A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics

David Jasper

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780664227517
• eBook ISBN: 9781646980437
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Hermeneutics defines the rules used to search out the meaning of Scripture. Throughout church history, interpreters have approached biblical interpretation in different ways, using different tools and methods. This book conveniently and accessibly surveys major biblical interpreters and approaches to hermeneutics from the patristic period to the present days. It provides a theoretical basis for understanding the processes of hermeneutics in different faith traditions.

Chapter One

Texts and Readers:
Reading and Writing

1 Introduction

The word hermeneutics is an English form of the classical Greek word hermeneus, which means an interpreter or expounder—one who explains things. At one point in the writings of the philosopher Plato, poets are described as “interpreters of the gods.” Throughout this book I will use the rather unusual term “hermeneut,” rather than, say, “interpreter,” in order to be true to this tradition. In Greek mythology Hermes was the messenger of the gods, noted for his speed and athleticism, whose job it was to carry to the people of earth the messages and secrets of the gods of Olympus. With his winged sandals Hermes was able to bridge the gap between the divine and human realms, putting into words those mysteries which were beyond the capacity of human utterance. Without such a messenger how would these two realms communicate with each other, and how would the gap in the understanding between the gods and humankind be overcome? His task was to bridge this gap and to make that which seems unintelligible into something meaningful and clear to the human ear.

Hermeneutics, then, is about “interpretation” or even “translation,” and especially the interpretation of sacred texts, which believers may understand as in some sense divinely inspired or “the word of God.” Much of this book will be about how people through the millennia have interpreted the Bible, the sacred Scriptures of both the Jewish and the Christian traditions, though references will occasionally be made to other sacred texts such as the Muslim Qur’an and the Hindu Bhagavad Gita. Nor is this unrelated to the wider questions of how we read anything at all, and how we understand or too often fail to understand the texts that we read; how we frequently disagree among ourselves about the meaning of texts, or how some texts that we find deeply meaningful can seemingly have no meaning at all for other readers. At the same time, reading is not just a question of seeking meanings. Texts can affect us in many ways. They can make us angry, or frightened, or they can console us. Writing, then, is a kind of action that can work on us in ways far beyond our mere understanding. This is sometimes called the “literature-as-action” model, which regards texts not simply as language but as performance and action. Texts can make us do things as well as understand meaning. One thing will, I hope, quickly become clear—hermeneutics is never static: how we read and understand the nature of a text is changing all the time, just as we ourselves change in our self-understanding. Indeed, what we actually mean by “reading,” “text,” and even “author” is very complex and actually not at all self-evident. And so we must start with a review of these apparently very simple terms so that as we begin to approach the history of Western hermeneutics we may be a little more wary and suspicious. We must begin by upsetting a few assumptions that we have perhaps made too readily, and acknowledge that maybe we understand a little less about first principles than we imagined.

2 Faith and Suspicion, Texts and Readers

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge maintained that as we read a text (he was actually referring specifically to poetry) it must be with “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (Biographia Literaria). To read anything requires, if you will, an initial act of faith in the text before us. In other words, if we are reading a novel, we have to believe that the hero is a real person, who matters to the reader even though we know that this is “just fiction.” The text becomes a “world” which we inhabit for a while (“for the moment”), participating in its drama and its claims on us. We can find instances of how this textual world can affect a whole public. In Victorian England, for example, so great was the public outcry at the first ending of Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations, in which the lovers Pip and Estella are condemned to a life apart, that the author had to write another ending, which brought the lovers together so that Pip can finally say, “I saw no shadow of another parting from her.” His reading public breathed again and felt much better. People’s lives can be deeply influenced by a text, even though we know that it is just “made up,” just an imaginary world. Such fictional texts and narratives can be pretty powerful in our lives, even though we know that, in a sense, they are not “true.” We believe in them, and we are drawn into their worlds and the lives of the characters who inhabit those worlds. How much more has this been so of sacred Scripture! That collection of texts which Christians call their Bible (a title derived via French and Latin from the Greek word biblia, which just means “books,” or a collection of scrolls stored in a chest or cupboard) has been immensely powerful in the history of Western culture, engendering tremendous faith and belief, arguments and even wars, and thereby effecting enormous outcomes in people’s and nations’ lives, for both good and ill.

Perhaps we may come to the Bible and read it with the eyes of faith, believing every word (or most of them), and believing that it is “a pantry of wholesome food, against mouldy traditions; [and] . . . a fountain of most pure water springing up into everlasting life” (words from “The Translators to the Reader” prefixed to the Authorized Version of the Bible of 1611). This response we call a “hermeneutics of faith.” As we shall see, a hermeneutics of faith can take many forms, but it was, on the whole, the predominant way of reading the Bible for at least the first fifteen hundred years of Christian history.

On the other hand, we may come to read a text with caution, even skepticism, determined to test every claim and proposition against such humanly defined standards as the light of reason or the evidence of history. This we call a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” and it has characterized most (though not all) thinking about hermeneutics in the past three or four hundred years. As we shall see in this book, these two attitudes of faith and suspicion are actually present in almost all acts of reading and interpretation in one way or another, sometimes more the one, sometimes more the other.

On the whole, it must be said, we do have a tendency to believe what is written down in a text, even though no less an authority than Plato, in his dialogue called The Phaedrus, warns us against the claims of the written word and the difficulty of interpreting it. After all, we cannot interrogate the text or ask it to explain itself more clearly as we can a speaker, whom we can ask to pause and repeat what has just been said in a different way or define for us an unfamiliar word that we have heard. To such demands the text can only remain silent. Thus Socrates warns his friend Phaedrus:

Once a thing is committed to writing it circulates equally among those who understand the subject and those who have no business with it; a writing cannot distinguish between suitable and unsuitable readers.

And so he concludes:

And [the] writer, past or future, who claims that clear and permanently valid truth is to be found in a written speech, lays himself open to reproach. (Plato, The Phaedrus, trans. Walter Hamilton.)

Ironically, of course, the same thing can be said of Plato’s text itself!

And yet, still, the written word has considerable authority, and above all we seek there for meaning. Almost invariably the first question asked by a pupil given a difficult book to read is, “What does it mean?” This would seem to presuppose a clear, objective meaning or content to be “excavated” from the text, provided we have the right tools and are clever enough to do it. Yet actually what we mean by “meaning” is not altogether clear if you stop and think about it.

Second, we often try to make a clear distinction between texts that deal in facts and therefore claim to be “literally” true, and texts that are fictional or “made up.” Actually the distinction between the literal and the literary truth is extremely difficult to pin down. “Literally” basically means “according to the letter,” and in biblical interpretation relates to a grammatical and nonmetaphorical understanding of the “letter” of Scripture. Its relationship to the “truth,” however, is extremely difficult to define, and the literal is often closely associated with the historical. Thus, many Christians, especially in the nineteenth century, discouraged the reading of novels and works of fiction because they were “not true,” while the Bible, as the Word of God, was regarded as both true and historically accurate. As we shall see, however, the sense in which, say, the Gospels are “true” or “historical” is fiercely debated throughout the history of hermeneutics. We sometimes speak of the “literal truth” as if a “literal reading” (whatever that means) stands in sturdy contrast to the vain imaginings of metaphor or other rather vaguely understood terms. Metaphors (the word is derived from two Greek words, meta phero, which mean to “carry over”) are suggestive of displaced meaning. Something does not really mean what it appears to say, and so we cannot speak literally of the kingdom of heaven; we can only describe it metaphorically as being “like” something more familiar. In Mark’s Gospel Jesus asks, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?” (Mark 4:30). The word “parable” is very like metaphor, derived from the Greek, and meaning that which is “thrown alongside” or parallel to the literal truth. In fact, the idea that a text, least of all a biblical text, may have just one meaning, which, once grasped, remains firm, absolute, and unchanging forever, is a relatively modern concept, and an odd one at that, and would have been very alien to an early Christian interpreter, or hermeneuts like Origen of Alexandria (ca. 185–254), Augustine of Hippo (354–430), or even Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), all of whom we shall turn to in later chapters.

The word “parable” is very like metaphor, derived from the Greek, and meaning that which is “thrown alongside” or parallel to the literal truth.

One of the effects of reading, apart from acquiring information (and part of the task of hermeneutics is to establish criteria to enable us to begin to distinguish between true and false information), is to stimulate us into thought and action. “Using our imaginations” actually may be a very good and creative thing, and retarding the imagination, especially in children, a negative or even dangerous policy. Texts that require the exercise of the imagination may provoke us into ethical reflection or aesthetic appreciation, although there is certainly a wrong use of the imagination as well. But the imagination may properly carry us beyond the limitations of systems of thought or even the orthodoxies of religion.

The English writer Edmund Gosse, in his book Father and Son (1907), wrote an account of his Victorian childhood under the tutelage of his evangelical parents, who feared the imagination and believed in the literal truth of the Bible and the terrible dangers of “fiction.”

Never in all my early childhood [wrote Gosse], did anyone address to me the affecting preamble, “Once upon a time!” I was told about missionaries, but never about pirates; I was familiar with humming-birds, but I had never heard of fairies. Jack the Giant-killer, Rumpelstiltskin and Robin Hood were not of my acquaintance, and though I understood about wolves, Little Red Riding Hood was a stranger even by name. So far as my “dedication” was concerned, I can but think that my parents were in error thus to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts. They desired to make me truthful; the tendency was to make me positive and skeptical. (Gosse, Father and Son; emphasis added)

What do you think Gosse is saying here? Why should the exclusion of fairy stories and the exercise of the imagination from childhood tend to make one skeptical? Are there any stories in the Bible like the ones he refers to? (I did warn you that this is a book that does not provide all the answers!)

Texts, you see, can offer to us more than literal, historical, or scientific truth. Actually, such categories that we tend to take for granted are often relatively recent in the history of human understanding. The writer of Matthew’s Gospel, for example, as we shall see later, would have had no concept of what we now mean by the word “history” or its claims in our systems of inquiry. And so, if words like “literal,” or “meaning,” or even “text” itself are beginning to become a little more difficult and problematic for you, then we are actually getting somewhere, for it is the business of hermeneutics to get us to think rather more carefully than we are wont to do about just such words, and so perhaps to be a little less absolute in our claims to understand them. Hermeneutics warns us also about taking too simply and straightforwardly the idea that a text is just exactly what it was intended to be in the mind and intention of its author, as if understanding the letters of Paul were equivalent to entering into the mind and purposes of the apostle himself. Too often people will say “Paul” when they actually mean the text of the “Letter to the Romans.” The careful reading of the letter should avoid the over-simple equation of Paul and his text, and we sometimes call this too straightforward conflation the intentional fallacy—that is, the fallacious belief that Paul’s intentions in writing are utterly and without reserve reflected in the text of his letter. Why this is a fallacy can be simply illustrated, for now, by the familiar words “I never quite say what I mean, and I never quite mean what I say.” When you are writing an essay or paper, is it always the case that you are able to find exactly the right words to encapsulate what (you thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Texts and Readers: Reading and Writing
• Chapter Two: Midrash, the Bible, and the Early Church
• Chapter Three: From Scholasticism to the Age of Enlightenment
• Chapter Four: Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Age of Romanticism
• Chapter Five: The Nineteenth Century
• Chapter Six: The Twentieth Century
• Chapter Seven: Varieties of Postmodern Hermeneutics
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index of Names and Titles of Works
• Index of Subjects