Ernesti, who wrote an important work on the interpretation of the
It was represented as a conditio sine qua non, that the exegete should be voraussetzungslos, i.e., without prepossessions, and therefore entirely free from the domination of dogmatics and of the Confessional standards of the Church. Moreover, it became an established principle that the Bible must be interpreted like every other book. The special divine element of the Bible was generally disparaged, and the interpreter usually limited himself to the discussion of historical and critical questions. The abiding fruit of this period is the clear consciousness of the necessity of the Grammatico-Historical interpretation of the Bible. There are also evidences of a growing conviction that this twofold principle of interpretation must be supplemented by some other principle, in order that full justice may be done to the Bible as a divine revelation.
The beginning of this period was marked by the appearance of two opposite schools, the Grammatical and the Historical.
1. THE GRAMMATICAL SCHOOL. This school was founded by Ernesti, who wrote an important work on the interpretation of the New Testament, in which he laid down four principles. (a) The manifold sense of Scripture must be rejected, and only the literal sense retained. (b) Allegorical and typological interpretations must be disapproved, except in cases where the author indicates that he meant to combine another sense with the literal. (c) Since the Bible has the grammatical sense in common with other books, this should be ascertained similarly in both cases. (d) The literal sense may not be determined by a supposed dogmatical sense.
The Grammatical School was essentially supernaturalistic, binding itself to "the very words of the text as the legitimate source of authentic interpretation and of religious truth" (Elliott). But its method was one-sided in that it ministered only to a pure and simple interpretation of the text, which is not always sufficient in the interpretaton of the Bible.