Biblical interpretation down through the ages - the Post-Reformation period

It might be expected that since the foundation was laid for the literal method of interpretation, Scriptural exegesis based on this foundation would have grown by leaps and bounds.  However, history shows that little progress has been made due to a continual adherence to creeds and church interpretations, as we can see by what C. Matthew McMahon reveals here:

Sola Scriptura does not rely “on the Bible alone” but also on the accepted Christian truths that God has so filtered through the church through able exegetes through the centuries. Oftentimes, Christians have an incorrect idea about Sola Scriptura as if it meant “me and my Bible alone.” However, once the Christian begins to testify of the truths of the Bible, then they are testifying of the regula fide and of accepted truth. To escape “tradition” (little “t”) is impossible. The reason so many Christians often reject Sola Scriptura for Solo Scriptura is that they are part of a schismatic group implementing their own agenda.

Sad but true — we just can't seem to stick to Scripture alone.  And all who try, are declared to be schismatic.

Yet despite this, certain sound principles have come out of this period.  Berkhof summarized these principles:

...it became an established principle that the Bible must be interpreted like every other book.  The special divine element of the Bible was generally disparaged, and the interpreter usually limited himself to the discussion of the historical and critical questions.  The abiding fruit of this period is the clear consciousness of the necessity of the Grammatico-Historical interpretation of the Bible...

The Grammatical School.  This school was founded by Ernesti, who wrote an important work on the interpretation of the New Testament, in which he laid down four principles.  (a) The manifold sense of Scripture must be rejected, and only the literal sense retained.  (b) Allegorical and typological interpretations must be disapproved, except in cases which the author indicates that he meant to combine another sense with the literal.  (c) Since the Bible has the grammatical sense in common with other books, this should be ascertained similarly in both cases.  (d) The literal sense may not be determined by a supposed dogmatical sense.

The Grammatical School was essentially supernaturalistic, binding itself to "the very words of the text as the legitimate source of authentic interpretation and of religious truth" (Elliott).

To summarize the history of interpretation, all interpretation began with the literal interpretation of Ezra.  This literal method became the basic method of Rabbinism.  It was the accepted method used by the New Testament to interpret the Old.  Our Lord and His apostles used the literal method, as did the Church Fathers, until Origen systematized the allegorical method.  Augustine's influence brought this allegorizing method into the established church and brought an end to all true exegesis.  This system continued until the Reformation, at which time the literal method was re-established.  The literal method of interpretation continued and became the basis for all true exegesis.

It is to be concluded, then, that the original and accepted method of interpretation was the literal method, which was used by our Lord, and that all other methods are false methods.

Biblical interpretation down through the ages - the Reformation period - part 2

Two names in particular stand out from the Reformation period — Luther and Calvin. Both men strongly insisted on the literal method of interpretation.  Following is a sketchy time line of the early Reformation years:
 
•1507 Luther is ordained as a priest at Erfurt
•Henry VIII becomes King of England in 1509
•1509 John Calvin is born
•1510 Luther, sent to Rome on monastic business, sees the corruption of the church
•1513 Leo X becomes Pope
•1515 While teaching on Romans, Luther realizes faith and justification are the work of God
•1517 Luther nails his 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenburg (this is the first public act of the Reformation)
•1519 Charles V becomes Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire
•1521 Luther is excommunicated
•1536 Calvin publishes the first edition of his Institutio Christianae Religionis or Institutes of the Christian Religion

Luther not only wanted to give ordinary people the Word of God, he also wanted to teach them how to interpret it. Toward this end he laid down the following rules of interpretation:

i. First among them was the supreme and final authority of Scripture itself, apart from all ecclesiastical authority or interference...
ii. Secondly, he asserted not only the supreme authority but the sufficiency of Scripture...
iii. Like all the other reformers he set aside the dreary fiction of the fourfold sense... "The literal sense of Scripture alone," said Luther, "is the whole essence of faith and of Christian theology." "I have observed this, that all heresies and errors have originated, not from the simple words of Scripture, as is so universally asserted, but from neglecting the simple words of Scripture, and from the affectation of purely subjective...tropes and inferences." "In the schools of theologians it is a well-known rule that Scripture is to be understood in four ways, literal, allegoric, moral, anagogic. But if we wish to handle Scripture aright, our one effort will be to obtain unum, simplicem, germanum, et certum sensum literalem." Each passage has one clear, definite, and true sense of its own. All others are but doubtful and uncertain opinions."
iv. It need hardly be said, therefore, that Luther, like most of the Reformers, rejected the validity of allegory. He totally denied its claim to be regarded as a spiritual interpretation.
v. Luther also maintained the perspicuity of Scripture... He sometimes came near to the modern remark that, "the Bible is to be interpreted like any other book."
vi. Luther maintained with all his force, and almost for the first time in history, the absolute indefeasible right of private judgment, which, with the doctrine of the spiritual priesthood of all Christians, lies at the base of all Protestantism.

Calvin stated his own position very clearly in his commentary to Galatians:

Let us know then, that the true meaning of Scripture is the natural and obvious meaning, and let us embrace and abide by it resolutely.

And in his Romans commentary Calvin said:

It is the first business of an interpreter to let his author say what he does say, instead of attributing to him what we think he ought to say.

In fact, Gilbert writes this about Calvin:

...For the first time in a thousand years he gave a conspicuous example of non-allegorical exposition.  One must go back to the best work of the school of Antioch to find so complete a rejection of the method of Philo as is furnished by Calvin.  Allegorical interpretations which had been put forth in the early centuries, like the interpretation of Noah's ark and the seamless garment of Christ, are cast aside as rubbish.  This fact alone gives an abiding and distinguished honor to Calvin's exegetical work.

Farrar sums up this entire period by saying:

...the Reformers gave a mighty impulse to the science of Scriptural interpretation. They made the Bible accessible to all; they tore away and scattered to the winds the dense cobwebs of arbitrary tradition which had been spun for so many centuries over every book, and every text of it; they put the Apocrypha on an altogether lower level than the sacred books; they carefully studied the original languages; they developed the plain, literal sense; they used it for the strengthening and refreshing of the spiritual life. 


(to be continued)

Bible interpretation down through the ages - the Reformation period

It wasn't until the Reformation period that any sound exegesis was produced.  In fact, it could be said that the whole Reformation movement was activated by a return to the literal method of interpretation. Certain influences led up to this.  According to Farrar:

Valla, a Canon of St. John Lateran...is one chief link between the Renaissance and the Reformation.  He had...learnt from the revival of letter that Scripture must be interpreted by the laws of grammar and the laws of language.

Erasmus is seen as another link because of his emphasis on the study of the original texts of Scripture. The translators also did a lot to bring people back to understanding the Bible literally.  Again as Farrar explains:

Wiclif, indeed made the important remark that "the whole error in the knowledge of Scripture, and the source of its debasement and falsification by incompetent persons, was the ignorance of grammar and logic.

Farrar also says of Tyndale:

We may borrow similitudes or allegories from the Scriptures," says the great translator Tyndale, "and apply them to our purposes, which allegories are not sense of the Scriptures, but free things besides the Scriptures altogether in the liberty of the Spirit.  Such allegory proveth nothing, it is a mere simile.  God is a Spirit and all his words are spiritual, and His literal sense if spiritual."  "As to those three spiritual senses," says Whitaker, the opponent of Bellarmine, "it is surely foolish to say there are as many senses in Scripture as the words themselves may be transferred and accommodated to bear.  For although the words may be applied and accommodated tropologically, anagogically, allegorically, or any other way, yet there are not therefore various senses, various interpretations, and explications of Scripture, but there is but one sense and that the literal, which may be variously accommodated, and from which various things may be collected.

Even our liberal-minded friend Briggs, who is no friend to the literal interpretation of Scripture, quotes Tyndale:

Thou shalt understand, therefore, that the Scripture hath but one sense, which is the literal sense.  And that literal sense is the root and ground of all, and the anchor that never faileth, whereunto if thou cleave, thou canst never err or go out of the way.  And if thou leave the literal sense, thou canst not but go out of the way.  Neverthelater, the Scripture useth proverbs, similitudes, riddles, or allegories, as all other speeches do; but that which the proverb, similitude, riddle, or allegory signifieth, is over the literal sense, which thou must seek out diligently...


 (to be continued)

Biblical interpretation down through the ages - the dark ages

As we might expect from whole tone of the Dark Ages, no effort was made to interpret Scripture accurately.  Paul Lee Tan, in The Interpretation of Prophecy, explains that the principles introduced by Augustine not only continued to be used, they were even expanded during this time period:

During the Middle Ages, the fourfold sense of Scripture was taught. Medieval scholars took Origen’s threefold sense—the literal, the moral, and the spiritual—and subdivided the spiritual into the allegorical and the anagogical. As schoolman Thomas Aquinas affirmed, ‘The literal sense is that which the author intends, but God being the Author, we may expect to find in Scripture a wealth of meaning.’ An example of how the fourfold sense was worked out during the Middle Ages is Gen. 1:3, ‘Let there be light.’ Medieval churchmen interpreted that sentence to mean (1) Historically and literally—An act of creation; (2) Morally—May we be mentally illumined by Christ; (3) Allegorically—Let Christ be love; and (4) Anagogically—May we be led by Christ to glory.

Louis Berkhof agrees and says this in Principles of Biblical Interpretation:

In this period, the fourfold sense of Scripture (literal, tropological, allegorical, and analogical) was generally accepted, and it became an established principle that the interpretation of the Bible had to adopt itself to tradition and to the doctrine of the Church.

Even though Aquinas agreed with the idea of looking beyond the primary meaning of the author, he did see some of the dangers of allegorization. Rodney L. Petersen in Continuity and Discontinuity: The Debate throughout Church History, tells us that...

Aquinas put forward a threefold argument against allegory: (1) it is susceptible to deception; (2) without a clear method it leads to confusion; and (3) it lacks a sense of the proper integration of Scripture.

And finally, Farrar summarizes this whole period by saying:

...we are compelled to say that during the Dark Ages, from the seventh to the twelfth century, and during the scholastic epoch, from the twelfth to the sixteenth, there are but a few of the many who toiled in this field who added a single essential principle, or furnished a single original contribution to the explanation of the Word of God.  During these nine centuries we find very little except the "glimmerings and decays" of patristic exposition.  Much of the learning which still continued to exist was devoted to something which was meant for exegesis yet not one writer in hundreds showed any true conception of what exegesis really implies.

Biblical interpretation down through the ages - the rise of allegorism - part 2

After Origen fell out of favor, the allegorical method might have faded away, had it not been for Augustine. He, according to Farrar, was one of the first to make Scripture conform to the interpretation of the church:

The exegesis of St. Augustine is marked by the most glaring defects...He laid down the rule that the Bible must be interpreted with reference to Church Orthodoxy, and that no Scriptural expression can be out of accordance with any other...

...Snatching up the Old Philonian and Rabbinic rule which had been repeated for so many generations, that everything in Scripture which appeared to be unorthodox or immoral must be interpreted mystically, he introduced confusion into his dogma of supernatural inspiration by admitting that there are many passages "written by the Holy Ghost," which are objectionable when taken in their obvious sense. He also opened the door to arbitrary fancy.

...When once the principle of allegory is admitted, when once we start with the rule that whole passages and books of Scripture say one thing when they mean another, the reader is delivered bound hand and foot to the caprice of the interpreter. He can be sure of absolutely nothing except what is dictated to him by the Church, and in all ages the authority of "the Church" has been falsely claimed for the presumptuous tyranny of false prevalent opinions. In the days of Justin Martyr and of Origen, Christians had been driven to allegory by an imperious necessity. It was the only means known to them by which to meet the shock which wrenched the Gospel free from the fetters of Judaism. They used it to defeat the crude literalism of fanatical heresies; or to reconcile the teachings of philosophy with the truths of the Gospel. But in the days of Augustine the method had degenerated into an artistic method of displaying ingenuity and supporting ecclesiasticism. It had become the resource of a faithlessness which declined to admit, of an ignorance which failed to appreciate, and of an indolence which refused to solve the real difficulties in which the sacred book abounds...

...Unhappily for the Church, unhappily for any real apprehension of Scripture, the allegorists, in spite of protest, were completely victorious.

It seems quite clear that the allegorical method didn't spring from the study of Scripture, but rather from a desire to combine Greek philosophy and the Word of God. It didn't come out of a desire to present the truths of Scripture, but to pervert them.

Even though Augustine was successful in infusing a new method of interpretation into the church, there were those who still held to the original literal method. Gilbert notes this of the School of Antioch:

Theodore and John may be said to have gone far toward a scientific method of exegesis inasmuch as they saw clearly the necessity of determining the original sense of Scripture in order to make any profitable use of the same. To have kept this end steadily in view was a great achievement. It made their work stand out in strong contrast by the side of the Alexandrian school. Their interpretation was extremely plain and simple as compared with that of Origen. They utterly rejected the allegorical method.

The history of interpretation would have looked very different had the method of the Antioch School been universally adopted. But, as J. W. Pentecost well said,

Unfortunately for sound interpretation, the ecclesiasticism of the established church, which depended for its position on the allegorical method, prevailed, and the views of the Antioch School were condemned as heretical.


(to be continued)

Biblical interpretation down through the ages - the rise of allegorism - part 1

The writers of the first centuries faced many difficulties.  They didn't have an established canon of either the Old or the New Testament.  They had known only the rules of interpretation of the Rabbinical schools and, therefore, had to free themselves from its extreme literalness.  They were surrounded by Judaism, paganism and all sorts of heresy.  Out of all this came three different exegetical schools.  Farrar says:

The Fathers of the third and later centuries may be divided into three exegetical schools.  Those schools are the Literal and Realistic as represented predominantly by Tertullian; the Allegorical, of which Origen is the foremost exponent; and the Historical and Grammatical, which flourished chiefly in Antioch, and of which Theodore of Mopsuestia was the acknowledged chief.

In tracing the rise of the allegorical school, Farrar goes back to Philo and ultimately to Aristobulus, saying that his...

...actual work was of very great importance for the History of Interpretation.  He is one of the precursors whom Philo used though he did not name, and he is the first to enunciate two theses which were destined to find wide acceptance, and to lead to many false conclusions in the sphere of exegesis.

The first of these is the statement that Greek philosophy is borrowed from the Old Testament, and especially from the Law of Moses; the other that all the tenets of the Greek philosophers, and especially of Aristotle, are to be found in Moses and the Prophets by those who use the right method of inquiry.

Philo liked Aristobulus's concept and tried to merge Mosaic law and Greek philosophy in order to make it more acceptable to the Greek.  G.H. Gilbert explains it this way:

[To Philo] Greek philosophy was the same as the philosophy of Moses...And the aim of Philo was to set forth and illustrate this harmony between the Jewish religion and classic philosophy, or, ultimately, it was to commend the Jewish religion to the educated Greek world.  This was the high mission to which he felt called, the purpose with which he expounded the Hebrew laws in the language of the world's culture and philosophy.

The only way Philo could make this work was to use an allegorizing method of interpreting Scripture.  Particularly influenced by this harmonization was the school of Alexandria.  Farrar further explains:

It was in the great catechetical school of Alexandria, founded, as tradition says, by St. Mark, that there sprang up the chief school of Christian Exegesis.  Its object, like that of Philo, was to unite philosophy with revelation, and thus to use the borrowed jewels of Egypt to adorn the sanctuary of God.  Hence, Clement of Alexandria and Origen furnished the direct antithesis of Tertullian and Irenaeus...

The first teacher of the school who rose to fame was the venerable Pantaenus, a converted Stoic, of whose writings only a few fragments remain.  He was succeeded by Clement of Alexandria, who, believing in the divine origin of Greek philosophy, openly propounded the principle that all Scripture must be allegorically understood.

It was in this school that Origen further developed the allegorical method of interpretation.  Origen believed Scripture presented a threefold sense: (1) a literal or historical meaning, but only as a stepping stone to a higher idea; (2) a psychic or moral meaning, for the general teaching of the vast majority of men; and (3) a mystic or ideal meaning, for those who knew how to understand the hidden meaning of Scripture.  (Rather arrogant, wasn't he?)  Origen's three-fold meaning theory accomplished basically the same thing as Philo's harmonization — to spiritualize away the letter of Scripture.  Instead of simply bringing out the sense of the Bible, he put into it all sorts of foreign ideas and irrelevant fancies.  But, this was what the people of his time wanted to hear. And because Origen was brilliant and extremely knowledgeable, he gathered a large following, until some of his more extreme ideas caused him to fall out of favor.


(to be continued)

Biblical interpretation down through the ages - during the time of Christ

The literal/plain method continued to be the method of interpretation among most Jews during the time of Christ.  Unfortunately, it was the same sharp literalism used before His coming.   As Bernard Ramm well observed:

...the  net result of a good movement started by Ezra was a degenerative hyper-literalistic interpretation that was current among the Jews in the days of Jesus and Paul.  The Jewish literalistic school is literalism at its worst.  It is the exaltation of the letter to the point that all true sense is lost.  It grossly exaggerates the incidental and accidental and ignores and misses the essential.

And yet it can't be denied that literalism was the accepted method.  Misuse of the method doesn't mean the method itself is wrong.  The method itself wasn't at fault, but rather the misapplication of it.

The literal/plain method was also the method of the apostles.  Although F.W. Farrar had some unusual ideas, I believe he said this rather well:

The better Jewish theory, purified in Christianity, takes the teachings of the Old Dispensation literally, but sees in them, as did St. Paul, the shadow and germ of future developments. Allegory, though once used by St. Paul by way of passing illustration [see Gal 4:24], is unknown to the other Apostles, and is never sanctioned by Christ.

R.B. Girdlestone confirmed this in his writings:

We are brought to the conclusion that there was one uniform method commonly adopted by all the New Testament writers in interpreting and applying the Hebrew Scriptures.  It is as if they had all been to one school and had studied under one master.  But was it the Rabbinical school to which they had been?  Was it to Gamaliel, or to Hillel, or to any other Rabbinical leader that they were indebted?  All attainable knowledge of the mode of teaching current in that time gives the negative to the suggestion.  The Lord Jesus Christ, and no other, was the original source of the method.  In this sense, as in many others, He had come a light into the world.

Even liberal-minded C. A. Briggs agreed that Jesus didn't follow the method of His day:

The apostles and their disciples in the New Testament used the methods of the Lord Jesus rather than those of the men of their time.  The New Testament writers differed among themselves in the tendencies of their thought...in them all, the methods of the Lord Jesus prevail over the other methods and ennoble them.

As we can see, it wasn't necessary for the apostles to use a different method to properly understand the Old Testament, but rather to correct the extremes of the existing method.  Moreover, since there's a vast difference between explaining an allegory (Gal 4:24) and using the allegorical method of interpretation, we must conclude that the New Testament writers interpreted the Old Testament literally/plainly.


(to be continued)

Biblical interpretation down through the ages - the OT

Biblical historians generally agree that biblical interpretation began when Israel returned from the Babylonian exile under Ezra (Neh 8:1-8). It became necessary at that time because of the long period in which the Mosaic law was not only neglected, but forgotten by the nation. When Hilkiah discovered the forgotten "book of the law," it was given a place of prominence for a brief time but was soon forgotten again. The Jews had also replaced their native language with Aramaic while in exile, which made the Scriptures unintelligible to them when they returned. So Ezra had to explain the forgotten and unintelligible Scriptures to the people. It goes without saying that Ezra's interpretation was a literal, plain interpretation of what had been written.

Over time Rabbinism came to have a tremendous hold on the Jewish nation.  Johann Jakob Herzog in A Religious encyclopaedia or dictionary of Biblical, historical, ... offers some interesting insight on how this came to be:

When the Jews returned from the Babylonian captivity, they felt that they were not a Mosaic people, but had, in order to become one, first, to learn what Mosaic law was, and, next, to re-organize their social, moral, and religious life in accordance with its prescripts.  The problem thus set before them demanded a union between school and government, and that union forms the very characteristic of rabbinism.  In the schools the Mosaic law was rendered into the popular Chaldaean tongue either by literal translation or by more copious paraphrasing, and to this rendering were added explanations, illustrations, admonitions, etc.  But the transition from a purely theoretical teaching of the law to a practical application of it was, of course, easy to make; and soon the teachers formed, in Jerusalem and other great cities, courts, into which all cases of litigation were brought for adjudication.  It is probably that at first the teachers were priests; but, as there was no necessity for combining those two functions, the teaching of the law, and its judicial application, gradually fell into the hands of the laity, and, as one of the principal duties of those teachers was to copy the sacred books, they received the name of Sopherim ("scribes").

In the time of Simeon the Just, who lived under Alexander the Great, or a little later, the institution attained it perfection and final establishment.  With Simeon the Just, however, begins the second stage in the development of rabbinism.  It was quite natural, that in the interpretation of the law, a tradition should be formed, comprising the opinions of the oldest and wisest interpreters, the Chachamim; and soon this tradition was dated back beyond the Babylonian captivity, even up to Moses.  But where there is tradition, there will come schools.  Antigonus, a pupil of Simeon the Just, formed the first school, and from that branched off afterwards the school of the Sadducees; for the Sadducees were a school before they became a sect.  About the same time a circle of men gathered from among the mass of the people, and pledged themselves to the strictest observance, even the most minute prescripts of the law; and from this circle of men, the Chassidim, afterwards developed the sect of the Pharisees.  Of still greater importance than the formation of schools was the transformation of the whole class of law-teachers into a corporation, which also took place in this period, owing to the introduction of the semichah, or ordination by the laying-on of hands.  Though the semichah was not legally established until about eighty years before Christ, it, too, was dated back to Moses.  Its final form it received from Hillel I.: it could be given only within the boundaries of Palestine, and only with the consent of the president of the sanhedrin, and any one who had received it was eligible to that assembly.    

It is obvious that the scribes during this time used a literal method of interpretation; however, it was a literalness so sharp, it cut out the spiritual requirements of the law. Although they arrived at false conclusions, it wasn’t the fault of the literal method, but the misapplication of it. C.A. Briggs, after explaining the thirteen rules that guided Rabbinical interpretation, says this:

Some of the rules are excellent, and so far as the practical logic of the times went, cannot be disputed. The fault of Rabbinical exegesis was less in the rules than in their application, although latent fallacies are not difficult to discover in them, and they do not sufficiently guard against slips of argument.

So despite all the fallacies of Jewish Rabbinism, it must be concluded that they followed a literal, plain method of interpretation.


(to be continued)

Biblical interpretation down through the ages - introduction

Hermeneutics is the science that gives us the principles of interpretation.  These principles guide anybody's system of theology.  They ought to be determined before one's theology is systematized, but in practice the reverse is usually true.  At least in the awareness of most people, hermeneutics is one of the last things to be considered.  Most people know something of the doctrines they believe but little of the hermeneutics on which they have been built. Preferably the principles, and thereby the method, of interpretation should be established before attempting to interpret the Word of God so that the results are a correct interpretation of Scripture and a right system of theology growing out of those interpretations.  

While many diverse methods of interpreting Scripture have been proposed over the course of history, today there are basically two distinct hermeneutical methods — the allegorical/spiritual and the literal/plain.  The general definitions of both are below:

Allegorical/Spiritual method - the method of interpreting a literary text that regards the literal sense as the vehicle for a secondary, more spiritual and more profound sense.  The historical import is either denied or ignored and the emphasis is placed entirely on a secondary sense so that the original words or events have little or no significance. 

Literal/Plain method - the method that gives to each word the same exact basic meaning it would have in normal, ordinary, customary usage, whether employed in writing, speaking or thinking.  The spiritual meaning of a word or expression is one that arises after the literal designation and is dependent upon it for its existence.

How these two divergent methods of interpretation came into being is an interesting study.  I'll write about them over the next several weeks.


(to be continued)