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Nine Theses on Interpreting Scripture
From The Art of Reading Scripture, edited by Ellen Davis and Richard Hays.
1) Scripture truthfully tells the story of God’s action of creating, judging, and saving the world.
2) Scripture is rightly understood in the light of the church’s rule of faith as a coherent dramatic narrative.
3) Faithful interpretation of Scripture requires an engagement with the entire narrative: the New Testament cannot be rightly understood apart from the Old, nor can the Old be rightly understood apart from the New.
4) Texts of Scripture do not have a single meaning limited to the intent of the original author. In accord with Jewish and Christian traditions, we affirm that Scripture has multiple complex senses given by God, the author of the whole drama.
5) The four canonical gospels narrate the truth about Jesus.
6) Faithful interpretation of Scripture invites and presupposes participation in the community brought into being by God’s redemptive action – the church.
7) The saints of the church provide guidance in how to interpret and perform Scripture.
8) Christians need to read the Bible in dialogue with diverse others outside the church.
9) We live in the tension between the “already” and the “not yet” of the kingdom of God; consequently, Scripture calls the church to ongoing discernment, to continually fresh rereadings of the text in light of the Holy Spirit’s ongoing work in the world.
Sorry. *Una sensus literalis est.* While it's true that there are types and
other sorts of figurative stuff in Scripture, every passage- as the
Reformation affirmed- has only one intended and valid meaning. Multiple
"meanings" make Scripture a "wax nose," that can be twisted to mean
anything the reader wants. They aren't what the text says; they're what the
reader wants it to say.
Bob Waters [watersblogged@vfemail.net]
I agree that there is a danger in twisting Scripture to mean whatever we
want, but that's where #6 and #7 come in.
From your argument, then, what is the intended and valid meaning of Psalm 22? Was it valid for Matthew and Mark to use this psalm in their crucifixion story - to take it out of its historical context and place it on Jesus' lips? Did God intend for the Psalm to be used in this way?
Or, as David Steinmetz says in one of the
book's essays:
"But I do not have to believe that Second Isaiah has an
explicit knowledge of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth to believe that
he was part of a larger narrative that finds it final, though not sole,
meaning in Christ. Like many of the characters in a mystery novel, Isaiah
had something else on his mind. But the meaning of his work cannot be
limited to the narrow boundaries of his explicit intention. Viewed from
the perspective of the way things turned out, his oracles were revealed to
have added dimensions of significance that no one could have guessed at the
time. It is not anachronistic to believe that such added dimensions of
meaning exist. It is only good exegesis."
I like the nine theses.
As a christian practicing simplicity, I submit
that reading scripture without making prayer an implicit part of the
practice opens one to dependence upon her/his own mind and heart, leaving
out God, and excluding God's use of others to bring light. Therefore I
especially subscribe to number eight.
Who pierced David's hands and feet?
I don't think Isaiah had the crucifixion of Christ in mind, either. But I believe that God did.
But as I said, typology, prophesy, and other such phenomena do indeed occur. These are the exception to the rule- and only an exception in the limited sense that a specific kind of secondary meaning is sometimes involved. The underlying Messianic meaning of Psalm 22 (as well as a host of other prophetic writings in the Old Testament) is pretty standard and straightforward exegesis, wholly in keeping with the Reformation dictum that Scripture doesn't have multiple meanings that need to be teased out of the text by the exegete's cleverness. Actually, in the case of Psalm 22, the hard part would be to explain it precisely in terms of what you term "the historical context."
If God *didn't* intend Psalm 22 to be used this way, then we need to eject Matthew and Mark from the canon. On the other hand, I don't attribute their quotation of Psalm 22 to Matthew and Mark. I attribute it precisely to God, specifically to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
The general principle that there can be multiple meanings to a text seems to me to be a bit of an open-ended way to say that prophesy happens in Scripture. Certainly Luther and the Reformers recognized the reality of prophesy. But they also recognized that Scripture (not "the saints of the church") provides us with the guidance we need here. Leaving it up to the exegete essentially makes the exegete, rather than the text, the source of the meaning being attributed to the text.
Bob Waters [watersblogged@vfemail.net]
Jennifer:
As usual your post stimulated me to blog over at Gower Street.
This conversation on texts and meaning is fascinating to me, sorry the
comments thread trickled out here. -JF