Sixth, interpretation should agree with each passage’s aim, circumstances of parts, and order.
Sixth, interpretation should agree with each passage’s aim, circumstances of parts, and order.
§ 536. (VI) Interpretation should agree with each passage’s aim, circumstances of parts, and order. Just as the lawyers say that “it is unreasonable to want to pass judgment about certain words of a law without first inspecting the entire law,” so also one cannot pass judgment about the genuine interpretation of any statement without having respect for the aim, circumstances, and sequence of the text. “Whoever does not pay attention to what is written before and after within the sacred books is perverting the Word of the living God,” say the Hebrews. In support of this position we quoted many statements from the fathers in our treatise On the Interpretation of Scripture [1610 Loci Theologici, locus 2], § 209, to which we can add the following:
Irenaeus writes (bk. 1, c. 1, p. 26) as follows about the heretical Valentinians:
They leap across the sequence of the Scriptures, and as much as they can, they take apart the parts of the truth. They transfer and transform, and while they are making one thing out of another, they deceive many with a wisdom badly pulled together from the Lord’s statements that they accommodate to their error. This is the same as if one were to take apart a beautiful image of a king, constructed by a wise artist out of precious stones, by destroying the human form that the artist had set up; and as if he were to transfer those stones to form the shape of a dog or of a wolf, which he also constructed badly; and as if later, when he had finished, he were to say that this is that beautiful image of the king that the wise sculptor had fashioned, having pointed to those stones that the first artist had fashioned beautifully into the image of the king but that now had been poorly transformed by the later “artist” into the shape of a dog; and as if, through the appearance of the stones, he were to deceive cleverly the unlearned who have no idea what the king looks like; and as if he were to convince them that this disgraceful form of a canine was that beautiful image of the king. Truly, it is in just this way that these people are patching together old wives’ tales to which they afterward apply words, statements, and parables that they have plucked from hither and yon. To these tales of theirs they want to apply God’s words.
** Clement of Alexandria calls the connection of that which comes before and that which follows a passage “the context and body of the prophecy” (Stromat., bk. 7). Theodoret, in his Opuscul. contra varias haereses (contained in vol. 2 of Athanasius), says that “this is the talent of heretics: that they reject the aim and function of Scripture by whose proofs they see they are constrained; that they twist some bare statement cut out of the genuine sequence of a speech for their own purpose, to serve their own proof; and that they do not subject themselves to the obvious meaning but violently pervert the syllables to an evil creation of their own inclination.” **
Hilary, De Trinit., bk. 2, p. 21: “We must understand every statement on the basis of the cause for which it is said and the explanation of the statement on the basis of the sense of the one who says it.”
Jerome, on Matthew 25, rejects the interpretation of Chrysostom—who takes Christ’s parable about the ten virgins to be about virginity of the flesh—and adds this rule: “I always admonish the prudent reader not to be satisfied with superstitious interpretations that are uttered out of context in support of the judgment of those who make them up, but to consider what comes before, what is in the middle, and what comes after, and to connect for himself everything that has been written.”
Augustine, De civ. Dei, bk. 17, c. 15: “The testimony that is being presented should have support from the context of the entire psalm so that at least there is nothing to oppose it, if not everything supports it.” Tractate 70 on John, at the beginning: “Thus we correctly understand the words of the Gospel if we find that they are in harmony with what has come before, for the preceding words ought to fit together with those that follow when truth speaks.” Tractate 3 on John: “Let no one disturb this serene meaning with a cloudy contradiction. Let what follows apply proof to what has come before.”
Lyra, on Deuteronomy 18, cites a statement of Hilary: “We must take our understanding of statements from the causes of the speaker.”