3 Normativeness and Authorial Intent: A Proposal Regarding New Testament Imperatives
3
NORMATIVENESS AND AUTHORIAL INTENT: A PROPOSAL REGARDING NEW TESTAMENT IMPERATIVES
I concluded the previous essay by noting the inherent hermeneutical tension created by the evangelical view of Scripture. Because Scripture is God’s word, on the one hand, we inherently look for absolutes and certainty; but because it was given in historical particularity, on the other, God himself locked in a degree of ambiguity and accommodation, on neither of which matters do evangelicals fully agree. Despite some of the difficulties involved, and despite the fact that in many cases we fall far more short of certainty than some would like, it was nonetheless suggested that the way through for us lay in the crucial question of the author’s intent. In this essay, and the next, I would like to pick up this question and suggest why this is the crucial matter for us, and at the same time especially wrestle with the area of hermeneutics where most tensions arise among evangelicals—the New Testament imperatives. Here is where we are divided; and the issue is rarely on the meaning of texts in their original contexts, but on the universality and normativeness of their application.
The purpose of this present essay, then, is threefold: (1) to make some preliminary observations about hermeneutics and normativeness; (2) to explore further the crucial question of authorial intent; and (3) to offer a proposal within that framework for the New Testament imperatives that sees them as part of the gospel, not some new form of law.
I. Toward a Common Understanding of “Hermeneutics” and Normativeness
In striving for greater hermeneutical precision, it seems imperative that we work toward a common understanding of the word “hermeneutics,” especially as to how the concept of normativeness fits into that understanding. It seems to me that by the term hermeneutics we ordinarily are not referring primarily to the many and varied ways that Scripture, having power on its own, speaks directly into our own personal lives. Rather, we are concerned about Scripture as the basis for Christian theology and behavior, and for the application of Scripture that is at once both universal and timeless. That is, we are concerned about the meaning and application of biblical truth that should be the same and obligatory for all people at all times and in all circumstances. We are interested here in the universal applicability of the biblical text, not the individual encounter with it.
We instinctively recognize the validity of this assumption in the area of Christian theology per se. The basic theological truths of the unity of God, creation, the deity of Christ, Christ’s death as effecting atonement, etc. are not negotiable—not at least to the evangelical. These are the essential and universally applicable truths of the Christian faith, without which the faith is something other than truly Christian. But when it comes to Christian behavior and personal piety evangelicals often display a different attitude toward Scripture, where it becomes a kind of quarry for principles—a rule book to live by—or an instant source of divine guidance for any and all aspects of life.
By this differentiation I do not mean to play down the devotional reading of Scripture. Nor do I demean those moments when quite apart from its original context or intent, the Holy Spirit has used the text of Scripture with great power to speak to our need or situation. In September 1988 we dedicated our Regent College facility that sits at the entrance to the University of British Columbia, on a choice corner lot that for years was simply overgrown with wild vegetation. At the dedication, which was held outside on our spacious park, our former colleague Dr. Klaus Bockmuehl read the Scripture from Solomon’s prayer of dedication in 1 Kings 8. It is hard to describe the power of that moment. Here at the entrance on the campus of a great university a school had been erected to integrate faith and learning, to speak Christ to the secular campus. And none had striven and prayed more for that dream than Dr. Bockmuehl himself. Though the setting was quite different from where those words were originally spoken, here were the words of Scripture—without comment—being spoken again and by the Holy Spirit becoming a living and powerful word.
And who of us in times of difficulty and dryness has not read from the psalms or prophets and had their vivid images of God’s watering the dry places for Israel become a means of watering our own arid places? Such experiences, I would argue, lie within the inherent power of Scripture. After all, the very fact that so much in Scripture comes by way of vivid images and metaphors opens up possibilities for hearing and being ministered to in ways quite beyond the original author’s intent.
On the other hand, although we very well might share with others such wonderful encounters in God’s living word, none of us would dare to believe that such moments are intended to be universally applicable to all other believers. It is the very personal nature of such moments that gives all of us latitude toward others to have their own such moments with God. But the things that divide us are not related to that use of Scripture. Rather, our differences result from all of us looking at the same texts, all with a similar view of Scripture as the word of God, yet either understanding the original meaning of the texts in different ways or having different views as to how they do or do not apply. Here, it seems to me, our hope for greater consistency and larger agreement lies still with the primary task of hermeneutics—the careful exegesis of texts, which has the original intent of the text as its primary goal. Let us turn once more, then, to the question of authorial intent.
II. The Question of Authorial Intent
The crucial nature of the question of intentionality was put on display a few years ago in its starkest form by the then U.S. presidential adviser, and later attorney general, Edwin Meese. Just before Christmas, 1983, he made national headlines by declaring that he had not seen “any authoritative figures that there are hungry children in America” and that people eat in soup kitchens because it’s free, not because they can’t pay for it. Such absurdities were properly castigated by the media, one of whom, given the appropriateness of the season, suggested a resemblance to Scrooge. In his defense Meese argued that the Bob Cratchits of Dickens’ story were not in such dire straits—Cratchit did have a job after all, and they also had a home and food—and that Scrooge was not really such an evil fellow, but rather has been the victim of a bad press. I know some who saw that rejoinder as clever and as setting his opponents straight. As a matter of fact, of course, it was neither clever nor true, but a clear display of one’s theology setting the agenda for the reading of a text—and in this case a rather demonic theology. Meese’s travesty of Dickens’ Christmas Carol was to turn it on its head, so that it became the 180 degree opposite of Dickens’ intent in writing the story. One may disagree with Dickens if one wishes, but it is totally illegitimate to destroy an author’s intentionality in such cavalier fashion.
I have used this rather stark example in order to get the reader’s attention, for one of the genuine difficulties of evangelical hermeneutics is our aptitude to do a similar thing to the biblical text, but not recognize ourselves as doing so.
In the previous essay, I argued that the inadequacy of liberal hermeneutics lies first in the liberal view of Scripture—an emphasis on its being given in human words so that the divine word is either blunted or diminished—and second in the liberal view of religious authority, which rests ultimately on human reason. The net result is the autonomy, or idolatry, of the self. We tell God what is permissible in Scripture to be his word.
Anyone hearing me say that and having a careful ear and an observant eye to the contemporary evangelical scene should have had his or her mental wheels turning. How different is that from an evangelical, who, by selective hermeneutics or with a theological a priori, manages to disregard or get around what is equally unpalatable in the text. Is there really much difference between a liberal, whose philosophical predispositions allow him or her a reinterpretation of the bodily resurrection of Jesus into a spiritual ideal of life after death, and an evangelical, whose political or economic presuppositions allow him or her to reinterpret, or disregard altogether, the biblical mandate of securing mishpat (justice) for the poor (that is, the oppressed and disenfranchised), which means not that they get what’s coming to them but that they are to receive mercy? If the one abuses the intent of the text so as to frame a “modern” theology, the other abuses the intent of the text so as to secure his or her inalienable rights to affluence, materialism, and selfishness.
Unfortunately, it is the liberal who seems able to see this inconsistency in us better that we ourselves. This is surely one of the valid critiques in James Barr’s rather scathing, if sometimes intemperate, denunciation of what he calls fundamentalism.[1] Because liberals tend to deny the prior authority of Scripture, it is easy for them to interpret texts as they will, as far as present or eternal relevance is concerned. But when liberals watch evangelicals vehemently attack them on crucial theological points, yet casually get around equally crucial ethical points, because evangelicals, too, seem to have made prior commitments as to what God may say to them, liberals are scarcely convinced that our view of Scripture is a helpful one. All the more so, when we leave the impression that because we believe God inspired the text, he must also be on our side in the interpretation of the text, even when we neglect or distort it to fit our prior commitments.
What shall we say, then? Do we capitulate, simply because our autonomy over the text takes place at a different point? Not at all, I would argue. The difficulty I have with liberal hermeneutics remains. I do not see any hope for a corrective to their autonomy over the text. They may be corrected by reasonable arguments, but reason still prevails, not the text of Scripture itself. What one doesn’t like in Scripture, one may simply disregard or interpret to fit one’s presuppositions.
But precisely because evangelical hermeneutics places the final authority in the text itself, there is always the hope that God the Holy Spirit will have his way and disabuse us of our prejudices and call us to obedience to God’s will. Because the authority is intrinsic to Scripture itself, the evangelical, by theological predisposition, should always be open to reformation. Sadly, that does not happen nearly as often as it should because we also tend to have the theological disposition that our prior theological, ecclesiastical, and ethical commitments are correct and not in need of reformation, an issue I wish to address in a further essay.[2]
But it is this conviction of ours about the inherent authority lying in the text of Scripture that makes the issue of authorial intentionality so crucial. This is why we insist that good exegesis is always the first step to sound hermeneutics. And good exegesis is so only as it seeks to discover and hear what the text is intending to say.
The reason for such insistence on intentionality rests with the nature of spoken or written communication. Except for rare exceptions like E. E. Cummings, speakers or authors intend for their hearers/readers to understand what they are trying to communicate. Indeed, even Cummings has the intent of no intent in his poetry, so that too is not without intentionality.
There is, of course, a different intent, for example, to a psalm and a letter. The poetic nature of a psalm, which appeals to both mind and feeling, has inherent in it the possibility that one may hear more than the poet intended.[3] So also with the powerful, basically poetic, images of the prophets, who also set a further dimension of understanding into motion when they committed to writing what was originally a spoken word. Even so, the very choice of poem over straight prose has such further hearing as a part of its intent; but a poet surely hopes also that the reader will hear the poet’s own joy or pain and understand the poet’s allusions or images.
My point is a simple one. Since God chose to communicate himself to us through human speech in historically particular circumstances, we are locked into a hermeneutical process that demands by its very nature that we listen carefully first of all to what is intended; for there alone lies our hope of hearing what God himself wants us to hear.
By insisting on the priority of exegesis in the hermeneutical task, however, we are not thereby arguing for the autonomy of exegesis. In fact, to insist on authorial intentionality as the crucial issue does not presume to have made the hermeneutical task easier. Such an insistence has a twofold aim: (1) Authorial intentionality serves as a corrective, or sets some limits, as to what texts may not be made to mean. One need only think of how B. B. Warfield interpreted “the perfect” in 1 Cor 13:10 to refer to the canon of New Testament Scripture to recognize the cruciality of original intent. It must be a hermeneutical axiom for the straight prose of a letter that the “meaning” of the text cannot possibly be something neither the author nor his readers could have understood.[4]
(2) Authorial intent is also the way forward for us to construct our theologies in a truly biblical fashion. It will teach us that in theology not all apparently conflicting data need to be resolved or harmonized. Sometimes such data can stand side by side in healthy tension. That, too, is a form of unity and reveals the many-splendored glory of God. Furthermore, authorial intentionality should guide us through some of the more gray areas where we are divided as to the application of texts. I hope to illustrate this in some detail in the next chapter.
But to argue for the intentionality of texts as the prior hermeneutical task does not resolve all our difficulties. It is merely the way forward. Several hermeneutical tasks remain. My concern in the rest of this essay is to explore especially the way evangelicals tend to treat the biblical imperatives; and at the same time I am concerned to offer a different model for our consideration, one which attempts to be true both to the intent of the text of Scripture, on the one hand, and to the intent of the gospel itself, on the other.
III. A Gospel Framework for New Testament Imperatives
One of my basic concerns about evangelical hermeneutics in the past is our tendency to adopt a very cognitive, rationalistic model which often misses either the nature of the gospel itself or the dynamic quality of life in the Spirit—matters that are absolutely fundamental to the very Christian life that our hermeneutics is concerned about. This is especially true of the fundamentalist’s use of texts, where Scripture very often becomes the quarry from which one mines propositions to be believed and imperatives to be obeyed. But the net result of such hermeneutics more often than not is that it turns both Scripture and the gospel into a form of Christian law, as devastating as the pharisaism which Jesus denounced or the Judaizers against whom Paul spoke so vehemently. Such hermeneutics sees Scripture as the divine rule book; in this hermeneutics three things tend to happen: (1) First there is a tendency to level all Scripture and thereby take all the imperatives across the board, thus mining the quarry and offering a new set of Christian rules to live by; the ad hoc nature of the texts is recognized only when what is mined does not fit theological predispositions (tongues, head-coverings, etc.).[5] (2) But secondly, fundamentalists accomplish this by frequently flawed exegesis and an especially selective hermeneutics, so that consistency is nearly impossible to come by. (One whole wing of evangelicalism, for example, argues vehemently for the eternal validity of 1 Cor 14:34–35 on the silence of women, while rejecting every other imperative in the chapter, including the final one, not to forbid speaking in tongues—all on the basis of a prior commitment to an exegesis and hermeneutical a priori that simply cannot be sustained in terms of author’s intent.) (3) Once the new set of rules is in place, subscribers to this method use it as a measuring stick by which all deviant beliefs and behavior are judged and found wanting.
Missing in such hermeneutics is the dynamic of the gospel itself and especially of the Spirit. Here one is declared to be saved by faith, because that is clearly taught in Scripture; but in actuality one is finally related to God on the basis of works—in this case by means of close adherence to the rules of the faith as they have been worked out by a very rationalistic hermeneutics, where there are no uncertainties and where everything is neatly packaged. Furthermore, obedience tends to be quite non-relational. One obeys the rules as they are extracted from the book, and the rules tend to be very task- not people-oriented. To put all that more theologically, the call to obedience is to God, not the Bible; it is to a divine Person, not to a collection of written rules.
While it is easy for us to see fundamentalists behind the foregoing description, what concerns me is that “enlightened evangelicalism” at times tends to operate from a very similar hermeneutics. Perhaps the easiest place to see this in operation is in the question which I hope to address in the next chapter—the debate over women’s ministries—where often with a kind of splendid casuistry that makes it look all very cogent, some women are excluded from their own calling to ministry because a single text is treated as law. Besides the fact that such a view misses the much greater amount of material on the other side of things and that it probably misses Paul’s own ad hoc intent by a considerable margin, such a view seems to miss the redemption and freedom afforded by the gospel and to favor instead some alleged, divinely ordained hierarchical structures—which can only be found after, not before, the Fall. Insistence on head-coverings, or sabbath observance, or tithing all tend to follow the same hermeneutical procedure. Each in its own way misses the greater power of the gospel and the role of the Spirit in Christian ethical or religious life and turns biblical texts into rules for Christians to abide by. After all, in Pauline theology in particular, the primary imperative is, “Walk in/by the Spirit” (Gal 5:16)—all other imperatives flow out of that one.
Lest some get nervous for fear that I am putting the use of Scripture aside for something rather more subjective, I would argue that such is not so. To the contrary, I am urging two things: First, we simply must take more seriously than we do that there are differences of degrees and levels in the New Testament imperatives. Abstaining from sexual immorality or clothing oneself with compassion, humility, and forgiveness are of a different kind and of a different category from the guidelines for the exercise of prophecy and tongues in 1 Corinthians 14 or for the discipline of sinning elders in 1 Timothy 5. The very fact that Paul himself gives plainly different guidelines for the marriage of widows in 1 Corinthians 7 and 1 Timothy 5 should tell us something about the nature of these kinds of texts, as over against those that in some way or another are illustrations of the double love command—love for God and love for neighbor.[6]
Second, over against the fundamentalist hermeneutics of the New Testament imperatives, which many evangelicals have never quite freed themselves from—for fear of being seen to abandon Scripture itself, I would guess—I am urging something much closer to Jesus’ own rejection of scribal models of interpretation in Matthew 5 in favor of a hermeneutics that is more biblically relational, based on the character of God and the gift of the Spirit. One does not get angry with a brother, not because the law forbids killing, but because in the kingdom of God we have become children of a heavenly Father who is not like that, and the very redemptive nature of the gospel makes love for neighbor one’s first ethical priority. To make “no anger” a new law to replace “no killing” in the Ten Commandments is to miss too much. All things are now measured by the character of the Father; as his children we are privileged by the power of the Spirit to bear his likeness in the world. The ethical demands of Matthew 5, therefore, illustrate how such life is be lived out in a variety of settings—all relational. And in the kingdom of God, in Jesus’ teaching, God’s demand is always accompanied by his gift. Ethics is response to the experience of grace, as the story of Zacchaeus illustrates most profoundly.
So also with Paul’s own rejection of circumcision and food laws. One is no better off or worse off doing either. Such religious duties simply do not count. Therefore, Paul neither urges that Jews stop circumcising their children nor allows that Gentiles must circumcise theirs. The freedom of the gospel, and life in the Spirit, eliminate such matters as obligations; but they do not eliminate or condemn those who are more comfortable with such practices than otherwise; hence with Jews Paul lives as a Jew. What is disallowed is for those who practice them to make them mandatory for those who do not.
The same is true with such a perfectly innocent matter as tithing. For all that one can say about its value and usefulness as a kind of minimum guideline for Christian giving, one quite misses the gospel when it is turned into some kind of Christian requirement. The gospel frees one from such a reading of biblical texts. But does it thereby also free one from giving? To the contrary, according to Paul, the gospel, with the gift of the Spirit, teaches one a kind of generosity that emulates the lavish gift of grace found in the one who “though he was rich, yet for our sakes became poor, that we might be made rich” (2 Cor 8:9).
What I am urging is not that we do our exegesis differently, nor that we get around texts that we don’t like; rather, I am urging that we learn to think of biblical texts not as rules to follow, but as expressions and illustrations of God’s redemption, and therefore as guidelines for our living redemptively in a fallen world.
IV. Application
Let me conclude, then, with two illustrations as to how such a model might work out in some very painful contemporary issues, on which we lack agreement, and which are so charged with emotion and personal pain that it is difficult for some even to engage in hermeneutical discussion about them—lest the issues be lifted from real life and be made the playground of theoretical ethics. I refer to the issue of abortion and the question of divorce and remarriage, and in both cases I am concerned not simply with how Christians themselves respond to these issues, but how they respond in a fallen world which for all practical purposes is trying to deal with moral issues quite apart from the reality of God. I turn to the first one, abortion, because Scripture does not speak directly to it, while in the other it does.
Let me say right up front about abortion that I am one of those who is convinced that as biblical Christians we must work to bring this horror to an end. But what concerns me is that I feel so little in common hermeneutically with other evangelicals who share my conviction. On the one hand, we must acknowledge that Scripture nowhere speaks directly to the issue. With others, I too believe that it is nonetheless covered by the sixth commandment—thou shalt not kill, in the sense of committing murder. But a hermeneutics that approaches this issue as obedience to law seems also to create people who very often break other expressions of the same law in their vehemence against those who do the abortions and those who have them done. In the name of Christ they act unlike Christ for the sake of their “Christian law.”
But what shape might a redemptive hermeneutical model take? I would suggest that it begins biblically not with the law, but with God himself, whose character is revealed in the law, when it is viewed first as gift before obligation. God as Creator, as the life-giver, as the one who has bestowed upon his human creatures the inconceivable gift of joining with him in the creation of yet another human life that will bear God’s image, as well as that of her or his parents—all of this should make abortion under any circumstances immoral, but on demand unthinkable. We are the children of the living God, our heavenly Abba, whose many-splendored creativity and whose care for the oppressed and disenfranchised is being defaced in every abortion. Surely God looks on with both horror and compassion. “But judgment is mine,” says the Lord, “I will repay.” I would argue, therefore, that our response to this evil should be many-sided, but always one which leaves judgment in God’s hands while we show compassion to those who so cavalierly destroy human life that we are convinced is precious in the sight of him who gave it in the first place.
Perhaps we might begin with a day of mourning, in which we weep before God in sackcloth and ashes over a people who seem to have such a callous attitude toward human life. On the other side, all those who oppose abortion in our modern world in the name of Christ must also be ready to be first in line to offer care and love for unwed mothers, for unwanted babies, for siblings of aborted babies who so often suffer their own form of trauma over whether they were wanted, and for those mothers whose abortions create such dissonance in their own lives that they must go through years of therapy.
But whatever else, our response toward the unborn must not be turned into law in such a way that our rules are more important than the people we perceive as breaking them. After all, it is not some abstract rule or obligation that is being shunted aside; it is a rejection of God’s own character as loving Creator, and a rejection of grace and redemptive love. Our ethics must likewise be creative expressions of redemptive love; otherwise the law becomes the important thing, and we carry on with strident voices damning the very people for whom Christ died.
When we turn to the issue of divorce and remarriage, we come to one that is of a considerably different kind, because here we do have texts that speak directly to the issue—and they seem uniformly against it. No matter how compassionate one might wish to be to those who have experienced this personal tragedy, and no matter how much we might yet have to learn about the meaning of these various texts in their original contexts, one can scarcely escape the biblical view, expressed especially by Jesus, that God is against divorce. As Jesus put it, God had something in mind from the beginning for our human race and for our basic relationships as male and female that stands over against divorce. Or to put it my way, with tongue in cheek, the reason Jesus said “no divorce” is that he also said “love your enemies.”
As anyone who has tried to wrestle with this issue knows well enough, the hermeneutical complexities surrounding it are considerable—and that for several reasons, many of which have nothing to do with our own scene. (1) It is clear that the injunctions in both Jesus and Paul presuppose a believing community; and since Paul in particular distinguishes between how a believer and unbeliever respond on this matter, it seems clear that this is not an issue that can be legislated outside the Christian community. That is, those outside Christ are playing to a different set of rules on this one (although even in their case much can be said positively in favor of marital faithfulness). (2) It also seems to be the case that both Jesus and Paul were speaking into contexts where divorce was being advocated (or at least sanctioned) by members of the believing community. Indeed the Pharisees’ view of divorce by the time of Jesus, in which they divorced in order to remarry and remarried in order to divorce, was simply “legalized caving in before the pressure of sexual passion.”[7] And in the case of Paul it was the threat from a more ascetic ideal that he had to fight against. Thus they do not speak to the question of divorce in general, nor to situations where there have been desertions or wife abuse. (3) Even so, it is clear that they expect people within the believing community not only not to pursue divorce, but in the case of Paul to live with their spouses in loving and self-giving ways that are determined by their relationship to Christ.
Our problems stem from a whole variety of forces: (1) the general self-centeredness of our culture has made its way into the church as well; (2) the amount of wife abuse is staggering in our culture—and this even within Christian homes; (3) people come from so many kinds of dysfunctional family backgrounds that stable family life is often foreign to them, so that they bring all the wrong kinds of models to the marriage relationship.
In light of all this, what then serves as our hermeneutical model of gospel and Spirit rather than law? It seems to me that the way forward is to stay close to Jesus’ and Paul’s intent—that divorce sought after by believers should be discouraged in every possible way. But not because this is law, but because sought divorce as an excuse to remarry is simply pagan and reflects little or no understanding of the gospel at all, and as the way out of a difficult situation lacks the larger sense of the redemptive nature of the gospel that sometimes calls for suffering and hardship on our part. Christian men and women are first of all brothers and sisters in Christ before they are husbands and wives, and that determines everything for them. They are to treat marriage partners with the kind of love that is required of all relationships within the believing community.
On the other hand, precisely because this is not law, and because many of our contexts differ so radically from theirs, our attitude should probably not be to save every marriage at all costs, but to seek a resolution in some cases on the basis of what is the most redemptive thing to do. Indeed, this it would seem to me is the ultimate question in all tough decisions about the New Testament imperatives, where we are seeking to reflect the gospel and life in the Spirit. What is redemptive? Since the paradigm of our faith is the cross, we should encourage some to seek for God’s redeeming their failures. The model of our faith, after all, is not perfect people, but redeemed people, who have experienced grace and restoration.
V. Conclusion
I would thus urge that evangelical hermeneutics in the years ahead must increasingly think of Scripture less as law to be obeyed and more as gospel to be proclaimed, as redemption and freedom in Christ, as life in the Spirit, against which there is no law. And I would further urge that our hermeneutics in the years ahead must also find ways of penetrating our increasingly secular culture with the real gospel and its message of redemption. We must find ways of bringing back awe and mystery into a fictionalized, trivialized, and technological world—made the more so as we move closer and closer to a generation that knows nothing about life without television; once children had to learn creativity since they could not be babysat or mesmerized by an idiot box. All of these and more must affect the way we think about and apply Scripture in our hermeneutical future.
As our former student put it, “the ministry is hermeneutics.” I would change that slightly, “Christian life is hermeneutics”: it involves the hard but joyous work of listening yet more carefully and applying God’s word to all of life in a fallen world.
1 James Barr, Fundamentalism (London: SCM, 1977). See, e.g., pp. 310–17.
2 [See chapter 5.]
3 Precisely this failure to recognize the differences between types of discourse attenuates so much of the argument against intentionality by David C. Steinmetz (“The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis,” Theology Today 37 [1980] 27–38). This article has an unfortunately large number of failures of this kind, including the fact that by starting with Benjamin Jowett’s insistence on “one meaning,” he has set up something of a straw man with regard to contemporary hermeneutical discussion and thus fails to address much of the present discussion which is miles removed from Jowett.
4 Some have objected to this axiom as limiting the power of the Holy Spirit to give meaning to texts far beyond the mind or intent of the original author. But in this case Paul himself sets the limits. In 1 Cor 5:9 he is quite upset with the Corinthian congregation because they have either misunderstood or, more likely, disregarded his own intent in an earlier letter. For him there is only one meaning to his words—his meaning; and they are quite blameworthy for having disregarded it. People simply do not use the letter form if they expect people to find all kinds of deeper or hidden meanings in their words. There are other types of discourse for this purpose.
5 [Typical of fundamentalists’ hermeneutics was their reaction to men’s “long hair” in the late 1960s—on the basis of 1 Cor 11:14. Without blinking, they made this incidental part of Paul’s argument normative, while his main point, that women should have a head-covering when praying or prophesying, was considered ad hoc.]
6 [I will pursue some of this in more detail in the next chapter.]
7 This is the language of David L. Dungan, The Sayings of Jesus in the Churches of Paul (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971) 121.