APPENDIX II
APPENDIX II
PRIMARY SENSE AND PLENARY SENSE
Peake Memorial Lecture, 1976
Any biblical student might well feel honoured in being invited to deliver a lecture in the series dedicated to the memory of Arthur Samuel Peake, but it is with a sense of double honour that the invitation is accepted by one who is already honoured by holding the academic position which was first held—and with rare distinction—by Dr Peake.
A. S. PEAKE AND BIBLICAL EXEGESIS
For the last twenty-five years of his life (1904–1929), Dr Peake occupied the Rylands Chair of Biblical Exegesis in the University of Manchester. For most of his incumbency that was the designation of the Chair: only towards the end of the twenty-five years was the wording amplified, to ‘Biblical Criticism and Exegesis’. Dr Peake was, of course, a practitioner and teacher of biblical criticism as well as exegesis, but the original designation of the Chair perhaps implies that criticism, whether lower or higher, is a means to an end. As Dr Peake himself said, ‘criticism has never attracted me for its own sake. The all-important thing for the student of the Bible is to pierce to the core of its meaning.’ When criticism has done its perfect work, the important question remains: What does the text mean? Critical study will help very considerably to find the answer to this question, but the meaning of scripture—its meaning for those to whom it came in the first instance, and its meaning for readers today—is what matters most.
Dr Peake was well aware of this, and he taught the principles of biblical interpretation not only to his students in the lecture-room but to the rank and file of his fellow-Christians also. The Bible: Its Origin, its Significance and its Abiding Worth—a book which I found, particularly helpful in my formative years—was written for a wider public, consisting, to begin with, of readers of The Sunday Strand, His Plain Thoughts on Great Subjects, a collection of more popular articles and addresses, illustrates his concern that Christians should free their minds from time-honoured interpretations which had no basis in the proper meaning of the biblical text. The ‘wayfaring men, yea fools’, who ‘shall not “err” ’ in the way of holiness, he pointed out, are reprobates who may not trespass on the path reserved for ‘the ransomed of the Lord’ (Is. 35:8, 10); the blood-stained figure who comes from Edom, ‘with dyed garments from Bozrah’, having ‘trodden the winepress alone’, is as far as can well be imagined from our Lord, fresh from the scene of his passion; the blood which reddens the apparel of the warrior of Isaiah 63:1–6 is that of the slaughtered sons of Esau. (I am bound to add that I suspect that the seer of Patmos made an early contribution to the christological. interpretation of this oracle; but he could bend the most recalcitrant material to serve his purpose.)
The distinction between the primary and plenary sense of scripture is not one that I recall coming across in Dr Peake’s writings. He does draw attention to the distinction between the primary and secondary sense, but that is not always the same distinction. The plenary sense, I suppose, is always secondary, but the secondary sense need not be plenary.
Dr Peake distinguished, for example, between the primary and the secondary sense of the Servant Songs of Isaiah 42–53. He was convinced that ‘the collective judgment of Christendom has been right in finding the fulfilment of these prophecies in Christ’ because ‘the prophet’s language is fulfilled in Jesus as in no other’. In saying this, he attaches what we should call a plenary sense—the plenary sense—to the Songs, pointing out that ‘we often find meanings in great works of Art which were probably not intended by the authors themselves’ and that ‘when inspiration works at so high a level as it often does in the Bible we may not unnaturally expect to find deeper senses than that of which the original author was aware.’ But such a deeper sense, even if it be acknowledged as plenary, is chronologically secondary; the sense of which the biblical author was aware is the primary sense. As it happens, the primary sense of the Servant Songs is not so readily ascertainable: the Ethiopian’s question to Philip, ‘About whom, pray, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?’ (Acts 8:34), is still a suitable question to be set in an examination paper. In my own view, Dr Peake’s estimate of the primary sense of these particular scriptures was not so near the mark as that of another great Methodist scholar, the late Christopher North.
‘SPRINGING AND GERMINANT ACCOMPLISHMENT’
When we speak of primary sense and plenary sense we may imagine that primary sense is a straightforward matter by contrast with the complexities of plenary sense. Primary sense is the sense which the author intended by his words, the sense which he expected his readers or hearers to understand by his words. Plenary sense is a richer thing than that. It can best be defined and described, perhaps, in a passage which I quote from Dorothy L. Sayers:
A phrase used by Dante not only contains and is illuminated by the meanings it derived from Virgil or the Vulgate: it, in its turn, illuminates Virgil and the Vulgate and gives new meaning to them. It not only passes on those meanings, supercharged with Dante’s own meaning, to Tennyson and Landor, to Rossetti and Yeats, to Williams and Eliot and Pound, but it receives back from them the reflected splendore of their own imaginative use of it.
Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, put it this way:
Prophecies are sometimes uttered about the things which existed at the time in question, but are not uttered primarily with reference to them, but in so far as these are a figure of things to come. Therefore the Holy Spirit has provided that, when such prophecies are uttered, some details should be inserted which go beyond the actual thing done, so that the mind may be raised to the thing signified.
St Thomas was referring to the interpretation of one particular area of biblical literature—predictive prophecy. He used the word ‘primarily’ where we should say ‘plenarily’, when he said that the contemporary reference of biblical prophecies was not their primary reference. As we are now using the words, their contemporary reference was their ‘primary’ reference, the ‘things’ to come’ of which the contemporary reference was a figure belonging to the plenary sense, in so far as they are genuinely relevant to the scripture in question. Thus the primary sense of Isaiah’s virgin oracle related to a prince about to be born in the near future; Matthew’s application of the oracle to the birth of Jesus can be said to set forth the plenary sense, not least because the idiom of the original oracle (although Matthew need not have known this) was already a well-established form of words for the annunciation of the birth of a coming deliverer, and was therefore appropriate for heralding the nativity of the Messiah.
To the same effect Francis Bacon at a later date spoke of the necessity of ‘allowing … that latitude which is agreeable and familiar unto Divine prophecies; being of the nature of their Author with whom a thousand years are but as one day, and therefore are not fulfilled punctually at once, but have springing and germinant accomplishment throughout many ages, though the height or fulness of them may refer to some one age.’ What Bacon here argues for is sufficient scope to accommodate not only the primary reference but further provisional fulfilments as well, until at last their ‘height or fulness’, their plenary sense, is manifested.
A biblical scholar of the present century, the late Cuthbert Lattey, attached high value to this interpretative approach in what he called the principle of ‘compenetration’. He found this principle helpful in the exegesis of such a passage as Isaiah’s virgin oracle and of larger literary units. An adequate exegesis of the visions of Daniel, he believed, ‘must take into account, as it were, three historical planes, that of the persecution of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and of the first and second comings of Christ’. Whether or not this three-dimensional perspective is necessary for the exposition of Daniel, it must be insisted that the exegete’s first responsibility is to establish the primary historical reference of the author and his original readers, and then to decide how far visions or oracles whose primary sense is thus ascertained can be related, by implication or in principle, to later situations.
There is a similarity between the idea of ‘springing and germinant accomplishment’ and the idea of Christian tradition as expounded in our time, for example, by Père Y. M. -J. Congar. Tradition, he says, is another mode by which the truth embodied in scripture, the apostolic heritage, is communicated to us. ‘Scripture has an absolute sovereignty’, whereas tradition is a thésaurisation or constant accrual of meditation on the text of scripture in one generation after another, ‘the living continuity of faith quickening God’s people’. The reality of such tradition cannot be doubted: many parts of scripture have a richer meaning for Christians today than they had for Christians in the early centuries ad because of what they have meant for intervening generations of Christians. (It is equally true that many parts of scripture had a meaning for Christians in other centuries that they cannot have for us today, but that is another story.) However, such tradition is derivative and dependent: the interpretation of scripture, even if it accrues at compound interest from generation to generation, cannot get more out of scripture than is there already—implicitly if not expressly. This, I am sure, was Dr Peake’s view (it is equally mine), but is it valid? I know some theologians who would suggest that the Holy Spirit may bring forth from scripture today truth which bears little relation to that conveyed by the text in its historical setting, but I cannot think they are right. Even the devotional application of scripture, which is specially impatient of strict exegetical controls, must be reasonably deducible from what scripture says; otherwise, why base a ‘blessed thought’ on one text rather than another, or why base it on a text of scripture at all?
One example of the way in which a new and widely accepted interpretation can be attached to an ancient scripture is provided by the lament of the desolate city of Jerusalem, after the siege and devastation endured at the hands of the Babylonian army: ‘Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow which was brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger’ (Lam. 1:12).
It is safe to say that many English-speaking Christians, perhaps the majority of them, when they hear these words, do not think of the sack of Jersualem in 587 bc but of the passion of our Lord. We recognize that Charles Wesley and Sir John Stainer between them bear considerable responsibility for this; but neither Wesley nor Stainer originated this passion interpretation: it goes back to the traditional employment of the language of Lamentations in the church’s Holy Week commemoration.
Yet the application of these words to our Lord’s passion may be acknowledged as a valid instance of the ‘plenary sense’ of scripture if (as Norman K. Gottwald has argued) the expression of communal disaster found in Lamentations draws on various categories of individual lament, constituting a ‘deliberate fusion of hitherto comparatively separate types’—a process which reached a climax in the fourth Isaianic Servant Song (Is. 52:13–53:12). If, then, the distinctively Christian interpretation of the Servant of Yahweh is as justified as Dr Peake held (and with good reason), the plenary sense of the fourth Servant Song (or something very like it) can legitimately be read out of certain passages of Lamentations, like Lamentations 1:12, where the language lends itself to this extended application.
THE COMPLEXITY OF ‘PRIMARY SENSE’
To this matter of extended application we shall return. But, having provided one illustration of what is meant by ‘plenary sense’ in relation to the Bible, we must look more closely at what is involved in ‘primary sense’.
I recall some correspondence in a leading literary journal several years ago which was started by someone’s taking a passage from a poem by Roy Fuller and drawing certain inferences from it. Roy Fuller in due course wrote to the editor and said that the first writer had misunderstood the passage: that was not what he had meant at all. This brought an indignant rejoinder: what business was it of the author of a poem to say what his poem meant? Once the poem had become public property, the sense in which the reader understood it was as valid as the sense which the author claimed to have had in mind when he composed it. The terms ‘primary sense’ and ‘plenary sense’ were not used, so far as I can remember; but from the tone in which the reader wrote I doubt if he would have conceded that the author’s interpretation had any greater right to be called ‘primary’ than his own. As we are using the terms now, however, the author’s meaning would be ‘primary’ and the reader’s interpretation, whether legitimate or not, would be ‘secondary’—not, I think, ‘plenary’. The reader’s protest reminded me too forcibly of the attitude of those whose main exegetical criterion in Bible study is ‘I like to think that it means this.’
But the establishment of the primary sense of a passage of scripture is not always such a straightforward matter as is commonly supposed. Take, for example, a gospel parable in which the intention of Jesus may have been one thing and the evangelist’s interpretation something else. You may recall C. H. Dodd’s remark on Matthew’s interpretation of the parable of the tares: ‘We shall do well to forget this interpretation as completely as possible.’ What he meant was, that we ought to forget this interpretation if we are concerned to discover the original point of the parable—which he took (rightly, I think) to be essentially dominical. But if we are speaking of biblical exegesis in the strict sense—in this instance, the exegesis of the Gospel according to Matthew—then the Matthaean interpretation is of the first importance. If Jesus meant to teach a different lesson from that which the evangelist inculcates, which of the two is primary? Jesus’ meaning, of course, both in regard to historical order and in regard to our understanding of his teaching; but so far as biblical exegesis is concerned, it is the Gospel of Matthew, not the tradition lying behind it, that is part of holy writ, and a case could be made out in this context for regarding Matthew’s interpretation as ‘primary’. Admittedly, important as the four evangelists’ theology and presentation may be, their primary value resides in the witness which they bear to Jesus and his ministry, so that, absolutely, it is the intention of Jesus that is of primary importance. (Let it not be forgotten that our knowledge of his intention must be derived from the witness of the evangelists.) But, when we are dealing with the Gospels and other biblical writings as literary documents, then the intention of the authors is of primary importance for the interpretation of their writings.
A further complication is introduced into our study of Matthew’s Gospel from this point of view when we have documentary evidence of an intermediary stage between the teaching of Jesus and the literary activity of the evangelist. There is no other version of the parable of the tares in the New Testament, but there are some parables in the same Matthaean context which appear in an earlier form in Mark’s Gospel. There we may have to distinguish between the intention of Jesus, the intention of Mark and the intention of Matthew, and to which of these we accord ‘primary’ status will depend on the primary purpose of our study—the exposition of the teaching of Jesus or the interpretation of one or the other of the two gospels in question.
Even if we concentrate on the earliest gospel writing and study (say) the parable of the sower (Mk. 4:3–20), we may trace three successive stages in the growth of the tradition: (a) the parable itself, (b) the interpretation of the parable with its explanation of the four kinds of soil into which the good seed fell and (c) the appended statement about the purpose of parables with its allusion to the Isaianic passage about unresponsive hearts, deaf ears and unseeing eyes. The primary sense of a biblical text may thus be quite a complex thing.
To take an example from the Old Testament: the primary sense of Psalm 51 was the sense intended by the penitent who first made it his prayer of confession. It is traditionally ascribed to David, as though it were an expansion of his response to the prophet Nathan: ‘I have sinned against Yahweh’ (2 Sam. 12:13). In any case, it belongs originally to the period of the monarchy, as probably do most of the individual psalms. The penitent knows that, where the soul has direct dealings with God in the way of repentance and forgiveness, ritual performances are irrelevant:
Thou hast no delight in sacrifice;
were I to give a burnt offering,
thou wouldst not be pleased.
Thy sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise.
But the time came when this psalm was included in a collection of hymns designed for liturgical use in the Second Temple. This liturgical use implied a sacrificial context, so something had to be added which modified the sense of the psalmist’s words about sacrifice. The editor who adapted the psalm to its new setting suggested that the psalmist’s omission of sacrifice was due not so much to his conviction that Yahweh had no pleasure in any such thing as to the conditions of exile, when no sacrifice was possible. Hence his supplement runs:
Do good to Zion in thy good pleasure;
rebuild the walls of Jerusalem,
then wilt thou delight in right sacrifices,
in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings;
then bulls will be offered on thy altar.
If the editor or compiler lived toward the end of the exile, this may have been his prayer, although it was not the prayer of the original suppliant. But in the exegesis of the psalm, do we concentrate on what appears to have been its original text, or accept it in its fuller canonical form? We must certainly pay attention to the canonical form, in order to ascertain the significance of the composition for worshippers who made it the vehicle of their devotions in the post-exilic age. But, where the fuller form conflicts with the meaning of the earlier form, we cannot say that the fuller form gives the plenary sense, for the plenary sense must preserve, even when it amplifies, the primary sense.
Similar considerations apply to almost every part of the Old Testament. We have to ask what each part meant in its original form and setting, what it meant when it was embodied in a larger corpus, and what it meant in the completed Hebrew Bible. Then, if we are Christians, we have to take a further step and ask what it means in the total volume of Christian scripture, Old and New Testaments together. An examination of the use of the Old Testament in the New, as bearing witness to Christ, helps to answer this last question.
When we come to the use of the Old Testament in the New, we have left the primary sense and reached the plenary sense, as has been seen in relation to the Servant Songs and their Christian application. But we find a halfway house between primary and plenary sense within the Old Testament itself, when earlier texts are taken up and reapplied in later books. Some of these reapplications are instances of transferred rather than plenary sense, as when (say) Habakkuk applies to the Chaldaean invaders the language which Isaiah had used of their Assyrian predecessors.
In the visions of Daniel, however, we find, something that does belong more recognizably to the category of plenary interpretation. For example, describing the rebuff which Antiochus Epiphanes received, during his second invasion of Egypt, from the Roman delegation under Popilius Laenas which was put ashore by the Roman flotilla anchored in the harbour of Alexandria, the interpreting angel tells Daniel that ‘ships of Kittim shall come against him’ (Dan. 11:30). This reference to the Roman vessels as ‘ships of Kittim’ established a precedent which was to be followed in the Qumran texts, where Kittim is a regular code-word for ‘Romans’. But why should ‘ships of Kittim’ appear here in the book of Daniel? Almost certainly the expression harks back to Balaam’s oracle about the latter days which foretold how ‘ships shall come from Kittim and shall afflict Asshur and Eber’ (Num. 24:24). The original historical reference of this oracle is a question in its own right: few will suppose that Balaam had Antiochus Epiphanes in mind. But the implication of Daniel 11:30 is that the incident of 168 bc was the true fulfilment of Balaam’s oracle. An interpretative tradition was thus set up which finds independent attestation centuries later in the Targum of Onqelos, where Numbers 24:24 is rendered ‘ships will come from the Romans’, and in Jerome’s Vulgate, which renders the same clause, ‘they will come in triremes from Italy’.
Here, then, within the Hebrew Bible itself are two levels of exegesis. Balaam’s oracle had one distinct primary sense: it is the task of historical interpretation to determine what it was—whether the invasions of the sea peoples at the end of the thirteenth century bc or some later occasion, perhaps in the period of the monarchy. But when we come to Daniel and his successors we recognize the beginning of a new exegetical tradition which in their eyes represented the definitive sense of the oracle. We may classify it under the heading of plenary sense (although they themselves might have maintained that it was the primary sense, meaning that it was to this that the oracle pointed from the outset).
Again, the sequel to Antiochus’s rebuff is described in Daniel 11:30–39 in terms which can be checked, point by point, against the available historical evidence. But there comes a moment when the historical outline fails; yet the remaining career of Antiochus must be traced until his final downfall. The apocalyptist is not thrown back on his unaided imagination: the last stages in the oppressor’s career had been foretold by the prophets. Isaiah had told how the Assyrian, invading the holy land from the north, would fall with a mighty crash at the peak of his arrogance, in the very act of shaking his fist at Jerusalem, and how he would be devoured by no human sword (Is. 10:27b–34; 31:8). In more explicit detail, Ezekiel had told how Gog, the invader from the north, would be turned round in his tracks, be forced to go back by the way that he came, and be overthrown on the mountains of Israel (Ezek. 39:1–6). With this wealth of information about the fate of the last Gentile invader, all that was necessary for Daniel was that it should be reworded in accordance with the idiom of the preceding part of the vision.
‘WRESTLING JACOB’
We come back now to the matter of extended application accruing to the development of a plenary sense well beyond the biblical period. This time a well-known patriarchal narrative will serve as an example.
The story of Jacob’s wrestling with the angel at the ford of Jabbok (Gen. 32:22–32) is one that is capable of being interpreted at several levels. We know it as an incident in the life of Jacob as recorded in Genesis, but it may have had an earlier currency—earlier even than its inclusion in an oral or documentary source underlying the Pentateuchal record. Sir James Frazer suggested that ‘we may, perhaps, provisionally suppose that Jacob’s mysterious adversary was the spirit or jinnee of the river, and that the struggle was purposely sought by Jacob for the sake of obtaining his blessing’; he compared Menelaus’s grappling with the sea-god Proteus. Well, perhaps; Frazer acknowledged that any explanation of the story ‘must be to a great extent conjectural’, and one might equally well conjecture that the river-god was disputing passage with this intruder into his domain. But neither of conjectures belongs to the realm of biblical interpretation. Biblical interpretation is concerned with the meaning of the passage in its literary context; in this context the primary sense of the story is the sense intended by the biblical author.
If we were examining the significance of an episode in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, it would not be deemed sufficient to look up Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicle, from which Shakespeare evidently derived the plot, and conclude that the primary sense of the episode was the sense which it bears in that compilation of historical fiction, or even in some oral tradition antedating Holinshed. For the student of Shakespeare, the primary sense is that which Shakespeare intended the episode to bear. So, for the student of scripture, the primary sense of the incident of wrestling Jacob is that intended by ‘the author of Genesis’ (to quote a form of words from the 1962 edition of Peake’s Commentary which one would not expect to find in the original edition.) For our present purpose it makes little difference whether we think of the Yahwist or of the final author: for the one as for the other, the significance of the incident is that which it has in the context of the story of Jacob, his dealings with God and the development of his character. It is not, I think, reading into the narrative something which the author did not intend if we consider that Jacob’s experience at the ford of Jabbok crystallizes the whole tenor of his life up to that point. Only when his strength and his self-confidence were drained away, when he was disabled by one stronger than himself and could do nothing but cling for dear life and refuse to let the stranger go until he received his blessing, was that blessing actually given. Jacob received the name Israel there because he had ‘striven with God and man, and had prevailed’; he left the place empowered and enriched because, as he said, ‘I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved’ (Gen. 32:30). There is no need to import this language into the narrative, because it is there already, and points to the sense which the author intended—the primary sense.
For various forms of the plenary sense of the narrative we go to later writers. Hosea, like the author of Genesis, uses the incident (which he may have known in a slightly different form) to illustrate the progress of Jacob’s experience of God (Hos. 12:3f.):
In his manhood he strove with God;
he strove with the angel and prevailed,
he wept and sought his favour.
Centuries later, the author of the book of Wisdom says that Wisdom acted as umpire at Jacob’s wrestling-match (Wisdom 10:12):
In his arduous contest she gave him the victory,
so that he might learn that godliness
is more powerful than anything else.
This is a pardonable moralization, not so remote from the primary sense as the lesson drawn by Philo—that ‘to win honour in both spheres, in our duty towards the uncreated and the created, calls for no petty mind, but for one which in very truth stands midway between the world and God’.
With the coming of Christ, and the new understanding of the Old Testament scriptures as bearing witness to him, a new dimension of biblical interpretation was opened up. But the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament in the New Testament is restrained and disciplined by contrast with what we find in the post-apostolic period. There is no reference to wrestling Jacob in the New Testament nor yet in the Apostolic Fathers. But Justin Martyr, in his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, asserts confidently that the mysterious wrestler, whom the narrator describes as ‘a man’, and of whom Jacob speaks as ‘God’, must be the one whom Christians acknowledge as both God and man. Trypho is increasingly bewildered as he listens to the flow of Justin’s argument: such application of sacred scripture is quite foreign to him, and he cannot comprehend how any one can understand it in such a sense as Justin expounds. But to Justin this understanding of the incident is all of a piece with his understanding of other Old Testament incidents in which God, or his angel, appears or speaks to human beings in the form of a man. The christological exposition of such incidents is hardly attested, if at all, in the New Testament documents; but it was a well-established tradition by Justin’s time, for Justin can scarcely be supposed to have initiated it. Once established, the tradition was actively maintained.
The story of wrestling Jacob, says Dr Peake in the original edition of his Commentary, ‘has been so filled with deep, spiritual significance (Charles Wesley’s “Come, O Thou traveller unknown” is a classic example) that it is difficult for the modern reader to think himself back into its original meaning.’ But in fact ‘Come, O Thou traveller unknown’ is a superb example of what is meant by the plenary sense of scripture.
It has occurred to me from time to time that it would be an agreeable exercise to write a thesis, or at least to supervise one, on ‘Biblical Interpretation in the Hymns of Charles Wesley’. One does not go to Wesley’s hymns for historical exegesis or the primary sense of scripture, but time and again one finds in them the plenary sense. The twelve stanzas of ‘Come, O Thou traveller unknown’ present a thorough-going transmutation of the story of wrestling Jacob into something akin to Paul’s mysterious experience recounted in 2 Corinthians 12:2–10, which taught him the lesson: ‘when I am weak, then I am strong’. But, so far as the author of Genesis is concerned, this (in my judgment) is the lesson which he intends to be drawn from the story of wrestling Jacob; and Charles Wesley, in drawing out and developing this lesson, does no injustice to the primary intention; rather, he lays bare the plenary sense in a Christian idiom:
And when my all of strength shall fail,
I shall with the God-Man prevail.
PRESENT APPLICATION
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when new critical methods were being applied to the biblical records, F. D. E. Schleiermacher manifested a hermeneutical concern as well as a critical interest. Granted that the new methods disclosed the intention of the biblical writers in their contemporary context, what did their message mean to readers in the different context of Schleiermacher’s day? How could the new critical contributions enrich the present understanding and application of that message?
Similar questions are asked today and fresh attempts are made to answer them by interpreting scripture as an integral and controlling element in the continuing life of the people of God, or as the locus of that life-giving and active word which awakens the hearers’ faith, helps them to understand their existence and thus transforms it and imparts ‘authenticity’ to it, liberating them from their bondage to the past and enabling them to be ‘open’ toward the future. This is the idiom of the ‘new hermeneutic’.
An example on the grand scale of what is involved in interpreting an Old Testament book as ‘scripture of the church’, as an integrating element in the Christian canon, is provided by Brevard Childs’ magisterial commentary on Exodus which has replaced the earlier commentary by Martin Noth in the Old Testament Library of the SCM Press. Here is a work which takes fullest account of all that historical-critical exegesis can say about the text, but goes on to maintain that the church’s canon, and indeed the church’s life, constitute the context within which the text is most fully to be understood. The theme which gives the book of Exodus its Greek name, Israel’s departure from Egypt, is of course a Leitmotiv in Old Testament thought about God and reflection on Israel’s history from that time forth, and supplies a pattern for the unfolding of that later redemptive act in which Christians find supreme significance. But does the New Testament treatment of the Exodus theme or the New Testament application of the story of Moses make a contribution to our understanding of the book of Exodus? Yes, if we are thinking of the plenary sense. The primary sense of Exodus is to be sought within the context of that Old Testament book itself, or at least within the context of the Pantateuch; but the later Christian interpretation brings out a deeper sense in so far as it uncovers layers of meaning implicit in the primary sense. One obvious criticism is forestalled by Professor Childs: to those who point out that Jewish tradition as well as Christian tradition has its ‘plenary’ interpretation of the Exodus story he replies that he is well aware of this, and that the Jewish tradition also must have its place in the full exposition of the text.
Professor Childs has shown a measure of courage remarkable in an academic theologian, because he knows how vigorously he must be critized by fellow-exegetes and theologians for importing ‘irrelevant’ considerations into the interpretation of an ancient Hebrew text. Some of the criticisms already voiced must be recognized to have some substance. But Professor Childs’ Exodus is a pioneer work, so far as the production of a full-scale scholarly commentary along these lines is concerned. It is not to be compared with the undisciplined puerilities of Wilhelm Vischer a generation ago. In a day when it is proclaimed that ‘historical biblical criticism is bankrupt’—a proposition with which I disagree, while I can understand the mood which lies behind it—Professor Childs’ ‘canonical’ exegesis might point a way forward. But if it does, the way forward will be in essence the way of plenary interpretation—that is to say, a way which does not break loose from the primary sense, but expounds the text so as to reveal its relevance to human life today, just as the successive generations intervening between the original readers and ourselves have heard it speak to their varying conditions.
THE HERMENEUTICAL CIRCLE
Frequent reference is made nowadays to the ‘hermeneutical circle’, an expression which bears more than one meaning. It may denote the circular movement from exegesis to theology and back from theology to exegesis; or it may denote the interpretative process flowing from subject to object (i.e. from the reader to the text), or indeed from object to subject, and then back again, as the one interacts with the other. Any such circular motion must be treated circumspectly.
Naturally, the more one studies (say) Paul, the more one’s understanding of Paul’s thought grows, so that it becomes easier to determine what Paul means in any one passage of his correspondence. Yet we should remember that Paul was accused of vacillation by some of his critics, and that he himself speaks of being ‘all things to all’ (1 Cor. 9:22) While, then, there is a reasonable presumption that he will not be wildly or radically inconsistent with himself, we must be prepared to find some places where he expresses himself atypically, and these cannot simply be interpreted in terms of our reconstruction of ‘Paulinism’, The need for caution is all the greater when the attempt is made to construct a system of biblical theology on the exegesis of several biblical authors and then to use that system as an exegetical tool.
Such attempts were commonplace in the generations before Peake, but in more recent times we have to deal with a tendency which lays itself open to the same objection. Rudolf Bultmann insisted that exegesis without presuppositions is impossible, and his own work illustrates that proposition. He set out on the exegetical enterprise with the presuppositions of Heideggerian existentialism and found those presuppositions confirmed in the biblical text. It must be conceded that, when one attempts in this way to simplify or summarize Professor Bultmann’s hermeneutical procedure, it is all too easy to do him injustice: this I should be very sorry to do. His name is one that ought never to be mentioned without profound respect. But he himself affirmed as explicitly as possible that Martin Heidegger and other existential philosophers ‘are saying the same thing as the New Testament and saving it quite independently’.
But whether the hermeneutical circle moves in the realm of the older scholasticism or in that of the newer existentialism, it can very readily become what logicians call a vicious circle, in which, by virtually assuming what requires to be proved, one arrives at the point from which one set out.
I think we can tell where Dr Peake would have stood on this issue, and I am sure I should gladly take my place beside him. Inevitably we come to the Bible with our presuppositions. But the wise course is to recognize those presuppositions, to make allowance for them, to ensure that they do not exercise an undue influence on our understanding of what we read. It is the unconscious and unsuspected presuppositions that are harmful. There are, indeed, some people who say, ‘Yes, I have my presuppositions, but then, you have yours; if you read the Bible in the light of your inadequate presuppositions, I am entitled to read it in the light of my much more adequate ones.’ But if I suspect that someone’s false conclusions are due to the false presuppositions with which he started, that does not justify me in letting my own assumptions, true though I may believe them to be, play a part in my exegetical work they have no right to play.
Dr. Peake was widely criticized in his day by people who believed that his conclusions were incompatible with biblical inspiration. What they often meant was that his conclusions were incompatible with what they understood biblical inspiration to involve. Let biblical inspiration or any other aspect of biblical authority be stated in the most emphatic and all-embracing fashion: any such statement is devoid of real content unless one discovers, by critical and exegetical study, what the biblical text says and means. Our biblical theology must depend on our exegesis, not vice versa. If we allow our exegesis to be controlled by theologoumena, we shall quickly find ourselves involved in circular reasoning. I have friends who say, ‘Well, yes; but then all theological reasoning is circular; let us simply make sure that we get into the right circle.’ I have no wish to accompany them on this magic roundabout.
To approach the exegetical task with unchecked theological assumptions is to find those assumptions reflected back to us from the text. There was a time when Paul and John and the writer to the Hebrews could not be allowed to express their independent insights: they had to say virtually the same thing and be fitted into a comprehensive theological system. Today indeed there has been a tendency to go to the opposite extreme: to emphasize the differences among the New Testament writers to a point where their common and fundamental witness to Jesus as Lord has been overlooked. But this unity of witness is a unity in diversity, and it is the province of exegesis to bring out the diversity within the comprehensive unity. Even in the works of one writer some diversity may be discerned: there is a danger, for example, of missing the distinctive emphases of Galatians and 1 Corinthians if both documents are accommodated to a single corpus of teaching called Paulinism.
It is not given to mortals to attain complete objectivity—not even to mathematicians. But one can at least acknowledge objectivity as an ideal and endeavour to approach it as nearly as possible. instead of decrying if as a misleading will o’ the wisp. Theology is more than the application of grammar to the text, but it cannot dispense with the application of grammar to the text as a basic procedure.
I have known classical teachers and colleagues to engage occasionally in biblical exegesis. They may have been Christians; they may have been agnostics. But when, without theological parti pris, they applied to the New Testament documents the interpretative skills acquired in their classical studies, their contributions, in my experience, have always been illuminating. And why? Because they helped to uncover the primary sense of the documents.
The conclusion of the whole matter, as I see it, is this: the way to ensure that the extended interpretation or existential application of the text does not get out of hand is to determine the primary sense (even when it is complex) and keep it constantly in view. The plenary sense, to be valid, must be the plenary sense of the biblical text: it will remain that if its relationship and consistency with the primary sense be maintained. Hermeneutic must never be divorced from exegesis. This was something on which Dr Peake insisted in his own time and in his own way: we shall do well if we follow his example.
The lecture was delivered during the lecturer’s incumbency of the Rylands Chair of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis in the University of Manchester.
A. S. Peake, The Bible: Its Origin, its Significance and its Abiding Worth (London, 1913), p. 455.
A. S. Peake, Plain Thoughts on Great Subjects (London, 1931), pp. 175–180.
Plain Thoughts, pp. 170–174.
Cf Rev. 19:13, with G. B. Caird, The Revelation of St John the Divine (London/New York, 1966), pp. 242–244.
The Bible, pp. 452, 455.
The Bible, p. 453.
The Bible, p. 452.
Cf C. R. North, The Suffering Servant in Deutero-Isaiah (Oxford, 21956).
D. L. Sayers, The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement (London, 1963), p. 272.
Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Psalms, preface.
What we here call the primary sense he called the literal sense.
See the Ugaritic poem, ‘The Wedding of Nikkal and Yarih’, lines 5, 7, in C. H. Gordon, Ugaritic Handbook (Rome, 1947), p. 152; Ugaritic Literature (Rome, 1949), pp. 63f.
F. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, II (Ecclesiastical History 2.2: ‘History of Prophecy’) in Works, ed. B. Montagu, II (London, 1825), p. 117.
C. C. Lattey, S. J., Back to Christ (New York, 1919), pp. 64ff.
C. C. Lattey, ‘The Emmanuel Prophecy (Is. 7:14)’, CBQ 8 (1946), pp. 369–376.
C. C. Lattey, The Book of Daniel (Dublin, 1948), p. vii.
Y. M. -J. Congar, O. P., Tradition and Traditions, E. T. (London, 1966), p. 422.
Tradition and Traditions, p. 4.
N. K. Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations (London, 1954), p. 46.
C. H. Dodd, Parables of the Kingdom (London, 1935), p. 184 (on Mt. 13:36–43).
Compare Hab. 1:5 with Is. 29:14.
J. G. Frazer, Folk-lore in the Old Testament (London, 1923), pp. 251–258.
Cf A. S. Peake in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible (London, 11919), p. 160, where the exposition of the incident seems to refer to a pre-literary stage of its transmission (like the exposition of the serpent’s rôle in Gen. 3:1–15, ibid., p. 140).
S. H. Hooke in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible (London, 21962), p. 175.
Philo, On Drunkenness, 82f.
Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 58, 126.
Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, p. 160.
F. D. E. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, E.T. (Edinburgh, 1928), pp. 591ff. et passim.
Cf J. M. Robinson and J. B. Cobb, The New Hermeneutic (New York, 1964).
B. S. Childs, Exodus: A Commentary (London, 1974). p. ix.
Cf his inclusion of ‘Calvin and Drusius, Rashi and Ibn Ezra’ among the ‘giants’ who ‘need to be heard in concert with Wellhausen and Gunkel’ (p. x).
The review by a Christian scholar, J. A. Wharton (‘Splendid Failure or Flawed Success?’) in Interpretation 29 (1975), pp. 266–276, is more critical than that by a Jewish scholar, J. Neusner, in Journal of Jewish Studies 27 (1976), p. 91.
Cf W. Vischer, The Witness of Old Testament to Christ, I, E. T. (London, 1949); see also p. 101, n. 9.
W. Wink, The Bible in Human Trans-formation (Philadelphia, 1973), p. 1.
Cf H. Diem, Dogmatics, E.T. (Edinburgh, 1959), pp. 236ff.; M. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, E.T. (Oxford, 1959), pp. 146ff; E. Fuchs, Marburger Hermeneutik (Tübingen, 1968), pp. 79ff.
R. Bultmann, ‘Is Exegesis without Presuppositions Possible?’ E.T. in Existence and Faith, ed. S. M. Ogden (London, 1964), pp. 342–351.
R. Bultmann, ‘New Testament and Mythology’ in Kerygma and Myth, ed. H. W. Bartsch, E.T., I (London, 1953), p. 25.
Cf A. S. Peake, The Bible, p. 440.
Cf J. D. G. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament (London, 1977).
Cf J. W. Drane, Paul: Libertine or Legalist? (London, 1974), which discerns a dialectic process in Paul’s capital epistles; also H. Hübner, Law in Paul’s Thought, E. T. (Edinburgh, 1984), for differences in emphasis between Galatians and Romans.
This lecture was first published in Epworth Review 4 (1977), pp. 94–109.