Conclusion
From chapters 7–9 it follows that both literary and historical approaches provide valuable information for the study of Scripture. The majority of scholars today recognize this balance, although various writers and teachers today may provide fuller contributions in one approach or the other. Likewise, most scholars do value both ancient and modern meanings (on a broad definition of meaning) or the ancient range of meaning and subsequent contextual applications (on a more traditional definition of meaning).
What is often considered distinctive about Spirit hermeneutics is on the level of contextualization, since the Spirit already inspired texts in their ancient form. As already noted, however, the Spirit can help us in the entire process of reception, so a full-orbed Spirit hermeneutic ultimately includes both. In practice, one may emphasize the Spirit to supplement traditional teaching regarding exegetical method, but one should not emphasize only the Spirit’s role in application or modern meaning as a substitute for inculcating basic exegetical skills (including literary context and, insofar as possible, ancient cultural context and language skills).
Both Literary and Historical Approaches 1
Many think of critical scholarship until the mid-twentieth century as primarily historically oriented, followed by a shift toward interest in rhetorical (persuasive) techniques in the texts. 2 Yet even earlier approaches to Acts scholarship, for example, often attended to Luke’s distinctive perspective and approach, 3 and today historical interests remain alive and well in this area of study. 4
Although contemporary literary and historical criticism were once often at odds (primarily because the former was responding to a traditional overemphasis on the latter), most scholars now accept the value of both approaches. 5 Even apparently purely intrinsic literary approaches themselves arise in and reflect particular historical and social contexts. 6
Questions from the broader historical context are inescapable if we concern ourselves with how ancient audiences, whose language and culture the text plainly presupposes, would have heard various passages. Writers such as Luke sought “to communicate with intended readers,” and this purpose helped shape the text as we have it, regardless of how we utilize the text for subsequent purposes foreign to those authors. 7 The audience implied by the text is historically conditioned by the world addressed in the text. 8
To read the text as a whole, we must read it in light of not only the intrinsic data throughout the text but also the extrinsic data that the original communication presupposes. 9 At a minimum this includes the language in which the text was written (without which, as already noted, the extant alphabetic characters become nothing more than random marks) 10 and those cultural, theological and literary assumptions that are shared between author and audience without needing to be made explicit. Often the real author and audience also shared knowledge of a more particular situation, although this specific knowledge often eludes us as secondary readers. 11
Historical context affects matters such as how readers approach genre; 12 some modern Jesus mythers approach the Gospels as mythography, whereas I would argue that any competent ancient reader, recognizing Jesus as a recent historical figure, would recognize them as ancient biography. 13 Although these disparate conclusions do involve different preunderstandings (in this case, some want to treat any supernatural claims as mythical), they remain substantially a matter of comparative historical analysis.
Contrary to what some suggest, ancient audiences cared about genre. Ancient readers were aware of various categories of genre; 14 in fact, technical rhetorical works often defined specific genres of letters and speeches more strictly than the empirical examples allow. 15 Ancient editors divided Pindar’s poems according to the kinds of hymns and songs they were, thereby arranging them into books. 16 Of various models for genre criticism in antiquity, Aristotle’s prevailed longest. 17
In contrast to those who avoid extratextual approaches for methodological reasons, some may avoid them because they recognize that they have limited expertise in such areas; and such avoidance is, at least, better than pretending expertise they lack. Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer, whose expertise in the ancient sources is self-evident, rightly warn that many NT scholars show little acquaintance with the ancient sources, and that their deficiency proves particularly conspicuous in work that sometimes collapses into “completely uninhibited ahistorical speculation.” 18 Such theories tend to arise in artificial vacuums: scholars too often explain away all the historical evidence that we do have, then create arguments from the silence that remains; “a radical form of criticism” that uncritically ignores the only extant sources we have “in order to make room for its own fantastic constructions.” 19
Approaches That Draw on Larger Contexts
Insofar as modern literary theory focuses on communication (a primary purpose of texts), it indicates that “texts display not only internal reference (in relation to structures within the text itself), but also external reference (in relation to circumstances outside the text); they tacitly presuppose the entire cultural knowledge of the period.” 20 As readers are drawn into a narrative, they are drawn into the narrative world that the text presupposes; this is not always the author’s real world, but it cannot but be somehow informed by the author’s real world. 21
William Kurz, citing speech-act theories, notes that narratives normally occur
in a context of communication. The writer of Luke and Acts was not merely amusing himself by doodling on papyrus or parchment but was attempting to communicate with intended readers through his written text. The key participants and factors of this act of communication are objective (extramental) realities, not figments of readers’ imaginations, as some might deduce from certain forms of literary criticism. Thus the writer of Luke existed as a historical individual, whether or not we can identify him today. If there had been no writer, there would be no text. 22
Explaining sociostylistic interpretation, Todd Klutz notes that “Like rhetorical criticism, . . . this type of stylistics assumes that the communicative force of a text’s style usually has something to do with the goals of the text’s producer, whose conformity to expectations of relevance normally entails that the assumed audience and situation are implied in the text itself.” 23 In contrast to formalism’s focus on aesthetic “properties of texts,” “sociostylistics and related linguistic methods pay just as much attention to the extratextual conditions, causes, motives and effects of texts as they do to the aesthetic qualities of the texts themselves.” 24
One fruitful blending of historical and literary approaches reads “texts using many of the reading and listening conventions in vogue at the time of composition.” 25 This blended approach has many implications. It might challenge, for example, some narrative critics’ almost exclusive focus on first-time readers; ancient readers recognized the value of rereading a document as often as necessary to catch the main themes and subtleties. 26
One line of literary criticism focuses on “the authorial audience,” 27 as reconstructed not only from the text but from the cultural world “in which the text was produced.” 28 Other scholars, interested in addressing the needs of philologists, have developed the text-analytical approach to specific intertextuality, which allows for authorial intention in deliberate associations between texts and their pre-texts. 29 As historian Andreas Bendlin points out, “The intention of the author and the unity of the transmitted text have not lost their appeal for classical philologists. Here, intertextuality mostly in its restricted text-analytical form, is employed in analyzing the use of Greek precursors and models in Latin literature.” 30
One particularly helpful current approach, grounded in cognitive neuroscience and empirical study of how human communication functions, is relevance theory (treated also above in chapter 4). 31 This theory observes that a communicator can leave some information implicit 32 because it may be inferred from the social context that the anticipated audience shares with the communicator. Where such information cannot be inferred, the communication fails.
Such failure is especially a risk in secondary communication, where we interpret texts not addressed to us, particularly when they were not originally addressed even to our own social or linguistic contexts. 33 Because so much communication depends on inference, Gutt notes that the intended sense “is recoverable not in just any context, but only in a context where the requirements of optimal processing are fulfilled, that is, where there are adequate contextual effects, without unnecessary processing effort.” 34
Both Ancient and Modern Meanings 35
A polarization between the value of an “original” meaning and modern ones may be common in some circles, but for Christian interpretation it is unhelpful. Historical study need not be played off against theological interest as if they are mutually incompatible. 36
Today most scholars recognize the value of both approaches, wherever their own emphases may lie. Joel Green, especially known for literary and theological interpretation, differentiates between speculative historical criticism and the more valuable sort that provides historical context valuable for hearing the text. 37 As he points out, the dichotomy between history and theology or ideology is a modernist one that neglects the role of ideology in shaping historical writing (particularly in terms of selection and arrangement). 38 Indeed, he observes, hearing the text in its own historical context may help us hear it more clearly, as opposed to domesticating it, distancing from it or merely exploiting our excavations of it. 39
Kevin L. Spawn and Archie T. Wright note that most scholars in renewal traditions support both dependence on the Spirit and “rigorous academic research.” 40 North American Pentecostal scholar Lee Roy Martin likewise emphasizes that “appreciation for the affective dimension” of reading Scripture “is only one aspect of a holistic hermeneutic. The affective elements become clearer and more precise when they emerge from sound exegesis.” 41 Australian Pentecostal scholar Jacqueline Grey notes that reading with sensitivity to both horizons “does not contradict the legitimacy of the historical and cultural context of the text, but (to use the terminology of Childs) extends it.” 42
Nor are these recognitions new. Early charismatic scholar Howard M. Ervin valued “Linguistic, literary and historical analysis” as a vital element in understanding the text. 43 Walter Hollenweger, long noted as a leading scholar on Pentecostalism, emphasizes the contribution that reading Scripture in its historical contexts can make to Pentecostal hermeneutics. 44
Before his death, charismatic theologian Clark Pinnock, though using a broader sense of the term “meaning” than evangelicals traditionally have embraced, reminded readers that a genuinely Spirit-led reading will be consistent “with the apostolic witness,” which he deems “an important check.” Although meaning is not limited to its historical sense, texts “cannot mean just anything we want”; respect for the text requires us to let “it establish the range of possible meanings.” Most relevantly here, he notes that “Texts of the Bible do have definite meanings in the historical situation and that meaning is the anchor of our interpretation.” 45
Need for Ancient as Well as Modern Meanings
Of all people, readers with a deep experience of the Spirit should be ready to distinguish divine revelation from human insights and contextualized practices. Although God also speaks through and adapts human insights (witness the similarities between Proverbs and Egyptian wisdom literature, for example), there is a reason that we give priority to the apostolic and prophetic message of Scripture as a whole over subsequent opinions about what it meant.
Studying Scripture first in the languages and cultures in which God gave it to us provides a crucial foundation for helping us understand its message. Revelatory insights are possible, but as emphasized in chapter 7, it is Scripture itself that gives us an objective anchor by which to test and guide our subjective experiences. Without that objective anchor, we can easily drift into “every wind of teaching” (Eph 4:14) that someone today claims gave them an adrenaline rush.
In the older formalist fashion, some might appeal to the text alone to prevent possible counterreadings that would undermine the text’s message. Unfortunately, the textual delimitation of meaning alone is not always adequate, since an uninformed modern reader will supply meaning in perceived lacunae not by ancient context but by his or her own interpretive systems; 46 a clever persuader could even construct such a system for the very purpose of recruiting the text for one’s agenda.
Indeed, even reading texts for merely the syntactical relation of terms without fuller social context would exclude any possibility of clearly recognizing when an author may have intended such literary devices as irony. Further, languages develop over time, so in principle the meaning of key words even in the same language could change, eliciting new interpretations inconsistent with the original (cf., e.g., how we could today read the expression “the gay 20s”). Anchoring the range of meaning within what remains consistent with the text’s design in its historical context provides clearer limitations. 47
Renewalist scholars Spawn and Wright thus have warned against “Pentecostal” methods that minimize “the historical, cultural and literary dimensions of Scripture,” “[s]ince these issues related to the provenance of the biblical text result from divine initiatives” and therefore are essential to truly Spirit-attentive readings. 48 Likewise Pentecostal scholar Gordon L. Anderson notes that a sound Pentecostal hermeneutic should not be “a new exegetical method.” Despite the role of the Spirit and subjectivity at other levels, “Exegesis is a method of getting at the original intended meaning of the text. To do so one must study language, culture, history, word history, etc. This is the standard method of studying texts.” 49
Some Readings Are More Helpful Than Others
Paul Ricoeur noted that because words are polysemous and sentences can have plurivocity, interpretation is debatable—but because these elements of communication appear in contexts they are “subject also to a validation of probability.” The critic can thus avoid not only dogmatism but also thoroughgoing skepticism about meaning. 50
Some have treated the recognition of the reader’s horizon as an invitation to simply read texts from the standpoint of one’s own doctrinal or theological presuppositions. Calling this Pentecostal hermeneutics would make Pentecostal tradition, rather than Scripture, the new norming norm. This rhetorical appeal might fit the postmodern propensity to equalize all truth claims, but it misrepresents the conventional hermeneutic of blending horizons. Anthony Thiselton warns, “The problem of pre-understanding, however, does not give grounds for the cynical response that the modern interpreter understands the Bible only on the basis of his own presuppositions. For there is an ongoing process of dialogue with the text in which the text itself progressively corrects and reshapes the interpreter’s own questions and assumptions.” 51 Thiselton’s seminal study thus concludes with the vital observation: “The hermeneutical goal is that of a steady progress towards a fusion of horizons. But this is to be achieved in such a way that the particularity of each horizon is fully taken into account and respected. This means both respecting the rights of the text and allowing it to speak.” 52
Simply reading our agendas into the text makes us masters over the text rather than submitting to it. 53 (This prioritization of reader over text differs from what early Pentecostals would have recognized as a Pentecostal hermeneutic, 54 though like most readers, they sometimes did it.) Readers too readily hear in Scripture simply “divine license” for what we desire or to confirm our biases against others, 55 or, against everything we affirm about divine grace, even our theological or ethical superiority to others. Respecting the text’s first horizon, in a sense, is an ethical responsibility; insofar as we receive the text as a communication, we respect “the other” that comes to us in the text by hearing it rather than simply treating it as a reflection of ourselves. 56
One might say that, like Abel, whose blood cried from the ground, the ancient text “still speaks” (Heb 11:4); NT writers were not shy about presenting Scripture as “speaking” 57 (the way pagan contemporaries also spoke of the work of revered poets). Most of my academic work so far has focused on ancient meaning and background, but the purpose of this labor was to help people hear the biblical text more accurately, not to suggest that believers should approach it as a mere specimen for historical analysis.
The disconnect that readers often feel with the ancient meaning is one reason many readers seem baffled by and reticent to keep reading the Bible. Believers need to hear and appropriate the text corporately and personally. I have taken it for granted that my Christian readers will not simply teach the background by itself as if that gives spiritual life to their hearers. 58 Background helps us understand, for example, what Jesus really meant in some hard sayings, or what it means for him to be meek and kind.
If we do not, however, communicate the real meaning of those sayings or help people to relate to Jesus’s kindness, we have not communicated the heart of the message. It is by seeing Jesus that we are transformed into his likeness (2 Cor 3:18). 59 For Paul, this also included people being able to witness Jesus’s death and resurrection through how Paul lived (2 Cor 2:15–16; 4:10; 13:3–4; Gal 2:20–3:1).
Ancient Foundations for Newer Significance
This ancient meaning must be foundational for any other meaning or significance we find in the text, if we hear it as a communication. “There is a line of continuity,” one Pentecostal scholar notes, “between the original ‘meaning’ of Scripture and any contemporary meaning.” 60 The original sense, another Pentecostal scholar notes, can help set parameters for the range of desirable reception today. 61
If our application reflects no correlation to the specific communications that the author offered in the social and linguistic milieu that he shared with his first audience, we no longer attend to the particulars of this text or its formation. 62 Instead, we make it a generic reflection of our own interests, one in principle little different from any other text that we might read the same way. This approach is not uncommon and is sometimes justified with hermeneutical language. But for those who respect the text as communication and are interested in anything analogous to what it first communicated, an approach more attuned to its original context will prove more helpful. 63 The first horizon cannot fully define our experience of reading, 64 but it should be foundational for the analogies we draw. 65
Having said that, Spirit hermeneutics cannot stop with just the normative, ancient meaning of the text, but must also concern itself with how that meaning speaks in new settings today. Exploring examples of those readings in various settings and examining reading communities are valuable pursuits. Learning from the contemporary insights of these other readers (and sometimes from their failed experiments) is no less helpful than when we listen to the insights and failed experiments of our predecessors in church history. “Whoever has an ear,” the Lord reminds us, “let them hear what the Spirit says” not only to their own church but “to the churches” (Rev 2:7, 11, 17, 29; 3:6, 13, 22). The messages to the seven churches were each contextualized for their local audiences, but all the churches could learn from them, because the Spirit can apply the message to our own situations.
Even the most ardent defenders of authorial intention usually do not disagree here, provided that the new insights are connected with the design implied by texts in their historical context. Despite some interpretations being incompatible with the original sense, 66 Hirsch contends that some differing interpretations may be compatible, insofar as they reflect the same type of meaning. 67 Ultimately Hirsch allows for a text’s “implications” or “significance” in new settings 68 —which in fact does allow for what others call applications or “meaning” beyond, though not disconnected from, the author’s intention. 69 Despite differences on the role of the author, then, both Hirsch and his more postmodern detractors allow for what we have called recontextualization. 70
Writers do communicate more (and less) than their conscious intention. 71 But cultural and linguistic assumptions shared with the original audience determine many of the “indeterminacies,” or lacunae, in their texts. We cannot fully recover authors’ thoughts, but neither do words or phrases have some normative meaning apart from their literary and sociolinguistic contexts. A term’s semantic range supplies potential meanings for the term, but its particular sense is narrowed by the social and literary setting of the text in which it appears. Those who object that the pursuit of authorial intention demands too much from our evidence should at least consider the shared context of the text’s implied author and its implied audience. 72
The ideal author’s intention, or works’ design in their original contexts, was more than merely informing their audience. Most biblical writers wanted their audiences to respond to their message by how they lived. 73 Given what we know of ancient narratives, including histories, this was as true for authors in narrative genres as in others. Indeed, it was more true of ancient Near Eastern royal narratives and Greco-Roman histories and biographies than it was for typical letters or novels. 74
The works included in our canon were shaped in particular linguistic and cultural circumstances. We can thus better understand what these texts were designed to communicate, and how they can be applied analogously today, to the extent that we understand the circumstances shaping them. Nevertheless, if we stop with merely historical observations about the text, we have failed to appropriate its inspired message. Once we understand what biblical texts communicated in their first context, we must hear their challenge or comfort in our own settings as well. Only then do we truly enter the text rather than merely examining it.