Transcript
And welcome to installment one of the 1997 Warfield Lectures. I say installment one because we will have three lectures this week and the final three in the fall. We're able to do that because the Warfield lecturer this year is a resident of Princeton and so the expense of bringing him here has been so modest that we are able to. Is the microphone on? Can we have one time out? I know that there's one. Professor Karlfried Froehlich
taught at this institution for 24 years as professor of church history. One of our faculty reminded me once that it only takes two years for the student generation to not know who you are. There are those who graduate with you and then the two years behind and then the newcomers come in and wonder what his name really ever was. But Dr. Froehlich took early retirement in 1992 and we are very pleased to have him back on
this occasion as the Warfield lecturer. Let me just say a brief word about the Warfield lectureship series. It is often assumed that the Warfield lectures are in honor of Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield whose portrait graces the mantle here. That is not the case. The lectureship was funded by Dr. Warfield in honor of his wife Annie Kinkead. I just finished reading volume two of David Calhoun's history of Princeton Seminary in which he shared information with me that I
had not known and may not be something you know either. Mrs. Warfield suffered what is euphemistically called a nervous breakdown I assume on their honeymoon. They were married in 1875 and they were in Germany walking in the Harz Mountains when they were caught in a horrible lightning storm and she never recovered from that. For 40 years B. B. Warfield tended to her and nurtured her, would walk her up and down Mercer Street and then when she
could no longer do that would walk her up and down the back of the home that Dr. Loder now lives in and she died in 1915 after 40 years of marriage. So for the full length of their married life Dr. Warfield cared for this lovely lady who suffered this terrible experience as a very very young woman and that says something I think about B. B. Warfield as a man. Dr. Froehlich is a native of Germany. He
studied theology, history and classical languages at the Kirchlicher Hochschule in Wuppertal and the universities of Göttingen, Paris and Basel. He came to the United States and did a master of arts degree at Drew University and then his doctorate with the theological faculty of the University of Basel, Switzerland where he studied under professors you may have heard of Oscar Cullmann, Karl Ludwig Schmidt, Bo Reicke, Ernst Staehelin, Eduard Thurneysen and Karl Barth to name just a few. He
joined the Princeton Seminary faculty in 1968 after having taught at Drew University and he retired from the seminary in 1992. He is a lay theologian of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He has lectured widely in the United States and abroad and has been a frequent speaker at colleges and churches as well as professional and pastoral conferences. His books include Understanding the New Testament with Howard Clark Key and F. W. Young and Biblical Interpretation in the
Early Church. The title of Dr. Froelich's Warfield Lectures is "Aminadab's Chariot" subtitled "The Predicament of Biblical Interpretation". His first lecture tonight is called Principles and Rules or Smelling the Issues. Please join me in greeting Dr. Karlfried Froehlich back to Princeton Seminary. Thank you very much President Gillespie for your kind words. Thank you all for the kind welcome. I'm extremely happy to be back here standing at a place where I have stood before. Historians always remember
a little bit more than what other people may remember. There was a time when lectures could not be held in Stuart Hall and we had to schedule lectures somewhere else. I had the joy of lecturing in this room to a large class for a whole semester. I think it may have even been two semesters and I always very much enjoyed the fact that Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield was watching over us with his little twinkle in his eyes.
If you look at the picture you'll see it. He was not a man without some humor and we need that these days. The Warfield Lectures sound very ponderous and very non-humorous. Well maybe he should be. There is a time as we all know for not so serious talk. I will try to do something serious but not so that you'll sleep off or doze off. Now that is quite something because the lecture is not really short.
But if it's anything enough, an evening is long, you can have your beer afterwards, though it will not be the Martin Luther used to enjoy. These are hard times for biblical interpretation. Not only that, these are hard times for the Bible itself. Recent reports of Bible societies reveal that the sales of Bibles in Western languages are dramatically down in recent years except in Eastern Europe. One might be tempted to answer that the market simply is saturated.
Everyone has a Bible who wants one. Obviously, however, we are only scratching the surface with this answer. But it may have a bearing on the problems biblical interpretation is experiencing. What is for sale is almost exclusively translations and translations are themselves interpretations. The multiplication of translations in print in English in recent decades, if it's not exhilarating, has reached frightening dimensions and most of them claim some official authority and support. This is not only true for the
old favorites like King James or the authorized versions but for new ones as well such as RSV and NRSV, Today's English Version, New English Bible, Ecumenical Version, and a host of others. The problem then is the very existence and thus the rivalry of multiple authoritative interpretations. In fact, the integrity of the biblical word itself seems to be dissolving in the experience of our generation. You read your daily devotions or the text for your congregational Bible study
in one translation and then in another and you hardly recognize that it's the same passage. You want to memorize a verse and you're faced with an embarrassing range of possible wording right down to the Lord's Prayer and Psalm 23. You want to buy a searchable Bible for your computer. Now, which one do you choose when you don't know for sure anymore what words to search for? It's no wonder that people are opting for the King James
again, at least you know what you'll find there. Again, the problem with the translations only scratches the surface. How serious must the problems with biblical interpretation be when we just dig a little deeper? Not long ago, the future of biblical interpretation looked bright. In the wake of World War II, a biblical theology movement was sweeping the international scene and American scholars played a leading part in its development. Teachers like James Muilenberg, G. Ernest Wright, and on
this campus Bernard W. Anderson inspired an entire generation with their focus on a theology of the mighty acts of God witnessed in the literature of the old Israel and the new and experienced in the contemporary upheavals and triumphs of the post-war era. This was a time when not only form criticism and tradition history illumined biblical texts in amazingly new ways, but Gerhard von Rad could make the scholarly argument for an inner dynamic projection of the
Old Testament tradition logically and in a way inevitably leading to the New Testament. Hartmut Gese could argue for the Septuagintal canon as a normative one for Protestant theologians who, quote, can never endorse the Masoretic one for it obscures in significant measure the continuity with the New Testament, end quote. The biblical theology movement had an immense influence on theological trends in the last four decades. I only mentioned social ethics and social action, confessional and ecumenical theology, interdisciplinary
efforts within the theological curriculum, and the propagation of American evangelicalism. Times have changed. The early enthusiasm for the movement has been dampened by a good deal of perspectival reorientation through the increased intensity of Jewish-Christian dialogue and Holocaust studies as well as being influenced by new forms of scientific investigation in anthropology, sociology, social psychology. Postmodern hermeneutics in general have moved from the central interest in author, genre, and textual transmission to even more fundamental questions of the
nature of the text, the process of the emergence of meaning, and the role of the reader. For biblical interpretation, this has opened a whole new can of worms. For people in churches where the concern for the use of the Bible has its natural place, it has meant an unprecedented invasion of unsettling forces, pluralism, relativism, competition, and a whole new measure of confusion at the realization that there is no clear authority anywhere which could adjudicate between the
sides being taken. A prominent Catholic theologian has described the situation as, quote, the once stable text having been replaced wholesale by the unstable reader. And another theologian, this time a much concerned Lutheran churchman, has repeatedly characterized the trend as, quote, nihilist hermeneutics. These are harsh words, perhaps too harsh. The text was never that stable. Bart Ehrmann has demonstrated that doctrinal corrections of New Testament passages were accepted into the received text as late as the fourth and
fifth centuries. And the work of the so-called Paris Bible "correctories" tried to establish a stable text of the Vulgate in the 13th century when the mess of rival versions was becoming intolerable. And the unstable reader? Well, this, of course, was the charge leveled against all Protestant exegesis by the Catholic controversialists of the 16th and 17th centuries. Protestant biblical interpretation was the epitome of unbridled subjectivity. Nothing new here either. One thing is clear. However stable the
text, however unstable the reader, neither has ever existed outside a community of faith. It was a church council and a pope who finally created a stable Vulgate by endorsing the post-Tridentine Clementina. It was Protestant churches in which the unstable Protestant readers were united under the common confessional commitment to the scriptures as their sole norm and rule. One natural reaction to the insecurity about the authority, integrity, and normativity of the Bible has been the phenomenal growth
of fundamentalist groups in this country and elsewhere and their enormous influence on public life and opinion. A fundamentalist approach to scripture is often the answer of well-meaning people who, facing the personal and societal ambiguities of biblical pluralism, are unprepared or unwilling to accept the measure of required relativism because they have only one life to live and prefer clear authority structures in line with their religious experience and with their honest vision for a better society. With
this attitude they join a long-standing anti-intellectual undercurrent in American culture which often finds intellectually demanding debate unnecessary, like these lectures, and sophisticated argument repulsive. Of course not all fundamentalism is anti-intellectual. If we look for the trend in our mainline churches it is frequently part of a strong confessionalism. I mean by this a strong confessional commitment which is by its very nature quite intellectual. Confessionalists have to be willing to think and to think hard.
As anyone who has ever studied a confessional document of the 16th century and many people who want to be ordained you don't kind of have to do this. Well they well know that it's hard thinking required. One of the most conservative branches of American Lutheranism, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, used to prepare its future ministers in a secondary school system which offered a thorough and comprehensive liberal arts education from a young age on. The benefits of
which are still remembered with gratitude by living scholars and theologians such as Jaroslav Pelikan and Martin Marty. Or closer to home on this campus there was Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield watching over us who endowed these lectureships we just heard in honor of his wife and whose name chair I had the privilege to occupy here for almost 25 years. Now Warfield was a solid biblical fundamentalist if there ever was one, a formidable mind the apologist par excellence for
the doctrine of the plenary verbal inspiration of the Bible old and new testament alike. Like his colleagues at Princeton at that time he regarded the Bible as the one and only repository of saving doctrines which God had provided for humankind to be teased out of the various theologies of the progressive revelations contained therein into a perfect synthesis by the church's theologians past and present. He called this enterprise biblical theology. Now the doctrine of biblical inspiration in
errancy was only one of these doctrines. For Warfield as David Kelsey of Yale has observed the doctrine was not indispensable logically no other Bible doctrine depended on it but methodologically it was once it had been established. While Warfield claimed he could prove that proposition I am convinced his interest here must be seen primarily as part of his confessional commitment his admiration for the Westminster confession and its central place in the unfolding of Bible doctrine. I quote
from his words it is our special felicity that as reformed Christians and heirs of the richest and fullest formulation of reformed thought we possess in that precious heritage the Westminster confession the most complete the most admirable the most perfect statement of the essential Christian doctrine of holy scripture which has ever been formed by man end quote. Now Warfield obviously did not worry about any predicament of biblical interpretation the task of quarrying the Bible for doctrine was
a joy and a challenge worth spending his life on. If there was a predicament it probably was the cross of having to fight a host of adversaries detractors and wrong-headed thinkers within and outside his church with regard to the Bible itself only one point apparently was a source of frustration it was not errors or fact or contradictions in the Bible they all dissolve easily as adjustable difficulties but the hazards of the transmission of the text.
Warfield realized that neither in the English Bible nor in the best Hebrew and Greek texts available to him in print did he have the absolutely inerrant Bible for which he fought so hard. His response to the difficulty was simple quote the Bible we declare infallible truth is the Bible that God gave us not the corruptions and slips which scribes and printers have given us some of which are in every copy end quote. Only the supposedly lost
autographs were really inspired from Warfield's insistence on the autographs you may infer his opinion about the role of the biblical languages in the Princeton seminary curriculum. Now Bill Harris I think is here has assured me that Dr. Warfield received Dr. Erdman the newly appointed professor of English Bible in a perfectly friendly manner personally but he was certainly unhappy over the unsuccessful introduction of this unwarranted field on his campus. Now this is the point where Aminadab's chariot
comes in. Do you know who Aminadab is? No? I don't either. Not this one. Some of you may have tried to look him up. You probably became a little frustrated. The case is complicated. The Hebrew Bible and thus the King James and NRSV know of two persons of this name though it's spelled with a double "M" Aminadab and 'ayin in Hebrew not with Aleph. One of them is prominent enough to appear in the New Testament genealogies
of Jesus as the great grandfather of Boaz the husband of Ruth. The Hebrew Bible also mentions three people with a very similar name. Aminadab not Aminadab. The most important of whom is that worthy who kept the ark at Gibea after the Philistines had returned it on an ox card mind you chariot and before David took it to Jerusalem for Samuel 7 and 2 Samuel 6. Now the Greek translation Septuagint calls all of these Aminadab as in
our title and Septuagint adds two more. The natural father of Esther whose name is not mentioned in the Hebrew book of Esther you may remember Mordecai was Esther's foster father and an enigmatic Aminadab connected with chariots, harmata in Greek according to Song of Songs 6:12. The Vulgate here follows the Greek and reads propter quadrigas Aminadab on account of the quadriga of Aminadab the Latin plural here designates a chariot with a team of four. This is the
Aminadab of my title because for centuries during the Middle Ages Aminadab's chariot with its four horses was among the common biblical images for the one scripture and its fourfold interpretation. Now the verse in question Song of Song 6:12 is an absolute conundrum. Marvin Pope in the Anchor Bible calls it quote the most difficult verse in the mechanical a verse which quote continues to vex translators and commentators. First of all while the original Hebrew contains chariots all
right markavot there seems to be no name connected with it the Hebrew reads markavot Aminadab chariots of my people ammi-nadib is prince well chariots of my people my noble my princely people maybe. The rest of the sentence does not help much it seems to say kind of like I did not know my soul it set me chariots of my princely people. Now what do you do with a verse like this just leave it out or
replace it with three dots. No Bible version has dared to do that all have attended a translation that is an interpretation you have to interpret though there's no clear meaning. That is the predicament you have to interpret because the Bible's in the form of language and language forces the reader to construct the meaning in the reading and on top of it if it's to discover what this has to do with the word of God. In a
case like Song of Songs 6:12 what can you do to construct the meaning? Well if you read the nine pages pope devotes to this impossible verse you'll be utterly amazed at the options interpreters in the Jewish the Christian and the modern literary criticism camp have presented. They have tried to amend the text to postulate insertions to transpose or reinterpret particular words to construct a possible syntax to consult the context. The results are all dangerously speculative everyone
goes out on a limb every interpretation is vulnerable to criticism but danger is often very attractive. It's amazing to watch it the more intractable the textual problem the greater are the zeal and creativity unleashed. Biblical interpretation means and always has meant exercising the imagination we sometimes forget this simple truth. The goal of Bible interpretation is not to remove dangers but to face them squarely and daringly and then to go out on a limb. Concerning our verse
from song of song 6 there has been much daring indeed just read you a few recent translations. Before I knew my desire hurled me on the chariots of my people as their prince or I did not know myself she made me feel more than a prince reigning over the myriads of his people or before I knew it my heart had made me the blessed one of my kin's women or before I realized it I was stricken
with a terrible homesickness and wanted to be back among my own people. Now these are only a few modern English gropings there are many more 2,500 years is a long time for imaginative attempts to put this little piece into the mosaic of the whole that vast maze of coherence which a life with and under the biblical word has created in the soul and mind of Christian people. A minute of chariot by scribal accident and then
by the pure power of the image but probably not without divine providence has appropriated a place for itself at the heart of the history of biblical interpretation in the west. Personally I've always been fascinated by the bible its stories its images its riddles its potential projections this fascination lured me into the study of theology. As a teenager I was one of a group of Sunday school assistants whose job it was to tell the stories to younger
children. During the Thursday training sessions offered by our pastor I annoyed that pastor with so many questions about what was behind those texts that he said one night now when you're out of school why don't you study theology I promise you will get more answers than you bargained for. He was right and ever since my seminar years in the early 1950s I've been much impressed by Gerhard Eberling's thesis which that great scholar formulated in the title
of his inaugural lecture in Tübingen Germany. Title is church history is the history of the interpretation of scripture. It was probably natural for me to attempt a history of biblical interpretation in these Warfield lectures such a history serving as an introduction to what theologizing could and perhaps should mean. Now there are some standard histories of interpretation although not that many in English invariably they present the material in chronological order organizing the material by periods but there's
a problem with any periodization it suggests linear development and is tied to the idea of progress a progress which of course will always reflect the particular agenda of the author. This danger is nowhere more apparent than in the older standard work on the field in English Frederick Farrar’s "History of Interpretation" still on the bookshelves and being sold. Farrar was a progressive Anglican educator and churchman in the 19th century well known as a teacher and preacher and
from 1895 to his death in 1903 he was the dean of Canterbury Cathedral no mean job. He delivered the substance of his book as the Now Farrar defines his agenda as an apologetic one defending the cause of Christianity by furthering the truth that's what he says. Looking at the truth concerning the history of biblical interpretation however his judgment is that quote the task before us is a melancholy one because on the whole quote past methods of
interpretation were erroneous other quote systematizing the art of misinterpretation rather than furthering interpretation. Going through his seven periods Farrar sees quote system after system of these age-long misapprehensions being condemned each in term by the widening knowledge of mankind and quote obviously he takes his stand enthusiastically with critical post-enlightenment scholarship though with some Anglican caution and the optimistic conviction that the divine truth enshrined in the Bible whatever it may be will in the end stand
vindicated. No apologies can be more directly serviceable to this end he feels then quote the removal of false methods of interpretation by which divine authority has been impaired. Now this triumphalist scientism disregards in an embarrassing way the ever-continuing predicament of biblical interpretation. There will never be a time when all problematic passages are satisfactorily explained as both Farrar and Warfield seem to expect. History writing looks at the past for the sake of the present the future
but the path it traces can never be seen simplistically as a transition from darkness to light. History must give us perspective that's something [unintelligible] was sitting right there all was said and I think he's absolutely right and today we must stress the plural perspectives insight into various options of looking at a task such as biblical interpretation options that is that have been exercised in the past and have had their own effects their own dangers their possibilities
and limits. Past history is never fully passed and if its questions are not acknowledged they will continue as a burden right into the present. Now I have not divided my analysis chronologically by periods but topically by subjects choosing a subdivision by the traditional fourfold sense of scripture that dominated medieval hermeneutics from the time of Augustine to the Reformation. School children memorized its element through a simple jingle which was probably composed by a 13th century school master
that's where we first find it. It goes like this. Most of us don't speak Latin anymore so I'll translate it my own poetic attempt into English. The letter teaches the deeds of the past allegory that which to believe thou hast the moral sense teaches what thou must do anagogy the upward path to pursue. Clear enough? Well you know you can learn it you can memorize it here's an offer how to do it you don't look for
a lot of other versions because I've never found any other good English version where the thing rhymes. I'm aware of course of the wholesale rejection of this fourfold sense among Protestants from the very beginning. Martin Luther who had used the system in his early exegetical work began criticizing it as early as 1516. Now that's early even a year before the thesis. He criticizes a useless diversion typical of the formalities of scholastic theologians who had nothing better
to do than play word games. Post-enlightenment biblical scholarship almost without exception saw this fourfold sense as a hopeless antique from the horror chest of the dark ages. Farrar speaks of quote the pure fiction of the multiplex intelligentsia of fourfold sense which as he feels vitiated the popular compendium of 500 years and more recent evaluations are often no less disparaging. I'm also aware however of its recent revival which began with the massive historical study by the
Jesuit theologian and later Cardinal Henri de Lubac published in four volumes from 1959 to 1964. He calls it "Les quatre sens de l'écriture", the four senses of culture, l'histoire de l'exégèse. De Lubac was a major representative of the French nouvelle theologie which though censured by the authorities in his order and in Vatican circles attempted to break old molds of stale theological attitudes and make room for a new spirituality based on the pre-Thomist
sources of Catholic doctrine. There were Protestant voices as well. David Steinmetz of Duke University published an article in theology today at Princeton in 1980 whose provocative thesis reads and I quote the medieval theory of levels of meaning in the biblical text with all its admitted defects flourished because it is true while the modern theory of a single meaning with all its demonstrable virtues is false end quote. Steinmetz's central point about the multiple meaning of the biblical
text certainly has the sympathy of the post-modern hermeneutics of recent years which reckons with the polysemous nature of the text as a matter of course and with multiple levels of understanding which incorporate a variety of perspectives including the exegetical history of a particular passage into the interpretive event. Now thanks to that somewhat unreal Aminadab of Song of Songs 6:12, one of the major designations of the fourfold method has been the "quadriga" chariot with four horses. Other
biblical image were also used for this purpose. They have in common that they depict moving force. The four flowing rivers of paradise or to be more precise the one river dividing into four streams that's what it says the four wheeled trolleys in Solomon's temple. Remember he had Hiram made those make those well means they didn't really roll but they had wheels and especially of course the merkavah the throne wagon of Ezekiel's vision, Ezekiel 1 and Ezekiel 10,
with its four living creatures at four wheels. All these images imply that the fourfold sense is something dynamic a sweeping movement full of energy full of life of future. The merkavah was frequently used also as a symbol for the unity and diversity of the four gospels you've probably seen the four living creatures whose faces Ezekiel describes as the symbols of the four evangelists in Christian art a man for Matthew a lion for Mark an ox for
Luke and an eagle for John. These creatures could go in all directions with with wheels within wheels a magnificent sight and this is exactly of course what the evangelists did Psalm 19 their voice has gone out into all the earth and their words to the ends of the earth all four corners of it. The four corners may explain why a fourfold division of scriptural not a threefold or fivefold one emerged as the norm. Four is the
number of the inhabited world the oikoumene the region for which the scriptural word and the evangelist's message is this is destined. A minute of swift chariot the quadriga comes with four horses in the medieval world of symbolic reality no question about that although it doesn't say so in the verse. Well it didn't have to be this way but the Vulgate says it's a quadriga and since it is one it makes sense. Now you will notice that
in my lecture titles I have combined this fourfold sense with the of the five senses as Aristotle taught us there are five senses not four or six sight hearing smell taste and touch. They've often been used as a rhetorical device in the moral tradition where they were not seen as neutral but as gates for the temptation of the flesh they became extremely popular ever since Augustine had described his own conversion in terms of his fight with
the allurements of the five senses. That's book 10 chapter 30 to 34 of the confessions beautiful section. The popular literature of the 17th and 18th centuries is full of titillating allegories of the senses where it often remains unclear whether the authors take more seriously the description of the pleasures of the senses or their rejection. They all say they are moralists. For me a major reason for the combination was the phenomenon of the term itself. We call
both the forms of scriptural understanding and the forms of physical perception senses. Now the Oxford English Dictionary shows that the word field in English covers the five bodily senses as well as many other psychological activities in the vicinity of feeling but a very large area of use concerns words and language. Sense is so the dictionary the meaning or though with a significantly different distribution of weight. The largest area of use is perception awareness and feeling while
sensus as the meaning of a word or phrase constitutes a small relatively late group under the heading that which occurs to the mind. That's what sensus in latin is in relation to language something that occurs to the mind. In Greek of course this mind would be the noose and there's no terminological bridge in Greek to the senses they're called aistheteria. The meaning of a word or phrase would have to be related to noose in Greek and
there is a composite noun hyponoia which means the substance of the classical texts which as we'll see the later allegorists attempted to spell out. aistheteria the five senses on the other hand belong in the discussion of human perception the relation of the self to the outside world more broadly to reality and sense experience is an activity of the soul and the soul of course is a constitutive part of the self. The Greek tradition reckoned with a
wide variety of ways of perceiving. Plato did not distinguish between the five senses feeling hot and cold pleasure discomfort fear they all are aistheteria thus not only the soul perceives I left out Aristotle. Aristotle introduced a new biological perspective for him body and soul together constitute the self not just the soul thus not only the soul perceives but also the body quote from Aristotle sensation is produced in the soul by way of the body that's a
general truth which Thomas Aquinas centuries later formulated quite succinctly nothing Thomas says is in the intellect which has not been in the senses before if you want to engage in any intellectual activity first look at what your senses do. Now returning to English and Latin again you can see what happened in the English usage and probably in later Latin as well there has been a strong shift of emphasis in the word of word field of sense
and senses the importance of language as an access to reality rather than the five senses has grown immensely what this means at is that hermeneutics and aesthetics that's the theory of perception belong very closely together in the western tradition hermeneutics and aesthetics the four senses of creature and the five bodily senses do make a good pair but be no surprise therefore that a minute of chariot has a counterpart in a chariot of the senses one of
the earliest allegorical real allegorical poems in the Middle Ages Alan of Lille’s “Antdclaudianus,” tells the story of prudence who invites the seven liberal arts to construct a chariot on which she prudence together with wisdom will ride to heaven to ask god for the archetype of a perfect soul to fashion a new human being who would overcome the imperfection of the old human the original work of nature the five senses are the team and reason is the
charioteer the party does reach the empyrean that means the highest uh world of all the four elements but reason can go no further well theology appears and counsels prudence to leave that chariot behind remember five steeds on it uh and then mount a single horse hearing come back that you know in the fall this advice is followed and the tradition succeeds now Alan of Lille is quite aware of possible criticism of this wonderful artifice which C. S.
Lewis has called quote nearly worthless a book of the melancholy kind that claim our attention solely as influences that's C. S. Lewis Alan defends himself by making a direct connection to the hermeneutical quadriga I quote Alan of Lille let those not show disdain for this work who are still wailing in the cradles of the nurses and are being suckled at the breasts of the lower arts for in this work the sweetness of the literal sense will soothe
the ears of boys the moral instruction will inspire the mind on the road to perfection the sharp subtlety of allegory the advanced intellect end quote the chariot is a conveyance a means of transportation of movement now where we were not quite sure in the case of the quadriga aminadab what is it but here we are told in no uncertain terms it's a movement upward an anagoge as the journey to God like the sweep of the chariot
that took Elijah into heaven or if you prefer like the chariot of Plato's Phaedrus are you beginning to smell the issues now by the way the sense of smell had a strange position in Aristotle's system mathematically you can figure this out easily five allows for a center and this is where smell belongs on one side are those senses which are dependent on a medium such as air and transparency that's seeing and hearing on the other those
that are independent taste and touch in the human face eyes and ears are located above taste and touch which is distributed throughout the body below the nose now what then are the issues we smell in the never-ending predicament of biblical interpretation in the face of the fact that we must always construct a meaning though there's seldom just one right answer how do you take up the challenge creatively and imaginatively oh our exegesis courses and seminaries
should have taught us and handbooks list the steps to be taken we roll up our sleeves and go to work to solve the problem yes the problem because we're told that's what it is we compare the textual evidence establish the meaning of the words perhaps we explain the idiosyncratic usage or the etymology we amend the text or conjure up an alternative syntax we consult the context and then attempt a translation an interpretation for Song of Songs 6:12
we may end up siding with the editors of the new revised standard version who print before i was aware my fancy set me in a chariot beside my prince quite nice and then add a footnote as they do the meaning of the hebrew is uncertain now all right this way we have solved the problem as far as possible but it's the challenge of this verse in fact of any biblical text we read exhausted by being
treated as a problem the steps we were taking belong to the world of methods and rules an extremely useful category of things like the mechanical arts of aristotle's cosmos of knowledge tools designed to deal with the predicament of having to find explanations to riddles that have no clear solution the history of biblical interpretation where it has been sketched or described has been understood as a history of methods and roles very obvious in Farrar’s Bampton lectures since
he takes such a dim view of all methods prior to the advent of modern critical exegesis they all receive failing marks ranging from deficient to erroneous and insipid with no varying degrees of mitigating qualification for each of its pre-reformation epochs Ferrar can name what he calls a definite exegetic compendium that spells out the rules and methods for the rabbinic epoch he mentions the Rules of Hillel for the alexandrine epoch some sections from phyllo for the
patristic epoch Tyconius’ "Book of Rules" which is quoted by augustine and Eucherius’ "Formulae of Spiritual Understanding" for the scholastic epoch he quotes just the fourfold sense i myself thought at one time that such clearly formulated text books of constituted the best sources for the history of biblical interpretation rule books allow us to articulate and quantify differences changes and transformations from one method of interpretation to another after all they were taught and learned and we can distill
the theory behind the evangelical practices of commentaries sermons and treatises quite directly from these texts rather than having to extract it by careful painstaking analysis of all the commentaries themselves i edited myself a collection of such texts but in working on the project i found out that the situation is much more complicated for one thing most of the rules were not original to the context of interpreting the bible they were borrowed from the surrounding culture rafael
lower has shown that Hillel's Rules originated in hellenistic law court oratory phyllo's hermeneutical keys had their precedent in the alexandrine methods of homeric interpretation and Cassian's formula of the fourfold sense the one that i quoted earlier goes back to an augustinian model which is clearly borrowed from classical rhetoric the text themselves taught me that knowing methods and rules is not enough to understand what was going on in the theory in of biblical interpretation in more technical
terms i would say the knowledge of methods and rules may make an exegete it does not yet make an interpreter let me unpack this sentence a bit exegesis was part of the hellenistic educational system which according to moved in three stages all of them focused on texts classical texts like homer and hesiod the first stage inculcated basic skills reading and writing the second stage familiarized the young student very young student with a literary heritage in several
steps these steps are called mere from meros apart no several mere several parts there was first the meros, meros diorthotikon we would say today textual criticism in which the text would be established dictated copied and corrected by the young children then came the meros anagnostikon where memorization reading and declamation complete with contests and prizes were central and finally on that second stage remember that's where we are finally there comes after textual criticism and the memorization
declamation all that there comes the meros exegetikon exegesis which took the most time and effort in exegesis first the texts were explained in terms of the language form meaning of words many of them were archaic if you have read homer you know that the derivation and etymology of names would be explained inflection of verbs and syntax this later part this is a second part later on developed into a systematic greek grammars you see you know why
this happened you need a system once you want to teach children what to recognize in a form that they see this is all part of exegesis now the con then finally the content was discussed as well that means the stories behind the text according to place time event people involved this gave students of homer a basic knowledge of classical mythology you have to have that knowledge if you want to understand what's being talked about you know
you don't even know what these gods have done there are the stories teacher would tell you that's what the story is now once all this textual work was done however a final step in the whole procedure was envisaged after exegesis the meros kritikon the critical part taught no longer by the grammarians that's not part of secondary school no the meros kritikon was taught in the schools of the rhetoricians and the philosophers rather than of the grammarians
and here the leading question was no longer how one studies the classics what they mean in terms of what the words say no dear the question was why are these texts here why homer is important you see at this stage young minds were introduced to the total ethos of the society the values the norms and the heroic models which that society embraced and which were drawn from and nourished by these sacred texts homer you see methods
and rules are not enough they're nothing more than the shared tools for dealing with language and its written expression literature but not with what this language expresses how it functions in the minds of people we need for biblical interpretation what the meros kritikon was supposed to provide an understanding of the why of the expectation what the text is ultimately going to do the wider frame of reference the governing ethos and since homer as well as the
bible were sacred texts for the communities in which they had authority of the religious goal of interpretation the theological parameter into which the interpretation wants to move the text in the mind of hearer and reader i have called this frame principles probably thinking more of the latin and greek equivalents than the modern english word there is a very clear sense in which the latin principia principles does express what i mean you know this very basic undergirding
ethos or the greek archive you know the word our care the plural that's what principles are in greek now these principles are close to but not identical with the concept of mentalite which is the object of an exciting branch of recent historiography the history of mentalities those underlying feelings presuppositions unarticulated assumptions of a particular age which color everything yet are hard to pin down but they are the tip of this iceberg the part of it that
sticks out of the water because it has risen to the surface of the interpreter's consciousness paying attention to principles in interpretation means taking into account the faith and the hope of the interpreters and of the communities in which and for which they operate now you will notice that i do not call interpretive principles what many people today would expect to be discussed under this heading inspiration canon creedal or confessional identity an authoritative teaching ministry for me
these are not principles these are formal presuppositions shared by people and communities who are part of the history of biblical interpretation in all ages like warfield's doctrine of inspiration they are methodologically indispensable but not logically in indispensable to understand the dynamics of the history of interpretation at any point something else is needed one must first understand the specific form the expectation took of how the word of god would be conveyed and received in that particular situation
perhaps the best example demonstrating that rules cannot be separated from underlying principles and principles cannot be discussed with our rules is augustine's famous handbook, De doctrina Christiana, on christian doctrine augustine composed it as a guide to the interpretation use of the scriptures in the church having taught as a professional rhetorician himself he does suggest plenty of methods and tools on how to handle well even how to manipulate the language of scripture book two develops his famous theory
of science exclusively as a theory of language science and both books two and three spell out the specifics of how you deal with unknown and obscure literal and figurative language science now on first reading the argument of book one seems to have nothing to do with this entire linguistic discussion it speaks of things to be used and things to be enjoyed of the life of christian witness and of the double love of god and neighbor as
commanded by christ see what we have here is not methods and rules for the analysis of language but the principle for the sake of which the bible exists the parameter into which all interpretation should move the hearer or reader is this principle which allows augustine to declare even the bible to be dispensable there are people he says who do not need the bible except for teaching others because they have a firm hold on faith hope and
charity and quote it also allows augustine to formulate that rule incredible that any interpretation of a biblical passage is correct if it promotes the double love of god and neighbor see what i mean principle obviously augustine specific formulation of this principle was not operative in all other interpreters for the rabbis the interpretive parameter was given by israel's faith in the covenant and the gracious gift of torah as the norm of jewish life as you may know
in the Qumran this very torah was understood that's a new kind of principle as the torah of the end time along the message message of the prophets the principles of origins exegesis in the early church had to do with origins fervent interest in the fate of the human soul and his hope that this fate was connected with the saving providence of the god who was the god of israel and of jesus christ now in the history
of christian interpretation the principles always included the conviction that god's action in the historical person of jesus christ was central to god's plan of salvation beyond that they could show immense variation in scope emphasis and vital concern a minute of chariot as a reading of Songs of Songs 6:12 suggests that former christian generations did not regard biblical interpretation as a bind a predicament in which bible users find themselves but rather as an opportunity as a child
i still grew up with the legend that luther rediscovered bible when he found that unknown book chained in the library of effort and began to read it with flaming cheeks it may have been literally chained i've seen since such chained libraries and i wish some libraries with huge book losses would have them but figuratively nothing is farther from the truth the middle ages particularly the late middle ages were a period of unmitigated bible enthusiasm when people
of all stripes delighted in the chance to interpret scripture finding with amazement ever new levels of meaning john the scott had compared the multiplicity of senses to the feathers of a peacock, many many colors, the Biblia pauperum, the poor man's bible of the 14th century had paired scenes from the new testament with its prefigurations from the old testament two at a time later imitations featured more three or even five such scenes you see living in the
world of the bible meant living in a symbolic universe and this meant unlimited opportunities for discovery discovery in an article worth reading john fleming of university has painted the portrait of christopher columbus as an amateur exegete who saw his discovery of the westward passage to the orient as a spirit guided act of biblical interpretation as the implementation of a prophetic charge to him in the night of christmas eve in 1492 so columbus's own description working out
of the bowels of his stranded ship named santa maria stranded because a boy had accidentally taken the rudder he himself a humble child of franciscan like that boy was forced to leave some people behind on a paradisical island thus establishing the first christian settlement in the new world navidad among a beautiful people quote people of love without finality the people whom they found there now it all had to be the ordained fulfillment of a biblical vision
of the end of time christmas santa maria the boy no the paradise as it comes around there means it had to be the ordained fulfillment of a biblical vision of the end time what else could it be fleming again and i quote him we may put the question somewhat crudely and ask whether this account of the founding of the first doomed european settlement in america is history did all this happen in reality as our typical vocabulary
rather pretentiously might put it was there in fact the village named navidad and did it find its strange birth in that manner described the answer to the first question did navidad exist is almost certainly yes but the answer to the second question will depend so much in medieval exegesis depended upon whether one speaks literal or spiritual little sense or in allegory and these will be the themes the topics for the next two lectures tomorrow thank you very much [applause]