Word of Life

Introducing Lutheran Hermeneutics

Timothy J. Wengert

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781506402826
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506402833
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Renowned Reformation scholar Timothy J. Wengert explores the genesis of Lutheran biblical interpretation by tracing the early work of Martin Luther, Melanchthon, and other Wittenberg exegetes. Their new approach led them to view Scripture in terms of "law and gospel," to read and translate the Greek and Hebrew text, and to focus on a theology of the cross and justification by faith. Luther and his colleagues found God working in the last place anyone would reasonably look: on the cross, in weakness and foolishness. Wengert demonstrates how these key historical and theological perspectives can be demonstrated in preaching, reflection, and teaching today. Using brief examples of preaching The Seven Last Word of Christ and reflecting on Luther's work on a variety of Psalms, the author provides a path for students and pastors alike to plumb the depth of Lutheran hermeneutics in their preaching and teaching.

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Not “Just the Facts, Ma’am”: From Definition to Effect

The classic television show from the 1950s and 1960s Dragnet often had its hero, Sergeant Joe Friday of the Los Angeles Police Department, interview a victim or witness by beginning, “Just the facts, Ma’am.” This positive, modern approach to facts and events has had an enormous impact on how we view the world. Despite the overwhelming complexity of particle physics and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—to say nothing of quarks and dark matter and black holes—we still navigate our universe on the basis of the “sure” facts of Newtonian physics. The same goes for biblical studies—liberal or conservative—where the search for the single meaning and intent of the authors (or Author) has dominated approaches to Scripture for the past 150 years or more. Even “postmodern” attempts to come to terms with the relative nature of reading a text for truth (putting it more squarely in the mind and experience of the beholder or exegete) still claim assurance about one fact: that we all have our own, albeit personal approaches to texts and to truth. By contrast, Wittenberg’s interpreters insisted that the actual, concrete meaning of a text always involved discovering two interrelated things: the definition of a text and its effect on the hearers. That is, true interpretation of the Bible always involves more than “just the facts” and includes what those “facts” are doing to us as we read them.

This twofold approach allows us to take seriously past interpreters of Scripture rather than imagine that it is up to us alone to figure out what a biblical author was trying to say. Part of the reason that earlier exegetes of Scripture may seem so far removed from today’s concerns and, thus, out of date arises from our modern (or postmodern) hubris about the nature of the facts in the text. Luther and Melanchthon—to say nothing of Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, or Jerome—may often seem to our eyes to confuse what the text means with what it meant to them, or else they seem to confuse grinding their own theological axes with the text’s meaning, thus proving the postmodern skeptic right. A careful reading of the history of biblical interpretation, however, actually leads to the opposite view: that the Bible has a rather limited field of meanings and that many of today’s debates may already be lurking in the past—even when present-day exegetes have no clue of their participation in such earlier conversations.^[1] Moreover, precritical readers have an advantage over our own rationally inclined approaches to the Bible: they assume (albeit naively) that the Bible has meaning not just for the past but also for the present and that that meaning more or less becomes clear when the text addresses the reader. This assumption is shared by the biblical authors themselves, who rarely if ever wrote only for themselves or an “immediate” audience but almost always had a much wider set of readers in mind. They assumed that what they had to say would outlive them.

Nowhere is this assumption of a wider audience more graphically displayed than in the woodcuts designed for the Luther Bible, first published in 1534. Although in the early books of the Old Testament the illustrators stuck with medieval precedent, their pictures for each prophet were unique.^[2] With few exceptions, the prophet, often clothed in sixteenth-century peasant dress, was always depicted in the foreground preaching to his own people (who in one case even turn away and cover their ears). In the background, the artists illustrated some typological connection to an event in Jesus’s life referred to in New Testament. Thus, for example, Hosea shows the resurrection; Isaiah, the crucifixion; Zechariah, the entry into Jerusalem; Joel, Peter preaching at Pentecost. The woodcut for Joel is particularly interesting, since it shows two acts of preaching (by Joel and Peter) in the same place (Jerusalem, shown as a prosperous German city square) and, thus, two sets of hearers. This forthright approach to the prophet’s calling to preach to his own people disappears a hundred years later in the famous illustrations of the Merian Bible. In them the prophet, no longer in sixteenth-century dress, stands alone in a barren landscape with only the typological reference depicted behind him. For example, Micah, standing in an empty foreground, prophesies the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, depicted in the distance. But to paraphrase the famous example ascribed to George Berkeley, if a prophet proclaims in an empty wilderness, is it really proclamation? Who’s listening? Wittenberg exegesis rested on the conviction that the text’s meaning depends on its being heard and believed.

The Facts

Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, along with a host of Wittenberg exegetes who followed in their footsteps, were children of the Renaissance. That is, they benefited from the shift in interpretation (often labeled humanism), that is, an insistence on returning to the oldest and best sources (in theology this meant to the church fathers and the original texts of Scripture) and a deep commitment to using the very best language Greek and Roman literature had to offer. This led them to develop highly sophisticated approaches to the biblical text. They recognized figures of speech and patterns of language in their authors. They used rhetorical tools to outline texts (especially the Pauline corpus) and to appreciate a biblical author’s attempts to move the hearer. They assumed that the more one knew Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, the better one could understand Scripture. And they turned a Renaissance debate over the relation of rhetoric and dialectics (logic) to their advantage in rediscovering that a text’s actual meaning included more than simply definition (the facts) but had to take account of its use and goal by the author and the church (the effect).

Plumbing the Text

Until quite recently, the churches of the Reformation have uniformly insisted that their ministers acquire some knowledge of Greek and Hebrew in order to divine the precise meaning of Scripture. Luther admits that while it is possible for a preacher lacking such knowledge to succeed, he assumes that their sermons will inevitably fall flat.^[3] It is hard for us to comprehend what an impact learning these languages had on the scholars in early modern Europe. Perhaps our own reactions to seeing the backside of the moon or pictures of Pluto up close or viewing the latest skeletons harvested from Olduvai Gorge, or the Dead Sea Scrolls, might come close to the wonder and otherworldliness these new, old languages evoked; but these things fall far short of the impact of reading God’s Word in its original tongues.

The desire to master these languages must have been overwhelming, as Luther’s own biography demonstrates. In 1516, as soon as Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum with its parallel columns of the Greek and the standard Latin (Vulgate) texts started rolling off the presses of the Basel printer Johannes Froben, Luther got hold of a copy and began to teach himself enough of the language to use it in the classroom. Of course, he was helped enormously by Erasmus’s annotations on the Greek text, which for the first edition (also published in 1516) pointed out places where the Vulgate needed improvement, while at the same time criticizing scholastic theologians’ poor use of Scripture. Erasmus’s Annotations not only gave Luther a leg up in translating the Greek, but it also contained countless references to the church fathers, which Luther also eagerly used.^[4]

Luther’s personal commitment to the original text of Scripture had already shown up in his work on the psalms, where in his first lectures he employed the work of Johannes Reuchlin on the penitential psalms as well as comments on the Hebrew text found in the works of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Nicholas of Lyra. It is no accident that his very first publication, which appeared in early 1517, was a German translation of and commentary on the penitential psalms, squarely based on his reading of Reuchlin. His knowledge of Hebrew increased slowly over the next decade, as Siegfried Räder has painstakingly demonstrated.^[5] As the biblical lectures became the heart of Wittenberg’s theological curriculum, Luther more and more concentrated on the Hebrew Scripture, while still occasionally lecturing on New Testament texts.^[6] In addition, he relied on his knowledge of Hebrew for the Wittenberg translation of the Old Testament and revisions, which stretched from 1523 to 1545.

But Luther’s commitment to the original languages had immediate effects on Wittenberg’s curriculum too. In 1517–1518, the humanist-oriented faculty set out to find teachers for Greek and Hebrew. Although a permanent Hebrew teacher was not found until the 1520s, when Matthäus Aurogallus came to the faculty, Wittenberg had much better success finding a Greek teacher, calling (upon the recommendation of Reuchlin) the twenty-one-year-old Philip Melanchthon to the newly created post in the arts faculty. The inaugural address of this slightly built man in August 1518 sent Luther over the moon, assured that the fledging university (founded in 1502) had found just the right scholar for the position. To his Erfurt friend and fellow Augustinian Johannes Lang, Luther had described a year earlier his excitement with the humanist turn (“our theology”) Wittenberg’s curriculum had taken.

Our theology and St. Augustine are continuing to succeed and they reign in our university through God’s action. Aristotle slowly is falling, headed for eternal ruin in the near future. Remarkably, lectures by the teachers of the Sentences are loathed. Nor can anyone hope to have anyone attending lectures unless they want to confess this theology, that is, the Bible, or St. Augustine or some other teacher of ecclesiastical authority.^[7]

Melanchthon’s knowledge of Greek and his sophisticated use of Latin were unique. While Erasmus had meticulously taught himself Greek as an adult, Melanchthon had already begun to learn the language in 1507 as an eleven-year-old student at the Latin school in Pforzheim. He also possessed a keen feel for all three “classical” languages (Latin, Greek, and Hebrew) and wrote grammars for Latin and Greek. It meant that he could sense, for example, when Paul was using Hebraisms in his language.^[8] Whereas Erasmus judged Paul’s Greek wanting compared to the classics by Homer, Demosthenes, or Plato, Melanchthon rejected such a prejudice and proclaimed Paul a far better stylist than Erasmus thought—coming to this conclusion even befor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Lithograph
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• The Cloud of Witnesses
• Not “Just the Facts, Ma’am”: From Definition to Effect
• The Law Always Accuses; The Gospel Always Forgives
• Famous Last Words
• Living with the Saints in the Psalms
• Appendix: Philip Melanchthon on the Word Justification in 1532
• Bibliography