Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically
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Teachers (the “doctors” of the church) were to train pastors in the reading of the Bible, and pastors were to teach their congregations.
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In Geneva Calvin had the title “Reader,” and he more than lived up to it, writing commentaries on almost every book in the Christian canon.
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“To the Reader,” Calvin explained that the purpose of his doctrinal instruction was to make smooth the path of reading the Bible so that readers “may be able both to have easy access to it and to advance in it without stumbling.”
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Calvin himself described doctrinal theology as “a key to open a way for all children of God into a good and right understanding of Holy Scripture.”
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Gilbert Vincent argues that, for Calvin, there was an ethical dimension to biblical interpretation; readers must respond not simply to bits of information but to the world-shattering event of being addressed by God.
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eschatological culture of reading, a reading by those “on whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor 10:11)—and those to whom the King of the ages has spoken.49 The salient point is that, for Calvin, the reader’s context includes “being addressed by God.”
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grammatica
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bypassed the letter:
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linguistics is next to godliness.
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To paint with a broad brush: modern readers objectify grammar, viewing language at a critical distance as something that can be studied neutrally, even impersonally.
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reductionist approach that pays attention to morphology and syntax only, abstracting bits of language from the lived context in which people use them, may technically count as grammatical, but it is not conducive to textual understanding.
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What other kinds of attention to the letter of the text are necessary to do justice to the Bible as the word of God in human words?
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the kind of exegesis we do depends on the nature of the reading culture into which we have been socialized
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exegesis without reading cultures possible
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close canonical reading
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My purpose
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The goal
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Man cannot live by looking at bread only.
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“Look. Listen. Receive.”
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Is biblical interpretation an instance of looking at or along? Should biblical hermeneutics give rise to a reading culture more like the sciences or the arts (or neither)?
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Every intellectual enterprise, including the study of the Bible, was now obligated to show that it employed critical methods that could yield genuine knowledge, if it wanted to be counted a science.
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To what kind of reading culture should Christian readers belong?
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The Jews, said Origen, could not get beyond the “letter” that kills to the “spirit” that gives life (2 Cor 3:6).
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The spiritual sense is thus the pearl of great price hidden in the shell of the letter, “a kind of outer covering and veil for spiritual meanings.”
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“The Incarnation . . . provides for Origen the guarantee of Christian allegorical access to truth.”
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“The Bible is one vast allegory, a tremendous sacrament in which every detail is symbolic.”
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allegoriphobia,
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Provan distinguishes between four kinds of hermeneutics before setting out a fifth way of his own.
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Origen knew what Boersma would like contemporary biblical scholars to know: “that the Bible cannot be interpreted without prior metaphysical commitments and that we need Christian Platonism as an interpretive lens in order to uphold Scripture’s teaching
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the nature and function of the letter of the text and (2) the necessity of going beyond letter to Spirit in nonarbitrary fashion.
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Diodore
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Three concepts figure prominently in the Antiochene approach: historia
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The Antiochenes insisting that the historia or narrative was “true” does not quite mean what a modern historian means.
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We shall treat of [the text] historically and literally and not stand in the way of a spiritual and more elevated insight [theoria]. The historical sense, in fact, is not in opposition to the more elevated sense [theoria]; on the contrary, it proves to be the basis and foundation of the more elevated meanings. One thing alone is to be guarded against, however, never to let the discernment process [theoria] be seen as an overthrow of the underlying sense, since this would no longer be discernment
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[theoria] but allegory: what is arrived at in defiance of the content is not discernment [theoria] but allegory. The apostle [Paul] . . . never overturned the historical sense by introducing discernment despite calling discernment [theoria] allegory.
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On this view, then, the spiritual sense does not float above but inheres in and adheres to the literal sense or historia (the narrative sequence of events).
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How do these two ancient reading cultures differ in forming readers to move from letter to spirit? Alexandrians view words as symbols referring to higher truths—
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Like reading culture, the notion of a frame of reference may be new to many readers, including students of hermeneutics. Both are essential to my argument and to mere Christian hermeneutics. To read with a frame of reference is to examine the text from a particular angle, put a certain set of questions to it, and filter the readers’ perceptions of what the text is about.
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Antioch and Alexandria represent not a facile contrast between letter and spirit, but different reading cultures, each with its own distinct frame of reference.
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Augustine’s approach combines the Antiochene attention to the literal sense with the Alexandrian concern for spiritual substance.
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“Theorists and teachers of lectio divina concern themselves more with the process of reading than with its result.”
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Biblical interpretation in this monastic reading culture was largely an exercise in piety for the sake of wisdom rather than knowledge.
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What we can say with confidence is that scholasticism formed a different kind of reading culture, which formed readers to have different sensibilities than they would have developed in a monastic reading culture.
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In light of these long-standing cross-cultural reading currents, the urgent questions for biblical interpreters today are these: Into what kind of reading culture have we been, or are we being socialized? Should we be trying to preserve, dismantle, or rethink the distinction that distinguishes
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What kind of reading cultures should local churches and seminaries be, and what kind of readers should they be trying to cultivate?
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Experts tend to be protective about their particular eras; a good church historian is, after all, an advocate of the past.
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When modern theology becomes a kind of religious anthropology, the disciplinary divide only deepens: “Where the subject matter of biblical exegesis and of dogmatic theology is not taken to be the same, there exists no real ground for mutual interaction between the two disciplines.”
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Theologians, too, approach the Bible with frames of reference taken from somewhere other than the biblical text (usually philosophy).
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Be that as it may, biblical scholars worry that both Protestant and Roman Catholic theologians tend to interpret the Bible with creedal and confessional rather than textual frames of reference. The concern is valid. However, it is no more problematic to employ confessional or creedal frames of reference than it is historical frames of reference, provided they enable rather than disable understanding of what the Bible says.
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