entombed in a sepulcher by systems of theology, and the stone of human power has been rolled up to close its door. But now the stone has been rolled away from the door of the sepulcher, and the enemies of the Bible can never shake its divine authority unless they be fatally strengthened by our hypocrisies, our errors, and our sins.10
The history of how the Bible has been interpreted throughout the history of the church thus becomes at best a distraction, a useless habit of ransacking the past for spiritual guidance to the neglect of the scientific analysis and reconstruction of the Bible itself. It was the aim of Farrar and his colleagues to liberate the Bible from its churchly bondage.
An imperialism of the present also thrives on the right within a populist evangelicalism shaped by the likes of the celebrated evangelist Billy Sunday, who once boasted, “I don’t know any more about theology than a jackrabbit does about ping pong, but I’m on the way to glory.”11 A higher level of discourse is carried on in the Evangelical Theological Society, but even this august group of scholars has only recently amended its annually subscribed statement of faith to include, in addition to the affirmation of biblical inerrancy, a required belief in the doctrine of the Trinity. If, in Paul Tillich’s terms, Protestant principle has swallowed up Catholic substance in much of contemporary evangelicalism, this is because evangelicals have paid too little attention to the sum total of the Christian heritage handed down from previous ages, including the practice of reading Scripture in the company of the whole people of God. It is ironic that the Reformation principle of sola scriptura, though much misunderstood, has led to the neglect among Protestants of the biblical commentaries of the reformers. We shall revisit the principle of sola scriptura throughout this volume as we consider how the reformers understood the Bible in relation to the tradition of the church. For now it is sufficient to recognize the danger of using sola scriptura as a slogan to cut ourselves off from reading along with the fathers and reformers of ages past. J. N. Darby, the founder of the Plymouth Brethren, tried to eliminate all vestiges of the Catholic tradition, including ministerial orders and the use of biblical commentaries, which he considered unhelpful intermediaries between the Scriptures and the individual soul. F. F. Bruce, the great evangelical New Testament scholar, related a comment made about Darby: “He only wanted men ‘to submit their understanding to God,’ that is, to the Bible, that is, to his interpretation!”12 Today Darby’s disciples are legion and not only among the Brethren movement he inspired.
SUPERIOR EXEGESIS
The historical-critical interpretation of the Bible held sway during the latter part of the nineteenth and nearly all of the twentieth century, and it still informs much of the discourse within the secular academy and the academic guild of biblical scholars. Within the past generation, however, the dominance of the historical-critical paradigm has been challenged from two different yet converging sources. On the one hand, there is a growing appreciation for the history of exegesis and the theological interpretation of the Bible understood as the book of the church. On the other hand, postmodern interpretations of the human self, language and textuality, while often couched in nonreligious terms, draw on themes and sensibilities of the premodern Christian tradition and call into question many assumptions of critical exegesis. Together these developments have created a new openness for a fresh engagement with the exegetical writings of the church fathers, scholastics and reformers.
In 1980, David C. Steinmetz published in Theology Today an essay with an edgy title, “The Superiority of Precritical Exegesis.”13 A leading scholar of the Reformation, Steinmetz does not deal directly with sixteenth-century exegesis in this article. Rather, he tackles what C. S. Lewis once called the “chronological snobbery” of scholarly methods that dismiss Reformation-era studies of the Bible, along with the interpretive tradition that preceded them, as antiquated, regressive and all but useless for understanding the Bible today. As an example of this approach, Steinmetz quotes Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, whose oft-cited 1859 essay, “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” included this statement: “The true use of interpretation is to get rid of interpretation, and leave us alone in company with the author.”14 Jowett’s jibe, though dressed in high Anglican garb, sounds strikingly similar to Alexander Campbell’s advice to his disciples. The Restorationist leader encouraged his followers to “open the New Testament as if mortal man had never seen it before.”15
Returning to Augustine and the early church, Steinmetz shows how the famous theory of the fourfold sense of Scripture that came to be widely used in the Middle Ages was a way of taking seriously the words and sayings of Scripture, including implicit meanings beyond the original intentions of the human authors. According to Steinmetz, this kind of exegesis did not mean the abandonment of the literal sense of the text, which was always taken as a given (the history in the Bible was understood as historical and the miracles as miraculous). Indeed, beginning with Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas of Lyra in the Middle Ages and continuing into the Reformation the literal sense became more prominent, even if more complex as it absorbed more and more of the content of the spiritual meanings. But the precritical exegetical approach did not mean an “anything goes” method of interpretation. The Bible opened up a field of possible meanings that allowed for considerable exegetical creativity but also imposed limits on the interpreter. Exactly what those limits were and how they related to the magisterial authority of the church would become major issues of dispute in the Reformation.
Like his teacher, Heiko A. Oberman, Steinmetz has emphasized the importance of understanding the Reformation in medieval perspective. He has also pioneered the method of comparative exegesis showing both continuity and discontinuity between major Reformation figures and the preceding exegetical traditions (see especially his essays collected in Luther in Context and Calvin in Context).16 The work of Steinmetz and his many students has contributed significantly to a renaissance in the theological interpretation of the Bible that has become one of the major and most encouraging developments in recent theology.
One of the best recent introductions to the theological interpretation of Scripture is J. Todd Billings’s The Word of God for the People of God, in which the value of premodern biblical exegesis is affirmed and defended against popular objections.17 Billings emphasizes the churchly context of reading Scripture—the Bible is the church’s book and is meant to be a means of grace, an instrument of communion with God. The sterility of the historical-critical method resulted in part from the sequestration of biblical studies to the context of an increasingly secularized academy divorced from the life and faith of the people of God. The closing sentence in Steinmetz’s programmatic essay points to the peril of such a dichotomy: “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.”
“The Superiority of Precritical Exegesis” has been reprinted several times and is frequently cited by scholars engaged in biblical interpretation. Also, an important volume of essays has been published to show how major themes in Steinmetz’s essay have been applied in sixteenth-century exegesis and interpretation: Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation, edited by Richard A. Muller and John L. Thompson.18 This volume includes an earlier statement by Steinmetz, his ten theses on theology and exegesis, which he first presented in the 1970s and which continues to inform studies in the history of biblical interpretation.
The meaning of a biblical text is not exhausted by the original intention of the author.
The most primitive layer of biblical tradition is not necessarily the most authoritative.
The importance of the Old Testament for the church is predicated upon the continuity of the people of God in history, a continuity which persists in spite of discontinuity between Israel and the church.
The Old Testament is the hermeneutical key which unlocks the meaning of the New Testament and apart from which it will be misunderstood.
The church and not human experience as such is the middle term between the Christian interpreter and the biblical text.
The gospel and not the law is the central message of the biblical text.
One cannot lose the tension between the gospel and the law without losing both law and gospel.
The church which is restricted in its preaching to the original intention of the author is a church which must reject the Old Testament as an exclusively Jewish book.
The church which is restricted in its preaching to the most primitive layer of biblical tradition as the most authoritative is a church which can no longer preach from the New Testament.
Knowledge of the exegetical tradition of the church is an indispensable aid for the interpretation of Scripture.19
A further note should be added about the loaded terms “precritical” and “superior.” As Muller and Thompson pointed out, the concept of precritical exegesis is fraught with hubris and condescension. A close reading of premodern exegesis will show that many of its practitioners were keenly aware of the kind of issues that preoccupy contemporary students of the Bible such as the authorship of the Pentateuch, multiple versions of the same event, imprecision in quotations, the so-called synoptic problem, and so forth. Through the work of Erasmus and other humanist scholars, these issues became more prominent at the time of the Reformation, but they are presaged in earlier commentaries as well. In other words, “precritical” does not equal “uncritical.” In what sense then, is pre-Enlightenment study of the Bible superior to that practiced by Jowett, Farrar, and their successors?
It must be admitted that the knowledge base for the study of the Bible today is quantitatively much greater than it was in the sixteenth century. To take only one example, the field of archeology (and its related disciplines like epigraphy, numismatics, comparative philology, and so on) was just emerging in the age of the Renaissance. Textual criticism of the Bible was also in its infant stages. No one had heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Rosetta stone. The study of New Testament Greek remained uninformed by the discovery of additional manuscripts and Hellenistic papyri. It would be foolish to neglect these and many other advances that have been made in the study of the Bible over the past two centuries, and no responsible practitioner of theological exegesis advocates anything like that. The appeal to the superiority of premodern biblical exegesis is a protest against the reductionism inherent in the longstanding monopoly of the historical-critical method, not a rejection of rigorous historical study of the Bible. Biblical commentaries written in the sixteenth century are marked by diverse and sometimes clashing interpretations, to say nothing of the many centuries of Christian exegesis that preceded them. However, what this tradition shares in common, often in contrast to more recent critical approaches, are five principles that guide our reading and understanding of Scripture.
The Bible is the inspired and authoritative Word of God. Recent debates on biblical inspiration and inerrancy have obscured for some what has been the received wisdom for all orthodox Christians: Scripture is a divinely bestowed, Spirit-generated gift of the triune God and should thus be received with gratitude, humility and a sense of reverence. Christians do not worship the Bible, but the God they do worship—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—has revealed himself and his plans for them and for the world through the words and message of the Bible. This commitment has been expressed in various ways throughout the history of the church, but the great Methodist leader John Wesley put it in a way that would have been met with large approval by most of the biblical exegetes who preceded him: “The Scriptures, therefore, of the Old and New Testament are a most solid and precious system of divine truth. Every part is worthy of God and altogether are one entire body, wherein is no defect, no excess. It is the fountain of heavenly wisdom, which they who are able to taste, prefer to all writings of men, however wise or learned or holy.”20 Because this is true the Bible cannot be read just “like any other book” (Jowett’s phrase) but must be received in faith, the kind of faith that is formed by love and leads to holiness.
The Bible is rightly read in light of the rule of faith. Some readers may have balked at the word system in the quotation from Wesley given above, thinking it a cipher for foundationalist epistemology or a doctrinal grid derived from a nonbiblical view of reality and imposed on Scripture from without. But Wesley was no systematic theologian. What he had in mind was the pattern of Christian truth found in the Bible and recognized by the church since the days of the apostles as the regula fidei, the rule of faith. What is the rule of faith? It is the apostolic summary of the Bible’s storyline. It is the story of how the God of Israel created all that is, the drama of his redemptive mission in the life, death and resurrection (and coming again) of Jesus Christ, and the account of his sending the Spirit to gather to himself a people called by his name. The rule of faith is the plot of the biblical canon. Its earliest forms are found already in the hymns and creeds of the New Testament and in the first baptismal confession of faith: “Jesus is Lord!” As the early church confronted new threats from within and from without, the rule of faith found fuller expression in what we now call the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381. The reformers of the sixteenth century were guided by this rule of faith in their interpretations of the Bible. Their catechisms, commentaries and longer theological works, such as Melanchthon’s Common Places and Calvin’s Institutes, they considered as but summaries of the basic Christian message found in the Bible and expressed in the rule of faith.
How does the rule of faith function for precritical exegetes of Christian Scripture? Perhaps Steinmetz can help us once again. Drawing on the genre of detective fiction, he points out that reading the Bible is sort of like reading a mystery story that has two narratives. The first narrative is the one the reader of the mystery story encounters as the tale unfolds: clues not fully revealed, false leads, shadowy characters who may or may not assume a larger part as the story goes on, unexplained encounters, altogether a haphazard and puzzling sequence of events. The second narrative is revealed by the master detective, a Miss Marple or a Sherlock Holmes, who near the end of the story brings the suspects and interested spectators all together into a room and reveals in short order what has been happening all along. Other possible interpretations of the story the reader may have entertained along the way are then once and for all dispelled. The unrecognized clues are now seen for what they really were. If the master detective performs his or her task well in presenting the second narrative, the whole story makes perfect sense, a kind of psychological closure takes place, and we are free to go on to the next novel. According to Steinmetz, the New Testament does what the second narrative in good detective fiction does: it discloses at the end the structure of the whole from the beginning.
Early Christians believed that what had occurred in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was of such importance that it had transformed the entire story of Israel and, through Israel, of the world. The long, ramshackle narrative of Israel with its promising starts and unexpected twists, with its ecstasies and its betrayals, its laws, its learning, its wisdom, its martyred prophets—this long narrative is retold and reevaluated in the light of what early Christians regarded as the concluding chapter God had written in Jesus Christ.21
Faithful interpretation of Scripture requires a trinitarian hermeneutics. The rule of faith demands that Scripture be read as a coherent dramatic narrative, the unity of which depends on its principal actor: the God who has forever known himself and who, in the history of redemption, has revealed himself to us as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Athanasius and the other fathers who struggled against the Arians for the Nicene doctrine of Trinity were embroiled in serious exegetical arguments. How could the Old Testament affirmation “God is one” be reconciled with the New Testament confession “Jesus is Lord”? What was the relationship of the eternal and unchanging God to the Logos who became flesh, Jesus Christ? Among many other things, the struggle for the doctrine of the Trinity was a debate over the meaning of the Bible, over texts such as John 1:1-14, Proverbs 8:22 and Hebrews 3:2.22 At the time of the Reformation, the doctrine of the Trinity once again emerged as a major point of dispute, especially between the mainline reformers and certain evangelical rationalist leaders among the radicals. The doctrine of the Trinity could not be surrendered because it had to do with the nature and character of the God whom Christians worship. This God, the triune God of holiness and love, was not a generic deity who could be appeased by human striving, but rather the God of the Bible who had made himself known by grace alone through the sending of his Son, Jesus Christ, “for us and for our salvation.” To enter into the mind of Scripture with a trinitarian hermeneutics is to come to know this God and not another. As Billings puts it, “The Bible is the instrument of the triune God to shape believers into the image of Christ, in word and deed, by the power of the Spirit, transforming a sinful and alienated people into children of a loving Father.”23
The Bible is front and center in the worship of the church. The reformers of the sixteenth century inherited a Christian tradition in which the Bible, for more than a thousand years in the Latin Vulgate edition, had been at the heart of the church’s liturgy and life. They inherited manuscripts of the Bible painstakingly copied by Benedictine monks whose motto was ora et labora, pray and work. But the monk’s engagement with Scripture did not end when the day’s work of copying was done in the scriptorium. The monk continued to pray, sing and recite the Scriptures in the daily liturgy of the hours. This did not mean that the Bible was never read by an individual apart from corporate worship—think of Augustine and his encounter with Romans 13:11-14 in the garden in Milan. Yet Augustine had been prepared for that encounter with Paul’s text by first hearing the Bible prayed and proclaimed by Bishop Ambrose in regular services of worship in the cathedral, and even earlier by the Scripture-soaked prayers and tears of his mother, Monica.
In the sixteenth century, the translation of the Bible was accompanied by the translation of the liturgy: Luther’s German Mass and Order of Service was published in 1526, Calvin’s Form of Prayers followed in 1542, and the Book of Common Prayer, overseen by Thomas Cranmer, appeared in the two versions of 1549 and 1552. The reading and preaching of the Bible was central to these and all other books of worship produced by the Protestant reformers. As part of their protest against clerical domination of the church, the reformers aimed at full participation in worship. Their reintroduction of the vernacular was jarring to some since it required that divine worship be offered to God in the same language used by businessmen in the marketplace and by husbands and wives in the privacy of their bedchambers. However, the intent of the reformers was not so much to secularize worship as to sanctify common life. For them, the Bible was not merely an object for academic scrutiny in the study or the library; it was meant to be practiced, enacted and embodied as the people of God came together for prayer and praise and proclamation.
The study of the Bible is a means of grace. The post-Enlightenment split between the study of the Bible as an academic discipline and the reading of the Bible as spiritual nurture was foreign to the reformers. They all repudiated the idea that the Bible could be studied and understood with dispassionate objectivity, as a cold artifact from antiquity. When the Cambridge scholar Thomas Bilney discovered the meaning of salvation while reading Erasmus’s new Latin translation of 1 Timothy 1:15, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,” he tells us that “immediately I felt a marvelous comfort and quietness insomuch that my bruised bones leaped for joy.”24 The reformers practiced what Matthew Levering has called “participatory biblical exegesis” in which the intimate “vertical” presence of the Trinity’s creative and redemptive action suffuses the “linear” or “horizontal” succession of moments. According to Levering, “to enter into the realities taught in the biblical text requires not only linear-historical tools (archeology, philology, and so forth), but also, and indeed primarily, participatory tools—doctrines and practices—by which the exegete enters fully into the biblical world.”25 Bilney’s experience led to his becoming an evangelist, and this eventually resulted in his being put to death in 1531, one of the first martyrs of the English Reformation.
REFORMERSAS PROTO-POSTMODERNS?
The Enlightenment project, with its dogmatic rationalism and its scientistic epistemology, can be roughly dated from the fall of the Bastille in 1789 to the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001. Though its aftereffects still linger, today the Enlightenment is in trouble from a serious erosion from within: postmodernism. The postmodern moment privileges the visual, the ephemeral, the pleasurable, the immediate, the evanescent, the disconnected. Metanarratives with absolute or universal implications have been replaced by local stories, and principles by preferences. The mood of postmodernity is aptly captured in a comment made by the central character in Richard Ford’s novel The Sportswriter: “I can’t bear all the complications, and long for something that is facades only. All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life.”26 Postmodern hermeneutics, left to itself, devolves into relativism, fragmentation and subjective perspectivism. The death of God in Nietzsche has led to the death of the author in Foucault and the death of the reader in Stanley Fish. The answer to the title of Kevin J. Vanhoozer’s Is There a Meaning in This Text? is—No, not really.
Postmodernism challenges the historic Christian understanding of language as a reliable medium of truth. At the same time, we must recognize its importance in unmasking the pretentions of the kind of exaggerated individualism and overweening confidence in reason that has shaped the historical-critical method of studying the Bible. Postmodernism has emphasized the relational character of knowledge, the role of the community (for Christians the church) in interpretation and the situatedness (language, gender, culture and historical particularity) of every interpreter. This requires that all texts, including the Bible, be approached with humility from a posture of receptivity, not with the aim of mastering or dominating what is encountered. Postmodernism calls for us to recognize our limitations, our finitude. As it turns out, these are habits of reading already deeply embedded in the Christian tradition. They are found, among other places, in the hermeneutical legacy of the Protestant Reformation.
In a bold and important study, Recovering Theological Hermeneutics, Jens Zimmermann has argued that the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment was anticipated by major themes in the biblical and theological work of the reformers. Among others, these three themes stand out.
The relational and correlative nature of knowledge. The famous opening lines of Calvin’s Institutes declare that “nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” There is no proper knowledge of God that does not involve self-understanding. These two kinds of knowledge are simultaneous and correlative. It is not as though one could gain a thorough knowledge of the self by earning a Ph.D., say, in psychology, and then transfer to a divinity school to pursue an advanced degree in the knowledge of God. No, at every step of the way and in every area of life, we are confronted by a seeming contradiction: The knowledge of ourselves drives us to look at God while it presupposes that we have already contemplated him. Calvin is a pre-Cartesian thinker. The act of knowledge involves more than a thinking subject and extended stuff. Calvin knew that the human mind, left to itself, would become a “factory of idols” producing self-made gods of darkness and delusion. Like later postmodern theorists, Calvin wrestled with the problem of understanding. He recognized the finitude of the human person and rejected naïve objectivism. The true interpretation of the Bible required the inward witness of the Holy Spirit: there is no independent epistemological platform on which we may stand and sovereignly survey our theological options. In every act of understanding, as in every moment of life, we all have “business with God” (negotium cum deo). As Zimmermann notes, for Calvin, “the whole purpose of reading Scripture is the restoration of our humanity to the fullness of the image of God in us as individuals and in society as a whole.”27
A trinitarian hermeneutics of the cross invites us to study the Bible with humility and conviction. The young Heidegger was drawn to the young Luther’s strong critique of Aristotelian scholasticism, especially to his development of a theology of the cross in opposition to a theology of glory.28 In his 1518 Heidelberg Disputation, Luther argued that the message of the cross destroyed (the Latin word is destruere), dismantled and reduced to nothing all abstract, speculative and objectified knowledge of God. The young Heidegger thought that later Reformation traditions had failed to build on Luther’s radical insight, and he saw himself as “a kind of philosophical Luther of western metaphysics.”29 Heidegger proposed a “deconstruction” both of Aristotle and the subsequent foundationalist construals of Descartes and Hegel on which so much modernist thinking is based. Thus, according to Zimmermann, the postmodernist critique of autonomous reason, including the notion of deconstruction itself, was foreshadowed in an important strand of early Reformation theology.
Vanhoozer has transposed Luther’s theology of glory/theology of the cross distinction into a contrast between a “hermeneutics of the cross” and a “hermeneutics of glory.”30
Those who read according to the hermeneutics of glory revel in their own interpretative skills, imposed their interpretive theories on texts, and eclipse the text’s own meaning. Such “glory” is, of course, short-lived. According to the hermeneutics of humility, by contrast, we will only gain understanding—of God, texts, others, and ourselves—if we are willing to put ourselves second and our interpretive theories to the test of the text.31
Humility is a corrective to the temptation to idolatry, the postmodern penchant for making of the human mind a factory of idols. Yet, as Vanhoozer rightly argues, a genuine hermeneutics of the cross also involves a hermeneutics of conviction, the conviction that
God has already staked his truth claim in the cross of Christ. He has already redeemed his claim in resurrection. . . . While there may be more light on the Bible’s meaning to come, we have a firm enough grasp of the overall storyline as to encourage boldness in our witness. Only such confidence, commitment, and conviction about what can be known can serve as the corrective to interpretive skepticism and sloth. The uncommitted interpretation is not worth hearing.32
Scripture and the community of saints. Jacques Maritain’s famous book Three Reformers presents the story of Luther as the “advent of the self.” Luther was the supreme individualist, Maritain claimed, a rebellious monk pulling down the pillars of Mother Church by placing his own subjectivist interpretation of the Bible above that of fifteen hundred years of ecclesial tradition. In this view, Luther and the reformers who followed him were early advocates of what Wilhelm Dilthey called “the autocracy of the believing person.”33 Yet the “deconstruction” that Heidegger rightly noted in Luther’s approach was not carried out in lonely isolation from the church, the body of Christ extended throughout time as well as space. The reformers read, translated and interpreted the Bible as part of an extended centuries-old conversation between the holy page of God’s Word and the company of God’s people. While in many cases they broke with the received interpretations of the fathers and the scholastics who came before them, theirs was nonetheless a churchly hermeneutics. One of the most lyrical expressions of this robust ecclesiology at the time of the Reformation comes from Johannes Oecolampadius, the reformer of Basel, in an address he gave shortly before his death in 1531.
The Church is the vineyard of the Lord, his heritage, his temple and his bride; even more she is his body, for which he has shed his precious blood and outside which there is no salvation. If one is not concerned for the church then martyrdom has no crown, charity is no longer a good work, and religious knowledge brings no wisdom. The person who does not love the Church does not love Jesus Christ.34
Thus, by emphasizing the correlative and communitarian character of knowledge and by following an incarnational, cross-centered hermeneutics, the reformers of the sixteenth century did anticipate major themes of postmodern theories of interpretation. At the same time, Reformation exegesis resisted the disintegrating impulse of deconstruction, affirming of God (with Francis Schaeffer) that “he is there and he is not silent.” The reformers refused to isolate the knowing subject from the God of creation—for them there is no genuine epistemology without revelation. They also read Scripture as a coherent story, a nontotalizing but still all-encompassing metanarrative in the light of which everything else has to be understood. In the words of Richard Bauckham, the biblical story is about nothing less than the whole of reality and thus it cannot be “reduced to an unpretentious local language game in the pluralism of postmodernity.”35
