The following article in full appeared in the Protestant Reformed Theological Journals of April and November, 1990, and April and November, 1991. Prof. Herman C. Hanko is professor in the Protestant Reformed Seminary in
Modern Views in Hermeneutics
Before we discuss specific views of more modern times in the field of Hermeneutics, there are a couple of things which must be understood.
In the first place, the views which we are about to discuss range over a broad spectrum of thought. They can be placed on a line, the one end of which is very modern and liberal Hermeneutics which basically denies the divine character of Scripture altogether; and the other end of which is the more "conservative" view of Hermeneutics which holds to Scripture as the Word of God in whole or in part. That they together belong to destructive higher criticism is my thesis. I am not unaware of the fact that many "conservative" Bible scholars would deny this and insist that they believe in inspiration and, in fact, the infallible inspiration of Scripture. In spite of these claims, it is my firm conviction that they belong to destructive criticism for all that and that they must be repudiated by one who holds to Scripture as God's Word. Their disclaimers are not persuasive, and we do not hesitate to characterize their views as being rationalistic approaches to Scripture which destroy Scripture's fundamental character and rob God's Word of its final authority.
The second point which needs to be made is that one need not necessarily pick out one of the views which we are about to discuss as being the preferable way to interpret Scripture. One can hold to several of these views at the same time.
It is one of the striking features of modern Hermeneutics that every year brings different theories forward concerning methods of biblical interpretation. One can hardly keep up with them all. Each new pet theory is another way which is supposed to offer us insight into biblical interpretation and becomes another tool in the hands of the interpreter of God's Word to help explain Scripture. But the proposing of a new theory does not necessarily mean that older ones have been abandoned. Those who promote, e.g., Form Criticism may at the same time hold to literary and historical criticism. The views overlap. More than one can be used.
With this introductory note, we turn to a brief discussion of some of these views.
On the more liberal end of the spectrum we find several such views which are rather common today even though proposed many years ago.
A very commonly held idea and one which has gained wide acceptance is Form Criticism. While there are variations of this view, basically it holds that especially the New Testament books of the Bible must be interpreted in terms of writing down what were originally oral traditions. The idea goes something like this. During the years of our Lord's ministry, gradually gospel stories and sayings of the Lord were formulated as people told others about what they had seen and heard, or what they had received from others. These stories, as stories have a way of doing, became somewhat stereotyped so that they took on a fairly fixed form.
After the Lord died and went to heaven, these stories and sayings circulated as separate units --in various Christian communities as the gospel spread throughout the world. Some of them were even written down in old documents, no longer available to us, but lying at the basis of the gospel narratives. Such documents are supposed to be the explanation for the similarities between the gospel narratives. An investigation of all this is the method used to solve the so-called "synoptic problem," which addresses itself to the question of why there are similarities but also differences between Matthew, Mark, and Luke.4
These units of oral tradition entered their twilight period during the years A.D. 30 - 60. Gradually they were altered and embellished under the influences of the beliefs in different Christian communities mainly for the purpose of being used effectively for communicating the gospel to others outside the church, and they were finally put into fixed form by the gospel narrators.
The result is basically four layers in the gospel narratives. The lowest layer is Jesus' own words and the authentic memories of His deeds. The next layer is the contributions made by the Post-Easter community. The third layer is the contributions of the Hellenistic community. And the final layer is the contributions of the evangelists themselves as they put all these traditions into their final form.
It is the task of the critic to discover in the gospel which parts are truly original and authentic.
It is clear that the efforts to discover what elements in the gospels are original and authentic are going to be determined by one's presuppositions. Hence, very liberal critics find very little which is truly reliable. One critic went so far as to say that when we finally penetrate all the layers and discover what is really authentic, we can conclude only that there once lived a man who was called Jesus. More conservative critics find much more that is authentic and are even willing to concede that most, if not all, we find in the gospels can be relied upon as trustworthy.
Another view, somewhat related to Form Criticism, is the approach to Scripture called Gemeinde Theologie or, Church Theology. This view holds to the notion that the church at the time Scripture was written formulated her beliefs concerning Christ which she incorporated into various documents. These beliefs were the response of the church to all God's speech. Scripture is the record of the believers' reaction to what God has said in Christ. Scripture is a kind of confession which the church makes concerning her faith. And this is, of course, something in which the church still engages.
A distinction was often made also between Historie and Geschichte. While both German words can be translated by the one word "history," the idea of the distinction is this: Historie refers to the facts of history itself; Geschichte emphasizes the mutual encounter of persons as they participate in and personally interpret Historie. This Geschichte involves various "encounters." It involves the original encounter of a person or persons with the facts of history, the encounter of the recorder who sets about recording such data, and the encounter of the interpreter. Other aspects of such an encounter can be added. The idea of calling all this "encounter" is that through the entire process one encounters Christ Who comes through the kerygma, i.e., the proclamation of Christ.
Bultmann developed this idea further when he spoke, e.g., of the resurrection of Christ as being the Geschichte of the Historie of the cross.
It might be well to pause for a moment and examine this, for there are a couple of interesting elements about it. For one thing, it is an example of the deception of some higher critical studies. If, e.g., one would ask a man whether he believed that the resurrection of Christ was history, his answer could (and, perhaps, would) be: Yes, but he would mean this in the sense of Geschichte and not Historie since both words mean the same thing. Thus by means of the distinction the historical reality of the resurrection is denied, for the resurrection narrative is only in mythical form. What the church believed concerning the cross; i.e.. that the dead Messiah continues to live in the life and consciousness of the church.
Bultmann was the one who also proposed a de-mythologizing of Scripture in order to get at what was authentic and historically factual. He interpreted a myth as being anything which was contrary to the modern scientific world-view of our time. This included a denial of the concept of a three-story universe with hell below earth and heaven above. It included also a denial of the intervention of supernatural powers including devils and angels. And it included the possibility of miracles. All these are contrary to science and cannot be accepted by the modern man. All in Scripture, therefore, which speaks of these things must be considered as myth. And the only way to understand Scripture is to de-mythologize it. What we have left when all the myths have been stripped away is the notion that the cross and resurrection of Christ mean that judgment is brought into the world with the possibility of a new life opened for man.
Another rather popular method proposed is the Sitz im Leben theory of inspiration which must be taken into account in Bible interpretation.5 The idea of this view, although more involved than we can explain here, is that the biblical writers were influenced by their own "situation in life so that their own cultural viewpoints were incorporated into their writings. This has become increasingly popular in our day as the view that the biblical writers were culturally conditioned in their writings. The statements of Paul, e.g., which deny the right of women to hold ecclesiastical office are only his cultural conditioning and not to be accepted today as normative for the life of the church.
Many different techniques are applied to Scriptural interpretation in modern Hermeneutics. Form Criticism, e.g., concentrates upon the literary form in which Scripture comes to us. Redaction Criticism emphasizes that the final products of Scripture which we have in our possession are the work of editors who assembled traditions, writings, and other available material in one coherent document. Source criticism makes an effort to determine the sources which the biblical writers used whether they were rabbinical writings, Old Testament writings, apocryphal writings, genealogies, early forms of the gospels, or whatever.
All of these belong, more or less, to what is commonly known as literary-historical criticism. This form of criticism examines the documents of Scripture to determine such things as their literary genera and their historical setting. So popular has this become in our day that there is scarcely to be found anyone in the major Seminaries of the country who does not hold to this view of biblical interpretation.
A striking example of this is to be found in Tremper Longman III's book, Literary Approaches to Biblical Criticism. 6 Tremper Longman Ill is professor of Old Testament in Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He is, therefore, a "conservative" Bible scholar who would undoubtedly claim to hold to the infallible inspiration of Scripture. After discussing in Chapter 1 Source, Form, and Redaction Criticism, he devotes his book to a study of the problem involved in literary criticism. 7
He speaks first of all of the fact that the writer may be an editor or a redactor and that he may have used sources. In considering this aspect of Scripture one must take into account the writer's purpose in writing as well as his cultural milieu.
Secondly, one must consider the narrator in the writing who is usually different from the writer. Sometimes he is a real person, sometimes fictional. One must determine his purpose in speaking and his cultural milieu, taking into consideration the fact that he may be omnipresent and omniscient. One must also take into consideration the narratee within the story and how he hears. But even then one is not finished. One must reckon with the person or persons to whom the writing is addressed; the reader, not always the same as the one to whom the writing is addressed; and later readers.
Thirdly, one must consider the setting of a writing, the genre (whether poetry, narrative, prophecy, etc.), the figures of speech; the devices used (e.g., Matthew makes an analogy between Christ's life on earth and Israel's forty years of wandering); 8 and, finally, the plot.
Now apart from any other consideration, one wonders how in all God's world it is possible for even a trained exegete, much less an untrained child of God, ever to discover what Scripture means if all these things are necessary. Not only is the process much too long and complicated for anyone to apply it successfully, but most of the information that has to be gained by this method in order to understand the biblical text is sheer speculation and almost totally unavailable to us. The whole structure is a house of cards which tumbles by its own weight. Every man has his own idea of who the narrator (whether real or fictional) is; of who the narratee and the addressee are. The simple fact of the matter is that Scripture is not pleased to reveal this to us in many instances, quite obviously because all this stuff is not necessary to understand the Word of God.
The difficulty is that Longman and others who take this same approach justify it on the grounds that this is really nothing more than an application of the old and traditional grammatical and historical method of exegesis. This method goes back to the early church and the School of Antioch; it was used by the great fathers in the church with more or less consistency; it was the method of the Reformers; it continues to hold a treasured place in the life of the church to this day.
But the question is: is this appeal justified? We shall have to give an answer to this question in a later article, an answer which will give us opportunity to discuss various other aspects of the problem.
For the present, we may draw several conclusions. In the first place, it is not difficult to trace many contemporary views in Hermeneutics to rationalistic philosophy. That ought to give us pause. The approach of these modern methods of Hermeneutics is the approach of rationalism, and rationalism stands directly opposed to faith. It is the antithesis of faith vs. unbelief, of Christ vs. Belial. In the second place, wherever on the spectrum of higher criticism one may stand whether towards the liberal end or towards the conservative end -- it is fundamentally all of one piece. Even such a brief survey as we have offered demonstrates clearly how many modern views in Hermeneutics share a common ground with suggestions and ideas promoted by the early philosophers who applied the principles of rationalistic philosophy to Bible studies. In the third place, one cannot doubt even for a moment that all such views ultimately make biblical interpretation impossible for the untrained believer.
And this is, after all, what we are most concerned about. To apply the principles of Hermeneutics outlined in our survey necessarily forces one to take one of two positions. He must either admit that the Bible is in whole or in part not the Word of God, or he must fall back on the old Medieval distinction between two levels of meaning in Scripture: one level that of the simple meaning open to any child of God; the other a deeper level of meaning available only to the expert. And that accursed notion also effectively takes God's Word out of the hands of His people.
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