On the Logical Priority of Logos

Theology's function is to interpret the kerygma into the context.   This much has always been clear to me.   But what are the limits of this interpretation?  What norms sort theological attempts between success and failure?   And what are the proper words to use here?   Ought we to speak of true theological statements over and against false ones?    Are theological claims made in this interpretation better thought to be felicitous or infelicitous?   Are some more fecund than others, and, if so, what are the marks of this fecundity?

Over three decades ago I decided that I wanted to do theology seriously.  But over the decades I have been paralyzed by the Herculean effort seemingly needed to make any true theological advance in our time.   I knew that I could not simply parrot putative truths of another time as if they were truths of our time, yet I did not want to say that the truth-values of theological statements were simply and facilely indexed to time.  I have watched contemporary theology (and theologians) come and go and I have marveled at how little their passage on the theological stage seemingly depends upon the strength of their arguments.  I have always assumed that the acceptance of theological positions ought not be like that of political ones.   Theology, the grand discipline of the west, could not be simply a matter of fad, whim, and immediate political, economic and social cash value.   It simply has to be something more, I have hoped.

The proclamation of the life, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ has to be the starting point of theology.  The source of theology must be the Cross.  Of this, I have never had doubt.   An analysis of the cultural and intellectual horizon is necessary to the task of theology and, in some way, this horizon is itself a source of theological reflection.   However, this source is not of the same type as the other source.  While one has particular insight into the horizon, and while the horizon is something we "bump up against" in all experience, the horizon is not revealed.   The kerygma is revealed and the horizon is not.

Yet the two are given in a different way than our interpretative activity of unpacking the poles of kerygma and horizon, and carefully and patiently laying out, uncovering, or constructively articulating the relationships holding between those poles.  Our language, culture, philosophical assumptions, conceptual schemes, and own existences (including the socio-political) are the media by which the poles are refracted.  The hard task of locating the poles with respect to each other by specifying their connections is, of course, what the method of correlation is all about.   This creative, interpretive act of correlation is built upon previous acts of interpretation.   There is a hermeneutic of kerygma, a hermeneutic of horizon, and a hermeneutic correlating the deliverances of the first two hermeneutics.   Since the hermeneutical act is historically, culturally, conceptually influenced - - the product of the hermeneutic seems destined to be a here today, gone tomorrow, Johnny one-hit phenomenon.  Or so it seems on first reflection.

But perhaps we theologians spend too much creative energy wallowing in the quagmire of the seeming relativism based upon historical, cultural, and conceptual dynamism.  After all, it is not that the hermeneutical task - - and the hermeneutical circle and its effects - - infect what we do alone.   All intellectual activity proceeds by interpreting one thing, then interpreting another thing, and finally interpreting how those things fit, or don't fit, together.  It is what human beings do, and it is what we have always done.   Yet, there was once a time - - and there is in many other disciplines still a time - - when truth claims were/are vigorously asserted, supported, denied and repudiated on the basis of criteria that are abiding even within the flux of history, language, and culture.  It is not that everything is a Heraclitian flux only.  There is, after all, logos in the flux; there is order and reason.  We theologians have tended to concentrate so much upon the flux that we miss the order.   We tend to forget that the very categories we use in thinking and communicating the historical flux of thought are, in some sense stable categories.   In fact, the necessary condition for communicating flux is an ordered, coherent structure of thinking and being.  One cannot state change without perdurance.   This very old thought is either true or false, and I believe there are very good reasons to think it true - - Gorgias aside.  

What we theologians need again is a healthy dose of the reality of logos.  Our task is not dissimilar to Descartes'.   We must assume the worse-case scenario for theological knowledge, and try to uncover those stable structures presupposed by that worse case.  We must again learn to employ principle of contradiction:  If a theological position, or a hermeneutical interpretation of the hermeneutical situation ramifies a contradiction, then we must learn again to state clearly that the denial of that position is at least possible.  Moreover, we must learn again to think deeply enough theologically to spot the ways in which theological discourse is not generally a discourse of the contingent, and be able to conclude appropriately from this how the possible thus relates to the actual.  This is not easy work, but it is the work before us.

Just as flux presupposes logos, so does the historicity of the hermeneutical situation presuppose a metaphysics, that ontological correlate to the stable structural categories necessary even to state a non-completable hermeneutical dynamism.  It is precisely this metaphysics that theology has forgotten about, and it is precisely this that must be investigated again.   My hope is to begin this investigation soon.    

Pre-understanding Scripture

Imagine how it must have once been. Imagine what it would have been like to have read Scripture thinking it clear, thinking that it gave perspicuous answers to questions. Imagine what it must have been like in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries during the development of Lutheran and Reformed orthodoxies. These theologians understood what the Biblical text meant within their cultural worlds and within the horizon of their experience; they knew that they could trust Scripture because it had authority.

Things are different now. Oh yes, we denizens of the early 21st century can still talk about the importance of Bible reading, of going to church, of participating in a community of faith. But things are different. We find the Bible today still to be a pretty important book to know something about; we think that reading it might help us. We might even think that if we read it enough, we might believe it. Yet for many, at least, there is a fissure between the text and our interpretation of it. We know that we have a wonderful text that has been handed down to us, but we are not at all sure how trustworthy at is - - well, at least on the details, and . . . well, even thought we can't agree exactly on what is a detail and what is not. It is obvious that Scripture no longer is trusted like it once was.

Every interpretation of something presupposes a pre-understanding of it. One cannot unpack the meaning of something if one does not already have some clue to what the thing is. This is true for books, for nature, and for people. I know, for instance, that Paul is in pain because I have experienced pain: I have a pre-understanding of what it is to be a person, to emit sounds, and to speak in certain ways. I, in fact, live my life pre-understanding what my life is all about. To use a famous example from Heidegger, I can tell what a hammer means in my life because I have a pre-understanding of how it connects to other things in life. There is a context of significances in which I live, and the hammer, its relation to nails, lumber, a roof, and to me, are all part of that context. Most of the time I do not think deeply about my dwelling pre-understandingly in my world.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries men and women pre-understood what the Bible meant. They knew it to be a text that one could trust, that had authority, that spoke the Word of God. Accordingly, one can speak about their ontological understanding of Scripture. It meant then, for many people, that upon which the ultimate signifincance for one's life was known. Thus, one was always already related to Scripture because Scripture always displayed itself as that upon which the proclamation of the meaning of our being depended. Given such a pre-understanding of being, it made sense lovingly to collect passages from the text which displayed truth. In those ages, truth came with a capital 'T' and Scripture was pre-understood as that which could proclaim this truth. It was within the pre-understanding of the be-ing of Scripture that the internal clarity of Scripture arose.

Things are quite different today. The pre-understanding of the text is not, for many, a pre-understanding that regards the text as authoritive, that allows that the text can judge the reader much more profoundly than the reader the text. Our pre-understanding regards the text within the context of texts arising from a particular region from which other texts emerged. The text is already known to be a document upon which the application of historical methods are fruitful. While there is a sense that the text has functional authority within certain religious traditions, it is not a document that can reach across these traditions and provide me with answers about my being and the meaning of my being. The text is therefore not understood as the kind of thing that could in principle give rise to the internal clarity of Scripture. There is no reason for the Scripture to be clear because it is not the kind of thing for which clarity is at issue.

The last five centuries have seen a fundamental shift in our pre-understandings of the Biblical text. These pre-understandings are not themselves the kind of thing that can be changed by evidence. In our day, as in former ones, pre-understandings are gifts to enjoy; they cannot be engineered; they cannot be worked up through our own piety or spirituality.

Luther said that we are ridden either by the devil or the Christ. Maybe this is true for pre-understandings. Of course, for Luther, the Word proclaimed brought the agency of the Holy Spirit into action. This agency, of course, could modify or transform the context of pre-understandings. Simply put, for the Reformers, there was always the sense that the Word of God could be spoken, that it could be found in the text, and that it was vouchsafed by the tradition. It is this pre-understanding that is no longer present in our day.

So how can we jump start an ontology of Scripture and Word when that ontology is no longer present? Does saying, "the Word is sufficient unto itself and unto its own interpretation" help us when there is no longer any pre-understanding of a Word that could be sufficient unto its own interpretation? Lutherans must always, of course, come back to the Word. This is true. But what happens when the lights go out on the context upon which the Word qua Word emerges? What happens then?

Here the answer must be firm and unwavering: the hermeneutical helplessness is itself a riding of the horse. No neutrality is possible here. The first question of the temptor, "did God say?" is also the last. We either find the Word or don't. The only thing that changes is where or where not we either find the Word or don't.

Why the Lutheran Confessions must be read as Witnessing to a Vibrant Tradition

I

The Lutheran theological tradition began in the university. Some of the fruits of the Lutheran Reformation are the ten confessional documents collected in the Book of Concord: The Apostles Creed, Nicene Creed, Athanasian Creed, Augsburg Confession, Apology to the Augsburg Confession, Small Catechism, Large Catechism, The Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope, the Schmalkald Articles, and the Formula of Concord.

These documents, carved out in the heat of battle, are clearly situational documents. One must know something of the context of their origination in order fully to understand them. Like all documents, these confessions are products of history. Written in the German and Latin of the day, the documents oftentimes argue subtle positions demanding that one have a scholar’s knowledge of the meaning of the technical terms, and a philosopher’s sense of what is ontologically possible.

But, it might be fairly asked, what have these documents to do with us today? Why would we slavishly praise documents emerging in the sixteenth century as somehow getting right scripture and giving us the truth for all time? After all, had not scripture been around for some 15 centuries already when these documents were written? Had it not already sustained countless interpretations, and had not Christendom broken into various traditions of its interpretation? How can we say that Luther, Melanchthon, Chemnitz et al got it right where all others failed? Is it not a major cultural imperialistic move to claim that one’s take on things is right and everyone else is wrong? Do we really want to be so unmitigatedly ethnocentric?

II

We know that scripture has sustained multivalent interpretations. Luther and his colleagues knew this as well. But we today seem far more sophisticated than Luther and friends because we realize that the problem of the polyvalency of the text cannot be solved by making one historically-conditioned reading of the text normative (the interpretation that all ought to adopt). We are seemingly jaded in a far deeper way than Luther and friends. They looked at how history had delivered different meanings to scripture, and tried to rectify that problem by fixing an interpretation of scripture that showed that these and only these doctrinal truths were taught by scripture. We seem to have given up on the project altogether.

The result of fixing the interpretation of the text was predictable: others objected and controversy ensued. The Formula of Agreement, the last and longest confessional document, is itself the result of controversy. In steering between warring camps the Formula set the standard for Lutheran subtlety. Calvinists, Catholics, and Anabaptists all clearly disagreed that the Lutherans had the proper interpretation of scripture and the proper view of God and God’s relationship with human beings - - especially as God deals with man and woman in the Church and with the sacraments.

Lutherans did not back down, of course. Armed with the classic distinction between quatenus and quia, Lutherans held that their documents were not simply true in so far as the rightly explicated the Bible, but were true because they so explicated it. On the quatenus reading some parts of the Confessions elucidate biblical truth, but it is possible others do not. However, on the quia interpretation, all of the Confessions are true, for all elucidate biblical truth. So Lutherans were pretty certain they had the right read on scripture. All of their confessional documents were true because they unpacked what was taught in scripture.

So the seventeenth century basically closed with a conflict of interpretations among the reforming traditions and the Catholic Church from which they had emerged. Each thought they were right; each believed that their disagreements with each other were serious, factual, and so important as to threaten salvation itself.

III

The breeze of the Enlightenment seemingly thawed the frozen interpretations of the disparate traditions. The Enlightenment sought reason as a guide through the unsafe waters of religious superstition, bigotry, and ignorance. It championed tolerance as the highest virtue and sought, in many ways, to undercut the absolute and exclusionary claims of the various religious traditions. For a while the strategy worked. Open-minded and educated people were less likely to cross swords over issues that they could not adjudicate on the basis of reason, or at least, on the basis of a reasonable interpretation of scripture. The result was that committed religious people could disagree with other committed religious people while still remaining respectful of the others’ dignity and right to proclaim contrary views.

But this honeymoon was short-lived. It is but a small step from openness of others’ views on the basis of the underdetermination of the theological theory by the evidence, to a claim that the dispute between rival religious groups really does not constitute a real dispute at all. Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion seemed to undermine any religious claim to knowledge, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason placed religious objects, events, properties, and states of affairs outside of the domain of existing things entirely. Kant famously argued that God could not be a substance that could be in principle causally related to other substances, that is, that God could not exist as a being existing apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language. God was rather “a regulative ideal of human reason.”

After Kant, theologians struggled to find ways of understanding the claims of theology antimetaphysically. Whatever was going on with theological and doctrinal claims, it is not like the traditions assumed. God was not a special supreme being among other beings that had supernatural powers to affect the distribution of natural properties. Religious and theological language more and more pointed to the depth of human existence itself. In the heady 19th century academic theology environment of the German university, it was natural to think that something profound was being found, or at least pointed to, by theological language. In this environment, the specificity of contrary confessions began even to lose their ability to conflict. Various confessional traditions were thought to talk in different ways about an ultimate dimension at the depth of human existence.

This was, of course, the ultimate triumph in Enlightenment tolerance. Two confessional traditions did not make conflicting claims, but rather gave different interpretations, interpretations that were not in the business of making truth-claims about God at all. Such tolerance spread into the 20th century, where theological claims were put safely on the side of values and thus inoculated from the whole question of truth.

The Lutheran tradition in North America struggled in its “pre-Enlightenment” and “post-Enlightenment” interpretations of theological claims. For those committed to the “old way” the claims of theology were still in principle true of an extra-linguistic domain in which God was a member. Many of those emigrants from 19th century Europe carried the old ways with them.
Others, however, were committed to the “new way” of thinking, a way that understood that theological language was not making the kinds of claims people assumed it did. These “new ways” of thinking did not establish themselves academically in North America as early as did their counterparts in the other Protestant traditions. While practitioners of the old found conflict between their confessional documents, those assuming the new realized that their confessional documents no longer were true - - at least not in the sense that their traditions had always understood. To be a Lutheran was no longer to be a Lutheran because Lutheran theology was true, but rather being Lutheran was simply something given, where one found oneself. Given this, the only option available for those wanting to retain confessional allegiance was simply to adopt the confessional theology as decorative of that Lutheran identity.

IV

We Lutherans have not reflected deeply enough on our plight. If the “new way” is right, then we have the following picture of things: Each of us has, for whatever reasons, found ourselves in Lutheran churches. We are curious as to what has historically defined Lutherans, and we read some Lutheran history and maybe some of our founding texts. We realize the treasury of our tradition and seek to know more. Of course, we realize at the same time that the confessions are the Lutheran “take” on scripture, and that scripture’s sense cannot be discerned once and for all. Some of us even suppose that scripture itself is merely a set of texts to which we are accidentally related by birth. In moments of openness, we might even claim that other foundational religious texts are no more true or false in an absolute sense than are ours.

I think this picture of things is one that resonates with vast numbers of people within ELCA and ELCIC churches. Most attending services are clearly not concerned with the truth-claims of the confessions and whether or not these claims exclude other truth-claims. (Of course, logically to claim that something obtains is to claim simultaneously that many other things do not obtain.) The lamentable thing about this picture is this: It suggests that Lutheran theology only mostly engages people that already just happen to self-identify as Lutheran. The theology thus for them is decorative of their identity as Lutherans. To learn the tradition is simply to learn more about being a Lutheran, it is to learn how one can decorate herself with a Lutheran ethos. Being Lutheran becomes then a possible role that one adopts in the world, a role adopted in the effort of finding meaning and purpose and identity in the universe. The confessions thus become all about “belongingness” to a group; they are important only for diachronic community.

It is this picture of things, friends, that we Lutherans must now reject. We must reject this picture because ultimately it is incoherent, in other words, “this horse don’t run.” Theological language that does not make truth claims, a language that is merely descriptive and ornamental is not a language that the churches can or will long speak. We don’t know how to speak this language for the long term, for we don’t know what difference is made ultimately by speaking it or not speaking it.

I believe the time has come for we Lutherans again to embrace their confessions, not as decorative to our being-as-Lutherans, but as truth-claims about the world in which we find ourselves. Our postmodern situation gives us opportunity directly again to claim that there is a loving God, and that this loving God has justified the lost - - all of us - - even though there is no merit or goodness within us. We can and must go even further. We must assert again that our confessions make truth claims on the basis of a biblical text that is perspicuous. Scripture is clear, and our confessions clearly declare its clarity.

Now some will say that this is repristination; they will say that we just want to bring back the good old days. My response is, “yes, we do want to bring back the good old days when theology was taken as having a subject matter, making truth claims, and being in principle relatable to other kinds of discourse.” It is true that we do want to treat theological claims again in ways more like the “old ways” of the pre-Enlightenment. But while we wish to do this, we want to use all of the tools at our disposal today to recover the old.

V

It has been said that “tradition is the living faith of the dead, and traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” We do not want to be traditionalistic but traditionalist. We want to treat the confessions of Lutheranism fairly again; we want to read these texts from a standpoint not ultimately foreign to the standpoint from which they were written. It is for this reason that the Institute of Lutheran Theology talks about recovering theological realism, semantic realism, and theophysical causation.

Luther and many of the Reformers were university professors trained deeply in logic and semantics. They were acutely aware of the meaning of terms, and the importance of specificity and clarity in their theological utterances. They were men aware that theological language was a language that made truth claims and that one had to understand both the significance and the supposition of terms before one understood what the claims were. They were men who believed that there was a divine realm and that it was connected to the earthly order in various ways.
They believed that if God had not acted certain things would not have been, and if God were to act certain things would come to be. The horizon of the confessions is a horizon of the old way.

However, all must realize that the days of the Kantian hegemony are over within philosophy. All must realize that the days of the verificationist criterion of meaning lie behind us. In many ways philosophers at work now, because of their deep sensitivity to logical and semantic issues, are much closer to the horizon of the confessions than philosophers have been for centuries. Analytic methods of philosophy are useful for studying the confessions because they emphasize truth conditions: a statement’s meaning is to be found in how the world would have to be if the statement were true. Accordingly, “God established the office of preaching” is true if and only if God established the office of preaching.

So how are the confessions normative today? If “God is in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” is true if and only if God is in Christ reconciling the world to himself, then the claims of the confessions come alive again. After all, what difference would it make to give quia subscription to the confessions if we no longer believed that they said what the Reformers clearly meant them to say? Perhaps the new way was no way at all.

The Internal Clarity of Scriptture

I

I want to talk this evening about a very important notion in the Lutheran Reformation, the idea of the internal clarity of scripture. It is important to discuss this because we live in a time of great hermeneutical confusion, that is, we live in a time where a plethora of divergent methods and approaches to scripture all claim to ascertain the real meaning of the Biblical text. As a result, scripture seems to sustain a different meaning as a function of the exegetical and interpretive method employed in its reading.

What I shall do tonight is briefly review some of these contemporary hermeneutical strategies, compare them with the traditional approaches inherited by Luther and the Reformers in the sixteenth century, and show how the internal clarity of scripture provided the Reformation with the resources to deal with the confusion of hermeneutical trajectories that infected much of the tradition. I will then suggest that just as notion of the internal clarity of scripture operated in the sixteenth century to quell hermeneutical license, so it must be used today by Lutherans, if Lutheranism is to have any response to the contemporary hermeneutical quagmire.

II

In the United States, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is trying mightily to get clear on what it calls, “the Church’s teaching on homosexuality.” People are particularly interested in whether or not those engaged in homoerotic behavior in the context of a “committed relationship” - - whatever that might precisely mean - - ought to be allowed to serve as “rostered leaders,” that is, as pastors or associates in ministry, etc. Connected with this is the issue of whether or not two people of the same sex should be allowed to receive some type of liturgical “blessing,” a blessing analogous to that given to heterosexual couples who are wedding.

It is not my intention tonight to discuss the homosexuality issue except to make these two general comments:

· It is true that there has been great consensus within Christianity the past twenty centuries about the intrinsic sinfulness of homosexual behavior. In particular, within the Catholic theological tradition that has assumed the existence of natural law, homosexual acts were routinely considered to be deviant from that which ought to obtain, were thought to be not in conformity with God’s primary intentionality for human beings, and were therefore regarded to be sinful.

· It is also true that the theological tradition thought it could find biblical justification for their views on homosexuality. Since the 16^th century onward, most Protestant Christians have regarded homosexuality as sinful on the basis of the authority of scripture. Scripture was thought to be clear on the matter of whether or not God’s intention for His creation precluded homosexual behavior.

It is obvious, however, that many mainline Protestants no longer believe that there are clear biblical injunctions against homosexual behavior. Accordingly, if scripture is properly interpreted, then passages putatively debarring homosexual acts are found to do no such thing. By reaching back to recover the original meaning of these passages, interpreters believe they can somehow access the original semantic horizon of the text, a horizon that can be separated from the tradition of its interpretation. In doing so they say that there is nothing in the bible that would entail that homosexual activity is intrinsically wrong.

(I should like to note in passing how the sola scriptura principle gets perverted in this effort. At the time of the Reformation, sola scriptura was used as the primary authority that grounds theological orthodoxy. However, in our day a slavish Protestant adherence to sola scriptura, coupled with hermeneutical license, catapults the interpreter across nineteen centuries of Christian witness and attempts to connect the interpreter’s question to a text whose meaning is no longer clear and whose authority is suspect. I always wonder why it would be important for Christian piety to discern what the bible originally meant if the book is not essentially authoritative, that is, if it is in no way an effect of divine self-communication to us. What fundamental difference should the biblical text make if it is no longer caused by the divine? If it is just a book among books that is accidentally the founding document of the Christian tradition, then why does it matter today what it says in the seven problematic passages putatively prohibiting homosexual behavior?)

III

When looking at the contemporary hermeneutical landscape, we note the following general interpretative strategies.

Traditionalist approaches: This group of time-honored approaches claims that the text does indeed make particular truth-claims about God and God’s relation to human beings. While there may be internecine conflicts within this class of approaches pertaining to which parts of scripture are metaphorical and/or allegorical, they assume that clear and literal truth claims are made throughout scripture. These strategies are objectivist in spirit, claiming textual objectivity for all readers at all times. Although some of these approaches hold to a verbal plenary theory of biblical inspiration and authority, one need not claim the Holy Spirit as a divine amanuensis to hold that scripture has an objective meaning, and that one can apprehend this meaning by reading it. Traditionalist approaches assume a present objectivity, a present semantic discreteness.

Contextualist approaches: Contextualist proposals seek to ascertain the meaning of the text upon the horizon of its origination, that is, synchronically by comparing it to other documents within the region at the time, and diachronically by comparing it to other texts within the general history of similar documents. Contextualist approaches use various historical-critical methodologies to attempt to find out what the texts meant within the context of their emergence. We might think of these as objectivist as well, but here the objectivity is tied to the original meaning of the text in the context of its origination, and not a present objectivity.

Reader Response: Reader response approaches downplay the importance of what the text may once have meant, in favor of what the text now means for the reader in her reading. Bracketing questions of origination and authorial intent, this approach can be linked to an “enthusiastic approach” generally: the text means what it means to me now as the Holy Spirit guides me in the present. Whereas the traditionalist and the contextual approaches presuppose textual objectivity, the reader response proposal is a subjectivist approach. (I want to qualify this to an “enthusiasm” that, as Luther says, “swallows the Holy Spirit feathers and all.”) This interpretive strategy presupposes that there is no discernible meaning in the text apart from the act of interpretation, that the meaning of the text is constructed in its act of interpretation.

Fusion of Horizons Approaches: Based in post-Gadamerian hermeneutical theory, this way of approaching the text claims that while the text’s meaning is not merely my interpretation of the text (as in reader response), it is nonetheless impossible to ever have an objective reading of the text (as in either the contextual or traditional approach). On this view, the meaning of the text emerges in the back and forth movement between the horizon of the text and the horizon of the interpreter. Because of the “effects of historical consciousness” - - because the horizon of the text has formed historically the interpreter’s own horizon by which she interprets the text (Gadamer) - -, the text’s horizon can be interpreted by the interpreter. The fusion of horizons approach mediates the immediacy of the reader response position by contrasting it with a mediate objectivist interpretation (e.g., the traditionalist and contextualist approaches), such that both are synthesized or “taken up” (Aufgehebung) in a mediated immediacy.

Except for strands within the traditionalist approach, the problem with all of these is that no matter how objective they might pretend to be, they end up looking pretty subjective. Once the text is treated as a document beside other documents, a fissure invariably opens between the text and its interpretation. Unlike some other classic texts, the text of Scripture has sustained widely-divergent interpretations, particularly after it is unhinged from its community of interpretation - - the Catholic Church. In the Reformation, the cry of sola scriptura suggested to many that one could leap frog beyond the tradition and go to scripture for all truth. While this worked when there remained a shared set of interpretive values, after this common ethos faded, the text became helpless in the face of radically different interpretations.

Terry Fretheim, a Professor of OT at Luther Seminary sums up the problem with our present plethora of interpretive methods. He makes the following points in a 2006 Word and World article (26:4):

— “The Bible is the Word of God” in that it has a formative and constitutive role through the Holy Spirit, and that it is foundational for shaping and maintaining Christian self-identity. “

— People using the same historical-critical methods on the text come to different conclusions.

— Authority has often been given to particular interpretations of the text. (This correlates to the traditional hermeneutic on Scripture, I suppose.)

— “Hence, we must make a clean distinction between the text and our own interpretation of the text, for whatever we say about a Bible passage is never the same as what the Bible itself says.”

— Against the traditional Lutheran view of the internal clarity of Scripture, Fretheim asserts,“ The Bible itself often makes interpretation difficult and contributes to the problem of its own authority. It has been said that the Bible is its own worst enemy.”

— “There is . . . no sure move from the “objective” exegesis of the text to its meaning; contemporary issues are in the room at every stage of the process. The effects of our experience upon our study of the Bible mean that readers do not have direct, unmediated access to meanings the author may have intended or to “naked” meanings of the text itself. Recognizing that, we can make no clean distinction between “what the text meant” and “what the text means, . . .”

I have used Fretheim because he speaks this so very clearly. He knows the methods of the academy and knows how to apply them to the text. In doing so, Fretheim notices something that others see as well: the interpretive methods applied to the text not surprisingly determine what meaning the text has. Fretheim’s views are not idiosyncratic, but are fairly standard among reflective ELCA scripture professors.

IV

As is well-known the theological tradition at the eve of the Reformation had in place the “four-fold method of biblical interpretation.” It was thought that all of scripture could be read in four distinctive ways, that is, there were four different senses to scriptural expressions: the literal, allegorical, troplogical, and anagogical. These four senses are summed up in this Latin expression: “Littera gesta docet; quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agas; quo tendas anagogia.,” (“The letter teaches what happened; the allegorical what you should believe, the moral what you must do; the anagogical where you are going.”) For instance, in a literal sense Jerusalem is the city of David in Judea; allegorically, it is the church; tropologically it is the just and righteous soul; anagogically it is the heavenly city to which the righteous are heading.

Starting with the school of Alexandria, the tradition assumed that literality of the words of Scripture must be transcended in order to encounter the spiritual truths standing behind the words. For instance, Augustine claims that in the parable of the loaves and fishes, the five loaves refer to the five books of Moses; the two fishes refer to the Priest and King pointing to Christ. Further, he claims that the multiplication into many loaves represents the multiplication of the five books of Moses into many volumes; the fragments left over refer to the deep truths that the many could not receive and were thus left for the twelve disciples.

Over and against such fanciful hermeneutics, Luther says that there is but one sense of Scripture, and it can strike us both as law and as gospel. The law is demand, showing us what we have not done or been in the sight of God; the gospel is promise, showing us what God has done and what He is for us.

In offering his “new hermeneutics,” Luther clearly realizes that according to the fourfold method, Scripture can mean almost anything that the interpreter wants it to mean, and that thus, the interpreter becomes lord over God’s Word rather than the Word becoming lord over the interpreter. Therefore, Luther claimed that no external exegetical method can be applied to Scripture in discerning the meaning of the text. In order to make Scripture lord over its interpreter, one must submit to its “clear sense.” This sense establishes what Scripture is about. Here Luther presupposes an internalist interpretive method.

V

Luther and the Reformers assume that Scripture attests to itself, that it interprets itself. Because of this, it is internally clear. All of the parts of Scripture testify to Christ, and Christ is found in all the parts of Scripture. Just as there is a hermeneutical circle with the parts of Scripture testifying to the whole, and the whole of Scripture illuminating the parts, so too is the Holy Spirit at work in a hermeneutical circle: The Word carries the Spirit who Himself interprets the Word. Luther also calls this clarity a sinceritas or simplicitas.

However, this internal clarity is consonant with Scripture’s apparent obscurity. Human beings are in bondage to sin and cannot free themselves. This sinfulness affects one’s standpoint on Scripture; One cannot access Scripture except from the standpoint of one in bondage to sin, one who does not want to let God be God, who does not want anyone to be lord except the self. This perceived scriptural obscurity is fully compatible with Scripture’s internal clarity.

Speaking of these things, Luther writes:

“For what still sublimer thing can remain in the scriptures, now that the seals have been broken, the stone rolled from the door of the sepulcher, and the supreme mystery brought to light, namely, that Christ the Son of God has been made man, that God is three in one, that Christ has suffered for us and is to reign eternally? Are not these things known and sung even in the highways and byways? Take Christ out of the scriptures and what will you find left in them? The subject matter of the scriptures, therefore, is all quite accessible, even though some texts are still obscure owing to our ignorance of their terms.” (Bondage of the Will, LW 33:25-26)

”If you speak of the internal clarity, no man perceives one iota of what is in the scriptures unless he has the Spirit of God. All men have a darkened heart, so that they can recite everything in scripture, and know how to quote it, yet they apprehend and truly understand nothing of it. They neither believe in God, nor that they themselves are creatures of God.” (Bondage of the Will, LW 33:28)

It is my contention that the notion of the internal clarity or perspicuity of scripture must be regarded as a primitive assertion within Lutheran theology generally. While it cannot itself be proved, its assertion is necessary for Lutheran theology to function properly. If one is to leapfrog back across centuries of tradition to find authority in a single text, then it is requisite that the text is clear. The alternative is to find the authority of the tradition in the development of the tradition itself, i.e., in the development of the church - - something Luther staunchly rejected. It is important to grasp the Catholic counterargument to the perspicuity of scripture.

The argument claims that, from the beginning, the Catholic tradition realized that the biblical texts harmonized only imperfectly. The tradition thus intuitively recognized that the development of doctrine is essential to understanding what scripture means. Accordingly, since there is no fundamental fissure between Scripture and tradition, the tradition thus determines the shape of the canon itself. Moreover, because of the fundamental obscurity of Scripture, a teaching magisterium is necessary to interpret it correctly. This magisterial office functions to interpret questions properly in the light of church teaching, a teaching itself founded in scripture and tradition. While having such a magisterium is a profoundly anti-democratic way of proceeding, such a hermeneutical elitism makes good sense if scripture is not internally clear.

VI

By advocating the internal clarity of scripture, however, Luther and the Reformers put an end to the fanciful interpretations of the tradition, a tradition in which those “in the know” could always claim to discern a specialist-like deeper “spiritual truth” behind the shallow vulgar letter of the biblical text.

Lutherans face a similar situation today. The fissure between the text and its interpretation seemingly guarantees that text will always be spun by the interpreter. As in the sixteenth century, so today, the Lutheran response to the notion that there is a yawning abyss between the text and its interpretation must be the assertion of the perspicuity of scripture. Listen again to the voices of our Lutheran theological ancestors, people who understood how anti-elitist and democratic Lutheran hermeneutics is:

“But the articles of faith and the moral precepts are taught in scripture in their proper places, not in obscure and ambiguous words, but in such as are fitted to them, and free from all ambiguity, so that every diligent reader of scripture who reads it devoutly and piously, can understand them” [Quenstedt (1617-88), Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 81].

This clarity is, of course, always related to the Holy Spirit which, while carried on the wings of the Word, is nevertheless necessary for understanding that Word:

“If you speak of the internal clearness, no man understands a single iota of the scriptures by the natural powers of his own mind, unless he have the Spirit of God; all have obscure hearts. The Holy Spirit is required for the understanding of the whole of Scripture and all of its parts” [Gerhard (1582-1637), DTELC, 83-4].

At work in this interpretation is the “hermeneutical circle” where the parts interpret the whole and the whole interprets the parts:

“The more obscure passages, which need explanation, can and should be explained by other passages that are more clear, and thus the scripture itself furnishes an interpretation of the more obscure expression when a comparison of these is made with those that are more clear; so the Scripture is explained by Scripture” (Quenstedt, 86).

But, this hermeneutical circle presupposes the agency of the Holy Spirit:

“For no other source than the sacred scriptures themselves can a certain and infallible interpretation of scripture be known. For scripture itself, or rather the Holy Spirit speaking in scriptures or through it, is the legitimate and independent interpreter of itself” (Quenstedt, DTELC, 86).

As in the sixteenth century, so in our day, the only way to claim that we are not guilty of finally constructing the text which supposedly presences the Word that saves us, is to assert that there is an objectivity to the text over and apart from human being, an objectivity which is an artifact of the divine, an objectivity that controls its own interpretation. This is the barely-remembered doctrine of the internal clarity of scripture.

Why is the "Literal Sense" so Problematic? - An Excursus on the Sexuality Issue

Believers in the pews are often bewildered how it can be that theologians and church leaders often proclaim positions at glaring odds with what they believe they read in Scripture. Why does my bishop say we should be "open and affirming" to homosexuals and my Bible say this about homosexuality at Leviticus 20:13: "If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them." (NKJV) How is this possible?

At this point historical-critical points are generally introduced, and the believer is taken back behind "God's Word" of Scripture into a world of causal explanations of Scripture, a world of socio-economic structural explanations, or perhaps of literary methodologies, or, if these don't do the trick, just plain bald assertions. (I remember debating an ELCA college religion professor who confidently told those assembled that Leviticus simply was "a weird book.")

In truth, however, the problem with "taking the Bible literally" has been around for a very long time, and it is not a problem that finally rides on historical-critical methodology or alternate socio-economic and ideological "causes" for Scriptural assertion. The problem with a literal reading of Scripture and a fortiori a sola scriptura approach is that such an approach seems to presuppose that there is not "a broad ugly ditch" (Lessing) that separates the horizon of the text and the horizon of the reader. In other words, the sola scriptura approach that holds to Luther's "literal sense of Scripture" seems to proceed blissfully unaware of the hermeneutical problem: How can one read a text and somehow apprehend the meaning of that text? If this is possible at all, what would be the conditions of this possibility? The problem with grasping the literal sense of Scripture is just part of the general problem of grasping the "literal sense" of any document. How could such a thing be possible? Where resides the meaning of the text, and how does a reader come to acquire it?

The believer attending services has, in general, no way to grasp that the difficulty in the theological community in grasping the simple, literal sense of Scripture has less to do with a wanton disregard for the specifics of the text, but rather with how one might understand Biblical authority on the other side of Gadamer. Just as there is a theological paradigm dominating in mainstream Protestant denominations that eschews theological and semantic realism and the very possibility of theophysical causation, so is there a paradigm that rejects the possibility of the text having meaning in itself. In the same way that Kant left the philosophical tradition with a dualism of the unknowable Ding-an-Sich (the noumenal) and a subjectivized Ding-für-Sich (the phenomenal), hermeneutics by the middle of the twentieth century was stuck with a dualism of the irrecoverable meaning of the text, and the subjectivized “reader response” to it. Just as Hegel tried to overcome the dualism of Kant by eschewing the very possibility of the thing-in-itself while showing the objectivity of the historicity of the thing-for-me, so did Gadamer seek to move beyond entirely the problematic of the textual meaning-in-itself, and embrace instead the objectivity of the historicized meaning-for-me.

For Gadamer, the meaning of a text arises in the back-and-forth movement of text and reader, where the horizon of the reader is figured as a historical product of the “spirit” that was itself realized in the text. The “effects of historical consciousness” are thus this: Historical movement produces cultural artifacts (texts) that effect subsequent historical movement. In any age, the spirit of its historical understanding is manifested in its texts. Texts are thus in a deep sense communal productions, with individual authors merely bespeaking the historical understanding of the age. When these texts of a previous age and community are read by later readers, the historical understandings in the text confront the later reader not as something wholly foreign, but rather as something deeply resonant to the later reader, because the historical understandings in the previous texts effect subsequent historical understandings that themselves are implicit in the later interpretive horizons.

It works like this: An earlier text (take Romans, for example) leaves an interpretative wake in the interpretive horizons of later generations. Thus, the text of Romans has formed the very interpretive equipment (my conceptual apparatus) by which I now in the early 21^st century must use in reading the earlier text (Romans). In a real sense the historical effects of Romans in my interpretive horizon are now marshaled in the attempt to read Romans. Thus, in the reading, interpretation is possible because the “meaning of the text in itself” is already historically bequeathed into the interpretive horizon of the reader such that its effects (Romans effects) thus function to read Romans. The meaning of the text thus arises in the play of the historical effects of Romans on the reader who presupposes these effects in the reading of Romans. Meaning is a back and forth, to and fro, movement between text and interpreter; it emerges as a fusion of horizons where the impossibility of the ultimate “otherness” of Scripture is displayed; Romans is not ultimately foreign, but has formed me the reader of Romans. The necessary condition of its speaking is that it is not ultimately and wholly different from the one interpreting it. This is why I can be said to have a “pre-understanding” of the text even prior to the reading of the text.

Accordingly, God cannot simply work as a wholly other One confronting us with wholly other mandates radically different from us. God’s Word in scripture is only possible because there is a pre-understanding of the text as a place where God might speak, a pre-understanding formed historically in the interpretive community by the text itself. Romans is a “classic performance” that has created a communal genre of interpretation that functions in the attentive listening to of the text. Just as we hear a classic performance of Beethoven and understand its “meaning” only if our interpretive horizon has been informed by listening to Beethoven, so do we hear the Word of God in scripture and understand its meaning only if our interpretive horizon has been informed by generations of communal experience with attentive hearing of the Romans texts as a place where God might speak.

The point in all of this is that just as there is no meaning to the music of Beethoven apart from listening to Beethoven, there is no meaning to the words of Romans apart from the history of communal experience with Romans. Just as musical meaning cannot reside anywhere but in the confrontation of the music with the listener, so too can textual meaning not reside anywhere but in the confrontation of the text with the reader. Theologians don’t so much want to “reject the literal Word of God plainly available in Scripture,” but find a way somehow to “make the literal Word of God possible.” It can only be possible in this complicated way where a historical interpretive community is dialectically related to the text, related such that the normative meaning of that text emerges on the basis of that dialectical relationship.

What church-going believers don’t realize is that the intellectual world that the theologian must inhabit makes it very difficult even to reclaim something of the horizon presupposed by much of the tradition. Gadamer, while he would appear to most non-theologians (many pastors included) as quite destructive to taking Scripture seriously, is really trying to reclaim the very possibility of taking it seriously by showing that the old dualism of textual objectivity and reader subjectivity (with the resultant “win” by the subject) can be overcome in the objectivity of the “spirit” of the text and tradition. The original Lutheran sola scriptura principle is fundamentally at odds with a Gadamerian approach unless it is reworked to show that the sola scriptura arises, and can only arise, in a communal situation presupposing tradition.

All of this is a bit complicated, and the reader of this blog might now actually know much more about about Gadamer than most ELCA pastors who don’t recognize the intellectual roots of the interpretive moves that they standardly make. Yet, these are the waters that must be swum if one is truly going to understand why “people just don’t take scripture at its clear sense when it prohibits homosexual activity.” In our present intellectual situation, we can’t think that any historical text has a clear sense without an interpretive community. If this is true of the Dialogues of Plato, it is true of Scripture as well.

There is no easy way out back to taking the text seriously. Perhaps what is needed is simply a move in the interpretive community not unlike the realist move of G.E. Moore. He said, “Instead of taking as the problematic the immediacy of the subject and the problem of the object, let us start with the immediacy of the object and see what happens.” This move put an end in philosophy to classical idealism, the "Hegelian synthesis" included. What is happening in theology is that we always assume an idealistic starting point and cannot find our way out of the subject. This is clearly true of Gadamer's hermeneutical analogue to "absolute idealism." So maybe it is time again for a new starting point. Why not simply start with the object and forgo the task of "building a bridge" to it? After all, there are only so many shots on the basketball court, and when you work yourself into the corner, the shots become very difficult indeed. If one still wants to play the game, one must find a different position on the court.