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Types of biblical hermeneutics
- Related Topics:
- number of the beast
- Hebrew Bible
- mammon
- Bible
- biblical criticism
As has been said, the importance of biblical hermeneutics has lain in the Bible’s status as a sacred book in Judaism and Christianity, recording a divine revelation or reproducing divine oracles. The “oracles” are primarily prophetic utterances, but often their narrative setting has also come to acquire oracular status. Quite different hermeneutical principles, however, have been inferred from this axiom of biblical inspiration: whereas some have argued that the interpretation must always be literal, or as literal as possible (since “God always means what he says”), others have treated it as self-evident that words of divine origin must always have some profounder “spiritual” meaning than that which lies on the surface, and this meaning will yield itself up only to those who apply the appropriate rules of figurative exegesis. Or again, it may be insisted that certain parts must be treated literally and others figuratively; thus, some expositors who regard the allegorical (symbolic) interpretation of the Old Testament histories as the only interpretation that has any religious value maintain that in the apocalyptic writings that interpretation that is most literal is most reliable.
Literal interpretation
Literal interpretation is often, but not necessarily, associated with the belief in verbal or plenary inspiration, according to which not only the biblical message but also the individual words in which that message was delivered or written down were divinely chosen. In an extreme form this would imply that God dictated the message to the speakers or writers word by word, but most proponents of verbal inspiration repudiate such a view on the reasonable ground that this would leave no room for the evident individuality of style and vocabulary found in the various authors. Verbal inspiration received classic expression by the 19th-century English biblical scholar John William Burgon:
The Bible is none other than the voice of Him that sitteth upon the Throne! Every Book of it, every Chapter of it, every Verse of it, every word of it, every syllable of it, (where are we to stop?) every letter of it, is the direct utterance of the Most High! (From Inspiration and Interpretation, 1861).
This explains Burgon’s severe judgment that the revisers of the English New Testament (1881), in excluding what they believed to be scribal or editorial additions to the original text, “stand convicted of having deliberately rejected the words of Inspiration in every page” (The Revision Revised, p. vii, London, 1883). Such a high view of inspiration has commonly been based on the statement in 2 Timothy 3:16 that “all [Old Testament] scripture is God-breathed” (Greek theopneustos, which means “inspired by God”) or Paul’s claim in 1 Corinthians 2:13 to impart the gospel “in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths in spiritual language.” On this latter passage the English bishop and biblical scholar Joseph Barber Lightfoot (1828–89) remarked:
The notion of a verbal inspiration in a certain sense is involved in the very conception of an inspiration at all, because words are at once the instruments of carrying on and the means of expressing ideas, so that the words must both lead and follow the thought. But the passage gives no countenance to the popular doctrine of verbal inspiration, whether right or wrong (From Notes on Epistles of St. Paul from Unpublished Commentaries, 1895).
The detailed attention that Lightfoot and his University of Cambridge colleagues, Brooke Foss Westcott (1825–1901), successor of Lightfoot as bishop of Durham, and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828–92), paid in their exegesis to the vocabulary and grammatical construction of the biblical documents, together with their concern for the historical context, sprang from no dogmatic attachment to any theory of inspiration but, rather, represented the literal method of interpretation at its best. Such grammatico-historical exegesis can be practiced by anyone with the necessary linguistic tools and accuracy of mind, irrespective of confessional commitment, and is likely to have more permanent value than exegesis that reflects passing fashions of philosophical thought. Biblical theology itself is more securely based when it rests upon such exegesis than when it forms a hermeneutical presupposition.
Moral interpretation
Moral interpretation is necessitated by the belief that the Bible is the rule not only of faith but also of conduct. The Jewish teachers of the late pre-Christian and early Christian Era, who found “in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth” (Romans 2:20), were faced with the necessity of adapting the requirements of the Pentateuchal codes to the changed social conditions of the Hellenistic Age (3rd century bce–3rd century ce). This they did by means of a body of oral interpretation, which enabled the conscientious Jew to know his duty in the manifold circumstances of daily life. If, for example, he wished to know whether this or that activity constituted “work” that was forbidden on the sabbath, the influential school of legal interpretation headed by the rabbi Hillel (late 1st century bce to early 1st century ce) supplied a list of 39 categories of activity that fell under the ban.
The Christian Church rejected the Jewish “tradition of the elders” but for the most part continued to regard the Ten Commandments as ethically binding and devised new codes of practice, largely forgetting Paul’s appeal to the liberty of the Spirit or viewing it as an invitation to indulge in allegory. In order to deduce moral lessons from the Bible, allegorization was resorted to, as when the Letter of Barnabas (c. 100 ce) interprets the Levitical food laws prescribed in the book of Leviticus as forbidding not the flesh of certain animals but the vices imaginatively associated with the animals. Setting up principles of exegesis by which ethical lessons may be drawn from all parts of the Bible is not easy, since many of the commandments enjoined upon the Israelites in the Pentateuch no longer have any obvious relevance, such as the ban on boiling a kid in its mother’s milk (Exodus 23:19b, etc.) or on wearing a mixed woollen and linen garment (Deuteronomy 22:11); and much of the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is widely regarded as a counsel of perfection, impracticable for the average man, even when he professes the Christian faith. Even summaries of the biblical ethic, such as the golden rule (Matthew 7:12; cf. Tobit 4:15) or the twofold law of love to God and love to one’s neighbor (Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:18), in which the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) is comprehended (Mark 12:29–31; cf. Romans 13:8–10), involve casuistic interpretation (fitting general principles to particular cases) when they are applied to the complicated relations of present-day life. The difficulties of applying biblical ethics to modern situations do not mean that the task of application should be abandoned but mean that it should not be undertaken as though it provided an easy shortcut to moral solutions.
Allegorical interpretation
Allegorical interpretation places on biblical literature a meaning that, with rare exceptions, it was never intended to convey. Yet at times this interpretation seemed imperative. If the literal sense, on which heretics such as the 2nd-century biblical critic Marcion and anti-Christian polemicists such as the 2nd-century philosopher Celsus, insisted, was unacceptable, then allegorization was the only procedure compatible with a belief in the Bible as a divine oracle. Law, history, prophecy, poetry, and even Jesus’ parables yielded new meanings when allegorized. The surface sensuous meaning of the Canticles (the Song of Solomon) was gladly forgotten when its mutual endearments were understood to express the communion between God and the soul, or between Christ and the church. There are still readers who can reconcile themselves to the presence of a book such as Joshua in the canon only if its battles can be understood as pointing to the warfare of Christians “against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). As for the Gospel parables, when in the story of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–37) an allegorical meaning is sought for the thieves, the Samaritan’s beast, the inn, the innkeeper, and the two pence, the result too often is that the explicit point of the story, “Go and do likewise,” is blunted.
Closely allied to allegorical interpretation, if not indeed a species of it, is typological interpretation, in which certain persons, objects, or events in the Old Testament are seen to set forth at a deeper level persons, objects, or events in the New. In such interpretations, Noah’s Ark (Genesis 6:14–22) is interpreted to typify the church, outside which there is no salvation; Isaac carrying the wood for the sacrifice (Gen. 22:6) typifies Jesus carrying the cross; Rahab’s scarlet cord in the window (Joshua 2:18–21) prefigures the blood of Christ; and so on. These are not merely sermon illustrations but rather aspects of a hermeneutical theory that maintains that this further significance was designed (by God) from the beginning. Traces of typology appear in the New Testament, as when Paul in Romans 5:14 calls Adam a “type” of the coming Christ (as the head of the old creation involved its members in the results of his disobedience, so the head of the new creation shares with its members the fruit of his obedience) or when in 1 Corinthians 10:11 he says that the Israelites’ experiences in the wilderness wanderings befell them “typically,” so as to warn his own converts of the peril of rebelling against God. The fourth evangelist stresses the analogy between the sacrificial Passover lamb of the Hebrews and Christ in his death (John 19). The writer of the Hebrews treats the priest-king of Salem, Melchizedek, who was involved with Abraham as a type of Christ (Hebrews 7)—without using the word type—and the Levitical ritual of the Day of Atonement as a model (though an imperfect one) of Christ’s sacrificial ministry (Hebrews 9).
