I’ve been reading Vox Day’s The Irrational Atheist for a while now, off and on.  I’m about a third of the way through.  It is an odd and often-compelling book that, frankly, I am enjoying very much.  My friend Eugene Curry, who told me I should read it, warned me that Day is himself an odd bird, and, in that, Curry is certainly correct.

Vox Day is a kind of polymath provocateur.  I find some of his views to be extreme and a few of them to be outright distasteful and wrong.  I just happen to find his attack upon atheism to be profoundly insightful and effective.  The book is a weird and wonderful read.

Except the first lines of it.

I hate the first lines of the book and thought they were worthy of open rebuke.  Here’s how he begins his book:

I don’t care if you go to hell.

God does, assuming He exists, or He wouldn’t have bothered sending His Son to save you from it.  Jesus Christ does, too, if you’ll accept for the sake of argument that he went to all the trouble of incarnating as a man, dying on the cross, and being resurrected from the dead in order to hand you a Get Out of Hell Free card.

Me, not so much.  I don’t know you.  I don’t owe you anything.  While as a Christian I am called to share the Good News with you, I can’t force you to accept it.  Horse, water, drink, and all that.

So, it’s all on you.  Your souls in not my responsibility.

Of course, Day is right about “horse, water, drink, and all that.”  And he is right that he “can’t force you to accept it.”  But the beginning (“I don’t care if you go to hell.”) does not necessary follow from those two facts, and neither should it.

When I first read these words I was immediately reminded of Paul’s contrasting attitude in the beginning of Romans 9.  Remember?

I am speaking the truth in Christ – I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit – that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.  For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.

I share Day’s indignation concerning the hubris of modern atheism, but I dare say that beginning a defense of theism with blunt articulations of our disregard for the eternal destinations of those to whom we are speaking does more than hurt the argument. Furthermore, given the truthfulness of Christianity, it rather conflicts with the heart of the God whose existence we are seeking to defend.

Now, I expect Day was being provocative.  That is his stock and trade.  But one does wish he had avoided an initial provocation that threatens the argument he is seeking to construct.  After all, a God whose followers do not care whether or not the world goes to hell is not a God most folks would care to know anyhow.

Christians do care whether or not people go to hell.

Or we certainly should.

I recently heard Dr. Timothy George of the Beeson Divinity School reference David Steinmetz’s 1980 article, “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis.”  I was struck by the title, as well as by Dr. George’s recommendation of the article, and decided to hunt it down.

This really is a tremendous piece, and goes a long way, I believe, in striking a blow against neophilia, the love of the new.  I have long felt that we are too dismissive of pre-critical exegesis, and Dr. Steinmetz hits the nail squarely on the head in this article explaining why that is so.

The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis

By David C. Steinmetz

Article Originally appeared in Theology Today Vol. 37, April 1980, No.1, pages 27-28.

All rights belong to Theology Today.

“The medieval theory of levels of meaning in the biblical text, with all its undoubted defects, flourished because it is true, while the modern theory of a single meaning, with all its demonstrable virtues is false. Until the historical-critical method becomes critical of its own theoretical foundations and develops a hermeneutical theory adequate to the nature of the text which it is interpreting, it will remain restricted-as it deserves to be-to the guild and the academy, where the question of truth can endlessly be deferred. “

 

In 1859 Benjamin Jowett, then Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, published a justly famous essay on the interpretation of Scripture.1 Jowett argued that “Scripture has one meaning-the meaning which it had in the mind of the Prophet or Evangelist who first uttered or wrote, to the hearers or readers who first received it.”2 Scripture should be interpreted like any other book and the later accretions and venerated traditions surrounding its interpretation should, for the most part, either be brushed aside or severely discounted. “The true use of interpretation is to get rid of interpretation, and leave us alone in company with the author.”3

Jowett did not foresee great difficulties in the way of the recovery of the original meaning of the text. Proper interpretation requires imagination, the ability to put oneself into an alien cultural situation, and knowledge of the language and history of the ancient people whose literature one sets out to interpret. In the case of the Bible, one has also to bear in mind the progressive nature of revelation and the superiority of certain later religious insights to certain earlier ones. But the interpreter, armed with the proper linguistic tools, will find that “… universal truth easily breaks through the accidents of time and place”4and that such truth still speaks to the condition of the unchanging human heart.

Of course, critical biblical studies have made enormous strides since the time of Jowett. No reputable biblical scholar would agree today with Jowett’s reconstruction of the gospels in which Jesus appears as a “teacher… speaking to a group of serious, but not highly educated, working men, attempting to inculcate in them a loftier and sweeter morality.”5 Still, the quarrel between modern biblical scholarship and Benjamin Jowett is less a quarrel over his hermeneutical theory than it is a disagreement with him over the application of that theory in his exegetical practice. Biblical scholarship still hopes to recover the original intention of the author of a biblical text and still regards the pre-critical exegetical tradition as an obstacle to the proper understanding of the true meaning of that text. The most primitive meaning of the text is its only valid meaning, and the historical-critical method is the only key which can unlock it.

But is that hermeneutical theory true?

I think it is demonstrably false. In what follows I want to examine the pre-critical exegetical tradition at exactly the point at which Jowett regarded it to be most vulnerable-namely, in its refusal to bind the meaning of any pericope to the intention, whether explicit or merely half-formed, of its human author. Medieval theologians defended the proposition, so alien to modern biblical studies, that the meaning of Scripture in the mind of the prophet who first uttered it is only one of its possible meanings and may not, in certain circumstances, even be its primary or most important meaning. I want to show that this theory (in at least that respect) was superior to the theories which replaced it. When biblical scholarship shifted from the hermeneutical position of Origen to the hermeneutical position of Jowett, it gained something important and valuable. But it lost something as well, and it is the painful duty of critical scholarship to assess its losses as well as its gains.

I

Medieval hermeneutical theory took as its point of departure the words of St. Paul: “The letter kills but the spirit makes alive” (II Cor. 3:6). Augustine suggested that this text could be understood in either one of two ways. On the one hand, the distinction between letter and spirit could be a distinction between law and gospel, between demand and grace. The letter kills because it demands an obedience of the sinner which the sinner is powerless to render. The Spirit makes alive because it infuses the forgiven sinner with new power to meet the rigorous requirements of the law.

But Paul could also have in mind a distinction between what William Tyndale later called the “story-book” or narrative level of the Bible and the deeper theological meaning or spiritual significance implicit within it. This distinction was important for at least three reasons. Origen stated the first reason with unforgettable clarity:

Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning existed without the sun and moon and stars? And that the first day, if we may so call it, was even without a heaven? And who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, “planted a paradise eastward in Eden,” and set in it a visible and palpable “tree of life,” of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life; and again that one could partake of “good and evil” by masticating the fruit taken from the tree of that name? And when God is said to “walk in the paradise in the cool of the day” and Adam to hide himself behind a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual event.6

Simply because a story purports to be a straightforward historical narrative does not mean that it is in fact what it claims to be. What appears to be history may be metaphor or figure instead and the interpreter who confuses metaphor with literal fact is an interpreter who is simply incompetent. Every biblical story means something, even if the narrative taken at face value contains absurdities or contradictions. The interpreter must demythologize the text in order to grasp the sacred mystery cloaked in the language of actual events.

The second reason for distinguishing between letter and spirit was the thorny question of the relationship between Israel and the church, between the Greek Testament and the Hebrew Bible. The church regarded itself as both continuous and discontinuous with ancient Israel. Because it claimed to be continuous, it felt an unavoidable obligation to interpret the Torah, the prophets, and the writings. But it was precisely this claim of continuity, absolutely essential to Christian identity, which created fresh hermeneutical problems for the church.

How was a French parish priest in 1150 to understand Psalm 137, which bemoans captivity in Babylon, makes rude remarks about Edomites, expresses an ineradicable longing for a glimpse of Jerusalem, and pronounces a blessing on anyone who avenges the destruction of the temple by dashing Babylonian children against a rock? The priest lives in Concale, not Babylon, has no personal quarrel with Edomites, cherishes no ambitions to visit Jerusalem (though he might fancy a holiday in Paris), and is expressly forbidden by Jesus to avenge himself on his enemies. Unless Psalm 137 has more than one possible meaning, it cannot be used as a prayer by the church and must be rejected as a lament belonging exclusively to the piety of ancient Israel.

A third reason for distinguishing letter from spirit was the conviction, expressed by Augustine, that while all Scripture was given for the edification of the church and the nurture of the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, not all the stories in the Bible are edifying as they stand. What is the spiritual point of the story of the drunkenness of Noah, the murder of Sisera, or the oxgoad of Shamgar, son of Anath? If it cannot be found on the level of narrative, then it must be found on the level of allegory, metaphor, and type.

That is not to say that patristic and medieval interpreters approved of arbitrary and undisciplined exegesis, which gave free rein to the imagination of the exegete. Augustine argued, for example, that the more obscure parts of Scripture should be interpreted in the light of its less difficult sections and that no allegorical interpretation could be accepted which was not supported by the “manifest testimonies” of other less ambiguous portions of the Bible. The literal sense of Scripture is basic to the spiritual and limits the range of possible allegorical meanings in those instances in which the literal meaning of a particular passage is absurd, undercuts the living relationship of the church to the Old Testament, or is spiritually barren.

II

From the time of John Cassian, the church subscribed to a theory of the fourfold sense of Scripture.7 The literal sense of Scripture could and usually did nurture the three theological virtues, but when it did not, the exegete could appeal to three additional spiritual senses, each sense corresponding to one of the virtues. The allegorical sense taught about the church and what it should believe, and so it corresponded to the virtue of faith. The tropological sense taught about individuals and what they should do, and so it corresponded to the virtue of love. The anagogical sense pointed to the future and wakened expectation, and so it corresponded to the virtue of hope. In the fourteenth century Nicholas of Lyra summarized this hermeneutical theory in a much quoted little rhyme:

Littera gesta docet,
Quid credas allegoria,
Moralis quid agas,
Quo tendas anagogia.

This hermeneutical device made it possible for the church to pray directly and without qualification even a troubling Psalm like 137. After all, Jerusalem was not merely a city in the Middle East; it was, according to the allegorical sense, the church; according to the tropological sense, the faithful soul; and according to the anagogical sense, the center of God’s new creation. The Psalm became a lament of those who long for the establishment of God’s future kingdom and who are trapped in this disordered and troubled world, which with all its delights is still not their home. They seek an abiding city elsewhere. The imprecations against the Edomites and the Babylonians are transmuted into condemnations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. If you grant the fourfold sense of Scripture, David sings like a Christian.

III

Thomas Aquinas wanted to ground the spiritual sense of Scripture even more securely in the literal sense than it had been grounded in Patristic thought. Returning to the distinction between “things” and “signs” made by Augustine in De doctrina christiana (though Thomas preferred to use the Aristotelian terminology of “things” and “words”), Thomas argued that while words are the signs of things, things designated by words can themselves be the signs of other things. In all merely human sciences, words alone have a sign-character. But in Holy Scripture, the things designated by words can themselves have the character of a sign. The literal sense of Scripture has to do with the sign-character of words; the spiritual sense of Scripture has to do with the sign-character of things. By arguing this way, Thomas was able to show that the spiritual sense of Scripture is always based on the literal sense and derived from it.

Thomas also redefined the literal sense of Scripture as “the meaning of the text which the author intends.” Lest Thomas be confused with Jowett, I should hasten to point out that for Thomas the author was God, not the human prophet or apostle. In the fourteenth century, Nicholas of Lyra, a Franciscan exegete and one of the most impressive biblical scholars produced by the Christian church, built a new hermeneutical argument on the aphorism of Thomas. If the literal sense of Scripture is the meaning which the author intended (presupposing that the author whose intention finally matters is God), then is it possible to argue that Scripture contains a double literal sense? Is there a literal-historical sense (the original meaning of the words as spoken in their first historical setting) which includes and implies a literal-prophetic sense (the larger meaning of the words as perceived in later and changed circurnstances)?

Nicholas not only embraced a theory of the double literal sense of Scripture, but he was even willing to argue that in certain contexts the literal-prophetic sense takes precedence over the literal-historical. Commenting on Psalm 117, Lyra wrote: “The literal sense in this Psalm concerns Christ; for the literal sense is the sense primarily intended by the author.” Of the promise to Solomon in I Chronicles 17:13, Lyra observed: “The aforementioned authority was literally fulfilled in Solomon; however, it was fulfilled less perfectly, because Solomon was a son of God only by grace; but it was fulfilled more perfectly in Christ, who is the Son of God by nature.”

For most exegetes, the theory of Nicholas of Lyra bound the interpreter to the dual task of explaining the historical meaning of a text while elucidating its larger and later spiritual significance. The great French humanist, Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples, however, pushed the theory to absurd limits. He argued that the only possible meaning of a text was its literal-prophetic sense and that the literal-historical sense was a product of human fancy and idle imagination. The literal-historical sense is the “letter which kills.” It is advocated as the true meaning of Scripture only by carnal persons who have not been regenerated by the life-giving Spirit of God. The problem of the proper exegesis of Scripture is, when all is said and done, the problem of the regeneration of its interpreters.

IV

In this brief survey of medieval hermeneutical theory, there are certain dominant themes which recur with dogged persistence. Medieval exegetes admit that the words of Scripture had a meaning in the historical situation in which they were first uttered or written, but they deny that the meaning of those words is restricted to what the human author thought he said or what his first audience thought they heard. The stories and sayings of Scripture bear an implicit meaning only understood by a later audience. In some cases that implicit meaning is far more important than the restricted meaning intended by the author in his particular cultural setting.

Yet the text cannot mean anything a later audience wants it to mean. The language of the Bible opens up a field of possible meanings. Any interpretation which falls within that field is valid exegesis of the text, even though that interpretation was not intended by the author. Any interpretation which falls outside the limits of that field of possible meanings is probably eisegesis and should be rejected as unacceptable. Only by confessing the multiple sense of Scripture is it possible for the church to make use of the Hebrew Bible at all or to recapture the various levels of significance in the unfolding story of creation and redemption. The notion that Scripture has only one meaning is a fantastic idea and is certainly not advocated by the biblical writers themselves.

V

Having elucidated medieval hermeneutical theory, I should like to take some time to look at medieval exegetical practice. One could get the impression from Jowett that because medieval exegetes rejected the theory of the single meaning of Scripture so dear to Jowett’s heart, they let their exegetical imaginations run amok and exercised no discipline at all in clarifying the field of possible meanings opened by the biblical text. In fact, medieval interpreters, once you grant the presuppositions on which they operate, are as conservative and restrained in their approach to the Bible as any comparable group of modern scholars.

In order to test medieval exegetical practice I have chosen a terribly difficult passage from the Gospel of Matthew, the parable of the Good Employer or, as it is more frequently known, the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16). The story is a familiar one. An employer hired day laborers to work in his vineyard at dawn and promised them the standard wage of a denarius. Because he needed more workers, he returned to the market place at nine, noon, three, and five o’clock and hired any laborers he could find. He promised to pay the workers hired at nine, noon, and three what was fair. But the workers hired at the eleventh hour or five o’clock were sent into the vineyard without any particular promise concerning remuneration. The employer instructed his foreman to pay off the workers beginning with the laborers hired at five o’clock. These workers expected only one-twelfth of a denarius, but were given the full day’s wage instead. Indeed, all the workers who had worked part of the day were given one denarius. The workers who had been in the vineyard since dawn accordingly expected a bonus beyond the denarius, but they were disappointed to receive the same wage which had been given to the other, less deserving workers. When they grumbled, they were told by the employer that they had not been defrauded but had been paid according to an agreed contract. If the employer chose to be generous to the workers who had only worked part of the day, that was, in effect, none of their business. They should collect the denarius that was due them and go home like good fellows.

Jesus said the kingdom of God was like this story. What on earth could he have meant?

VI

The church has puzzled over this parable ever since it was included in Matthew’s Gospel. St. Thomas Aquinas in his Lectura super Evangelium Sancti Matthaei offered two interpretations of the parable, one going back in its lineage to Irenaeus and the other to Origen. The “day” mentioned in the parable can either refer to the life-span of an individual (the tradition of Origen), in which case the parable is a comment on the various ages at which one may be converted to Christ, or it is a reference to the history of salvation (the tradition of Irenaeus), in which case it is a comment on the relationship of Jew and Gentile.

If the story refers to the life span of a man or woman, then it is intended as an encouragement to people who are converted to Christ late in life. The workers in the story who begin at dawn are people who have served Christ and have devoted themselves to the love of God and neighbor since childhood. The other hours mentioned by Jesus refer to the various stages of human development from youth to old age. Whether one has served Christ for a long time or for a brief moment, one will still receive the gift of eternal life. Thomas qualifies this somewhat in order to allow for proportional rewards and a hierarchy in heaven. But he does not surrender the main point: eternal life is given to late converts with the same generosity it is given to early converts.

On the other hand, the story may refer to the history of salvation. Quite frankly, this is the interpretation which interests Thomas most. The hours mentioned in the parable are not stages in individual human development but epochs in the history of the world from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to David, and from David to Christ. The owner of the vineyard is the whole Trinity, the foreman is Christ, and the moment of reckoning is the resurrection from the dead. The workers who are hired at the eleventh hour are the Gentiles, whose complaint that no one has offered them work can be interpreted to mean that they had no prophets as the Jews have had. The workers who have borne the heat of the day are the Jews, who grumble about the favoritism shown to latecomers, but who are still given the denarius of eternal life. As a comment on the history of salvation, the parable means that the generosity of God undercuts any advantage which the Jews might have had over the Gentiles with respect to participation in the gifts and graces of God.

Not everyone read the text as a gloss on Jewish-Christian relations or as a discussion of late conversion. In the fourteenth century the anonymous author of the Pearl, an elegy on the death of a young girl, applied the parable to infancy rather than to old age. What is important about the parable is not the chronological age at which one enters the vineyard, but the fact that some workers are only in the vineyard for the briefest possible moment. A child who dies at the age of two years is, in a sense, a worker who arrives at the eleventh hour. The parable is intended as a consolation for bereaved parents. A parent who has lost a small child can be comforted by the knowledge that God, who does not despise the service of persons converted in extreme old age, does not withhold his mercy from boys and girls whose eleventh hour came at dawn.

Probably the most original interpretation of the parable was offered by John Pupper of Goch, a Flemish theologian of the fifteenth century, who used the parable to attack the doctrine of proportionality, particularly as that doctrine bad been stated and defended by Thomas Aquinas. No one had ever argued that God gives rewards which match in exact quantity the weight of the good works done by a Christian. That is arithmetic equality and is simply not applicable to a relationship in which people perform temporal acts and receive eternal rewards. But most theologians did hold to a doctrine of proportionality; while there is a disproportion between the good works which Christians do and the rewards which they receive, there is a proportion as well. The reward is always much larger than the work which is rewarded, but the greater the work, the greater the reward.

As far as Goch is concerned, that doctrine is sheer nonsense. No one can take the message of the parable of the vineyard seriously and still hold to the doctrine of proportionality. Indeed, the only people in the vineyard who hold to the doctrine of proportionality are the first workers in the vineyard. They argue that twelve times the work should receive twelve times the payment. All they receive for their argument is a rebuke and a curt dismissal.

Martin Luther, in an early sermon preached before the Reformation in 1517, agreed with Goch that God gives equal reward for great and small works. It is not by the herculean size of our exertions but by the goodness of God that we receive any reward at all.

But Luther, unfortunately, spoiled his point by elaborating a thoroughly unconvincing argument in which he tried to show that the last workers in the vineyard were more humble than the first and therefore that one hour of their service was worth twelve hours of the mercenary service of the grumblers.

The parable, however, seems to make exactly the opposite point. The workers who began early were not more slothful or more selfish than the workers who began later in the day. Indeed, they were fairly representative of the kind of worker to be found hanging around the marketplace at any hour. They were angry, not because they had shirked their responsibilities, but because they had discharged them conscientiously.

In 1525 Luther offered a fresh interpretation of the parable, which attacked it from a slightly different angle. The parable has essentially one point: to celebrate the goodness of God which makes nonsense of a religion based on law-keeping and good works. God pays no attention to the proportionately greater efforts of the first workers in the vineyard, but to their consternation, God puts them on exactly the same level as the last and least productive workers. The parable shows that everyone in the vineyard is unworthy, though not always for the same reason. The workers who arrive after nine o’clock are unworthy because they are paid a salary incommensurate with their achievement in picking grapes. The workers who spent the entire day in the vineyard are unworthy because they are dissatisfied with what God has promised, think that their efforts deserve special consideration, and are jealous of their employer’s goodness to workers who accomplished less than they did. The parable teaches that salvation is not grounded in human merit and that there is no system of bookkeeping which can keep track of the relationship between God and humanity. Salvation depends utterly and absolutely on the goodness of God.

VII

The four medieval theologians I have mentioned-Thomas Aquinas, the author of the Pearl the Flemish chaplain Goch, and the young Martin Luther-did not exhaust in their writings all the possible interpretations of the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. But they did see with considerable clarity that the parable is an assertion of God’s generosity and mercy to people who do not deserve it. It is only against the background of the generosity of God that one can under-stand the relationship of Jew and Gentile, the problem of late conversion, the meaning of the death of a young child, the question of proportional rewards, even the very definition of grace itself. Every question is qualified by the severe mercy of God, by the strange generosity of the owner of the vineyard who pays the non-productive latecomer the same wage as his oldest and most productive employees.

If you were to ask me which of these interpretations is valid, I should have to respond that they all are. They all fall within the field of possible meanings created by the story itself. How many of those meanings were in the conscious intention of Jesus or of the author of the Gospel of Matthew, I do not profess to know. I am inclined to agree with C. S. Lewis, who commented on his own book, Till We Have Faces: “An author doesn’t necessarily understand the meaning of his own story better than anyone else….”⁸ The act of creation confers no special privileges on authors when it comes to the distinctly different, if lesser task of interpretation. Wordsworth the critic is not in the same league with Wordsworth the poet, while Samuel Johnson the critic towers over Johnson the creative artist. Authors obviously have something in mind ‘when they write, but a work of historical or theological or aesthetic imagination has a life of its own.

VIII

Which brings us back to Benjamin Jowett. Jowett rejected medieval exegesis and insisted that the Bible should be read like any other book.9 I agree with Jowett that the Bible should be read like any other book. The question is: how does one read other books?

Take, for example, my own field of Reformation studies. Almost no historian that I know would answer the question of the meaning of the writings of Martin Luther by focusing solely on Luther’s explicit and conscious intention. Marxist interpreters of Luther from Friedrich Engels to Max Steinmetz have been interested in Luther’s writings as an expression of class interests, while psychological interpreters from Grisar to Erikson have focused on the theological writings as clues to the inner psychic tensions in the personality of Martin Luther. Even historians who reject Marxist and psychological interpretations of Luther find themselves asking how Luther was understood in the free imperial cities, by the German knights, by the landed aristocracy, by the various subgroups of German peasants, by the Catholic hierarchy, by lawyers, by university faculties-to name only a few of the more obvious groups who responded to Luther and left a written record of their response. Meaning involves a listener as well as a speaker, and when one asks the question of the relationship of Luther to his various audiences in early modern Europe, it becomes clear that there was not one Luther in the sixteenth century, but a battalion of Luthers.

Nor can the question of the meaning of Luther’s writings be answered by focusing solely on Luther’s contemporaries. Luther’s works were read and pondered in a variety of historical and cultural settings from his death in 1546 to the present. Those readings of Luther have had measurable historical effects on succeeding generations, whose particular situation in time and space could scarcely have been anticipated by Luther. Yet the social, political, economic, cultural, and religious history of those people belongs intrinsically and inseparably to the question of the meaning of the theology of Martin Luther. The meaning of historical texts cannot be separated from the complex problem of their reception and the notion that a text means only what its author intends it to mean is historically naive. Even to talk of the original setting in which words were spoken and heard is to talk of meanings rather than meaning. To attempt to understand those original meanings is the first step in the exegetical process, not the last and final step.

Modern literary criticism has challenged the notion that a text means only what its author intends it to mean far more radically than medieval exegetes ever dreamed of doing. Indeed, contemporary debunking of the author and the author’s explicit intentions has proceeded at such a pace that it seems at times as if literary criticism has become a jolly game of ripping out an author’s shirt-tail and setting fire to it. The reader and the literary work to the exclusion of the author have become the central preoccupation of the literary critic. Literary relativists of a fairly moderate sort insist that every generation has its own Shakespeare and Milton, and extreme relativists loudly proclaim that no reader reads the same work twice. Every change in the reader, however slight, is a change in the meaning of the text. Imagine what Thomas Aquinas or Nicholas of Lyra would have made of the famous statement of Northrop Frye:

It has been said of Boehme that his books are like a picnic to which the author brings the words and the reader the meaning. The remark may have been intended as a sneer at Boehme, but it is an exact description of all works of literary art without exception.10

Medieval exegetes held to the sober middle way, the position that the text (any literary text, but especially the Bible) contains both letter and spirit. The text is not all letter, as Jowett with others maintained, or all spirit, as the rather more enthusiastic literary critics in our own time are apt to argue. The original text as spoken and heard limits a field of possible meanings. Those possible meanings are not dragged by the hair, willy-nilly, into the text, but belong to the life of the Bible in the encounter between author and reader as they belong to the life of any act of the human imagination. Such a hermeneutical theory is capable of sober and disciplined application and avoids the Scylla of extreme subjectivism, on the one hand, and the Charybdis of historical positivism, on the other. To be sure, medieval exegetes made bad mistakes in the application of their theory, but they also scored notable and brilliant triumphs. Even at their worst they recognized that the intention of the author is only one element-and not always the most important element at that-in the complex phenomenon of the meaning of a text.

IX

The defenders of the single meaning theory usually concede that the medieval approach to the Bible met the religious needs of the Christian community, but that it did so at the unacceptable price of doing violence to the biblical text. The fact that the historical-critical method after two hundred years is still struggling for more than a precarious foothold in that same religious community is generally blamed on the ignorance and conservatism of the Christian laity and the sloth or moral cowardice of its pastors.

I should like to suggest an alternative hypothesis. The medieval theory of levels of meaning in the biblical text, with all its undoubted defects, flourished because it is true, while the modern theory of a single meaning, with all its demonstrable virtues, is false. Until the historical-critical method becomes critical of its own theoretical foundations and develops a hermeneutical theory adequate to the nature of the text which it is interpreting, it will remain restricted-as it deserves to be-to the guild and the academy, where the question of truth can endlessly be deferred.

 

David C. Steinmetz is Professor of Church History and Doctrine at the Divinity School of Duke University and the author of Misericordia Dei: The Theology of Johannes von Staupitz in Its Late Medieval Selling(1968) and Reformers in the Wings (1971). He also contributed an article, “Reformation and Conversion,” to the April 1978 issue of THEOLOGY TODAY.
¹ Benjamin Jowett, “On the Interpretation of Scripture,”Essays and Reviews, 7th ed. (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 186 1), pp. 330-433.
²Ibid., p. 378.
³ Ibid., p. 384. 4 Ibid., p. 412.
⁵ Helen Gardner, The Business of Criticism (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 83. 6 Origen, On First Principles, ed. by G. W. Butterworth (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 288. 7 For a brief survey of medieval hermeneutical theory which takes into account recent historical research see James S. Preus, From Shadow to Promise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 9-149; see also the useful bibliography, pp. 287-93. 8 W. H. Lewis, ed.,Letters of C S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1966), P. 273.
9 Jowett, “Interpretation,” p. 377. 10 This quotation is cited by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 1, at the beginning of a chapter which sets out to elaborate an alternative theory.

Thursday, September 20

10:30 p.m. – We leave at 5 a.m. tomorrow morning.  Will stop to spend the night in Nebraska, then arrive at Pine Ridge around 1:30 Saturday afternoon.  Looking forward to a great trip and praying that God will use us and change us.

Friday, September 21

10:15 p.m. – We’re in Kearney, Nebraska.  We drove today from North Little Rock into, up through, and out of Oklahoma, through Kansas, and then here.  A beautiful if long day of driving.  Lots of laughs, lots of conversation, and lots of scenic views.  Tomorrow we arrive in Pine Ridge around 2:00.

A great group.  Eleven folks:  7 women, 4 men.  I believe there are 3 churches represented.  It’s been great to get to know, visit with, and laugh with friends.  At one point today I was driving a U-Haul through Kansas while singing along with George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” on the radio while my friend Gooch grabbed a few winks in the passenger seat.  At struck me as one of those glorious little oddities of life, a totally random, unexpected, but blissfully joyful moment.

I am glad I came.  There really is something neat about going off with fellow believers in Jesus for a worthy cause.  Praying for great things.

Monday, September 24

11:30 p.m. – The trip is going very well.  We traveled to Pine Ridge Friday and Saturday.  The drive is very long, but you see some beautiful country.  You also get a sense of the vastness of America, especially while driving up a road like Hwy 61 through Nebraska.  Truly beautiful.  By Saturday night, everything was unpacked at the church and we checked into the hotel here in Kyle, SD.  It’s about 50 miles from Pine Ridge and we pass Wounded Knee on every trip to and from the church.

Yesterday, Sunday, we attended church at the Lakota Baptist Church where we had a great time of worship with the church family.

Another group is here from, I believe, Tennessee.  They are a group of ladies doing ministry here.  Today, a Christian veterinary group arrived as well (or they may have arrived yesterday).  None of the groups seemed to know that the others would be there, which has created some…well…let’s just call it “opportunities for Christians to come together and learn to cooperate.”

Yesterday after church we drove through the Badlands of South Dakota which really must be seen to be understood.

While there, we pulled over after seeing some mountain sheep in a ridge just ahead of us.  Then, to our utter amazement, they turned and walked calmly right past our group.  It really was quite astounding.

Today marked our first day of Vacation Bible School.  Our primary mission here is to the kids.  We put on Vacation Bible School Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, concluding with a carnival on Thursday.  We do other things as well.  For instance, some of the ladies are leading a lady’s Bible study tomorrow.  The ladies will receive nice gift bags with Christian literature as well as hygiene items.

Also, I’m speaking at the men’s jail tomorrow while one of the ladies will be speaking at the women’s facility.  Then we’ll be having VBS at night.

This means that during the day we have been able to see some of the sites around here, and there are, indeed, many to see.  For instance, I was finally able to see this:

Before traveling to Rushmore, we were fortunate to attend an event that happens only once a year:  the buffalo roundup at Custer State Park.

The sight-seeing has been fun and, truth be told, it has helped me get a bit of a better grasp on the world in which the Lakotas live.  But, at the end of the day, our mission here is the kids.  So we are feeding them each night of VBS (this is one of the, I think, four rooms that kids were eating in)…

…and we are teaching them.  I am honored to be doing the teaching time during VBS (this is our smallest group of kids, the first I had tonight of three groups in all).  We also have crafts and music.

In all, I believe this mission is not only worthwhile, I believe it is very important.  I am glad I came.  As with all such missions, those that go are the ones that are changes.

Pray for the Lakota people.

More later…

Tuesday, September 25

Was able to stop by Wounded Knee on the way to the church.  I had been wanting to do so and looked forward to the chance.  It was very moving to be at the site, though I did not stay very long.  It is safe to say that Wounded Knee is the living symbol of the American Indian tragedy, and it is an odd sensation to be there.

At 1:00 we went to the jail where the ladies conducted a Bible study with the female inmates and Allen and I conducted a Bible study with the men.  It was a powerful time that I will never forget.  I spoke for maybe 12-15 minutes to about 20 inmates.  Many of them were very open to the gospel.  Then we just sat and talked and shared our stories.  I felt a real connection with these men.  They were all Native Americans and the majority of them were in for alcohol-related offenses.  Alcohol truly is the scourge of reservation life.  We had a great opportunity to talk about the freedom Christ brings.  As one of the brothers there shared about his inability to break free from alcohol, I turned to Romans 7 and we spoke about the war between the spirit and the flesh.  In all, we had about an hour to spend with these guys.  I will never forget it and I pray the Lord works mightily in each of their lives.

Then tonight we had a great VBS after feeding the kids.  I felt a little more connection with the kids tonight than I felt last night and I believe many of them are being blessed by the ministry that we are offering to them.

Thursday, September 27

Well, here is a journal entry I didn’t expect to make.  Late Tuesday night (really, early Wednesday morning) I awoke very ill.  I will spare you the details.  It was either food poisoning or some kind of bug.  Yesterday was a very unpleasant day.  I spent the day in bed trying, unsuccesfully, to keep fluids and a few crackers in me.

Last night I determined that I would find a doctor today if I didn’t wake up feeling better.  I’m thankful to say that I slept the night through and have not been sick a single time so far today.  I just feel tired.  While I did not get to go with the group to Crazy Horse, I do hope to be at the carnival tonight if the day goes well.

Oh well.

8:15 – I was able to get to the carnival tonight, the last event of the trip.  It was a real joy to see the kids being fed, playing games, receiving prizes and, in general, being encouraged.  I have been really impressed with the group that came up here from Arkansas.  I’m especially proud of our leader, Lisa Kelley, who first had the vision to do this.  And it is obvious that all who come here share her passion.  I feel honored to have been able to witness it all and to share in it to some extent even though I missed some of it due to being sick.

I suspect I’ll have more to say when I’m able to unpack all of this, emotionally and spiritually, but, for now, I think I’ll end with a few pictures of the kids I was able to take tonight.

Pray for the Lakota people.

Every year, Southern Baptist churches are asked to fill out what’s called the “Annual Church Profile” (ACP).  This is the primary means by which the Convention collects and compiles statistical data concerning SBC churches.  In the ACP, you are asked to provide information concerning the church’s giving, Sunday School attendance, baptisms, membership, etc.

For a number of years now, I have left the “Total Membership” and “Resident Membership” sections blank on our ACP.  I did that the last few years at my last church in Dawson, GA, and have carried the practice here to Central Baptist Church in North Little Rock, AR.

I do have my secretary fill in our average attendance figures, so it can be seen roughly how many attend, but not the “Total Membership” or “Resident Membership.”  Why?  Simply put, because while our “Total Membership” is just over 2,000, our average attendance for the last year was 519.

That means that just 25% of our total membership attends church.

To be sure, there are some legitimate reasons for this.  Some members are elderly or are in poor health and cannot come.  Others may be in the military stationed abroad or perhaps are out of the state on business for a protracted period of time.  Yes, there are legitimate reasons.  I suspect, however, that these reasons do not make up a very large percentage of the 75% of our members who do not attend.

Let’s be charitable and say we can explain 5% of that 75% on legitimate reasons.  That would mean we have 70% of our membership that does not attend…and that really is no improvement.

Now, I am not proud of that.  In fact, I find it embarrassing.  However, let me point out that the evidence suggests that we are the norm and not the exception.  In fact, most SBC churches have a shocking disparity between their membership and their attendance.

This was not always so.  For the better part of our 400 year history, we Baptists have held to what is called “regenerate church membership.”  That is a particular way of looking at membership.  It means that the membership of the church is comprised of those who have been born again and duly baptized.  How can a church know whether or not a person has been truly born again?  Of course, ultimately, we cannot see into the hearts and minds of human beings, but Baptists have historically asked for a credible confession of faith in Jesus as Lord followed by believer’s baptism.  In this way, Baptist church membership is distinguished from, say, a state church model or paedobaptist models that would extend the title “member” to those who have not made a profession of faith and been baptized.

Regenerate church membership carries with it a very simple implication:  that if the church is, by definition, comprised of the regenerate, it is reasonable to expect that there will be, at the least, an agreed upon effort among the membership to live as Christian people.  Of course, we fall.  We fail.  We sin.  And the grace of the Lord Jesus is ever present and must be present among his people.  If this grace is not present, the church becomes a graceless cult, a gathering of Pharisees.

Regenerate church membership in its healthiest manifestations (and, I would argue, in its New Testament manifestions) is fully aware of human frailty, even among the redeemed, but comes together in loving agreement about what the Christian life should generally look like.  Baptist churches have often spelled these agreements out in church covenants.  One of these elements is association with the local church.

As a result, for most of our history, Baptist churches have had watchcare over the membership, living in covenanted accountability with those walking with the body of Christ and lovingly but clearly calling those who have fallen away back to the fold.  This explains why church discipline has historically been important to Baptist Christians.  Church discipline, in both its formative and corrective manifestations, was seen as a biblical and necessary and redemptive means by which the regenerate character of the church was encouraged and maintained under the ministry of the Spirit’s guidance and the church’s faithfulness.

The disparity between membership and attendance in most modern SBC churches shows that all of this has changed in our day.  Our commitment to regenerate church membership is now largely theoretical, and very few people even know the term at all.  Church discipline has been cast off as an awkward disonaur of the past, a relic that wreaks of legalism and inquisitions and hypocritical judgment.  The fact that church discipline has indeed been sometimes abused in these ways does not make it easy to get a reasonable hearing for it today.

Because of this, the idea of membership accountability is increasingly alien to our church culture.  The reasons are many and varied:  historical illiteracy, biblical illiteracy, the rise of the ecclesiastical marketplace, consumerism, hyper-individualism, the loss of a sense of community, the privitization of spirituality in American Christianity, the privitization of confession and repentance, rampant, low ecclesiology, the ease with which we can move from one church to another when our feelings get hurt, the collapse of the letter system among Baptist churches, competition among churches for congregants, and a shift from biblical teaching to the assuaging of perceived felt needs among congregants in the local church.  The list goes on an on.

At Central Baptist Church, we are trying to restore a sense of “church,” a sense of “we,” a sense of being a covenanted community.  We are trying to re-learn church, to re-learn the gospel, to re-learn what it means to be the body of Christ.  As such, we have committed ourselves to becoming “an authentic family around the whole gospel for the glory of God and the reaching of the nations.”

In the meantime, I am asked yearly by the ACP to write down our membership number.  But here’s the thing:  I know if I write “2,000 members” that (a) it’s true only in a coldly technical sense but not in any sense that my forefathers would recognize and (b) that that figure will be added to similarly inflated figures from other churches, compiled and then reported to the world as part of the largely-mythical idea of the Southern Baptist Convention having almost 16 million members.

In other words, I leave that section blank because I believe it is a sin to bear false witness.

Now, those are my thoughts.  I am not claiming that churches which report that figure are, in fact, sinning.  Again, the number is technically true, and a church may indeed bemoan the inflated nature of it yet still report it as the technical truth.  (In doing so, however, it would be conceding that the word “membership” means something very different to us than it did to our forefathers.)  But, for me, when I consider the reality of our church climate and the need to be honest about where we truly are, I have determined that I cannot write the figure in good conscience or give assent to it.

We are a congregational church.  The church may choose to vote to add the number at any time.  Should it choose to do so, the number will be reported.  However, short of that, it will not be.

Our current situation was not created in a day.  It will not be fixed in a day.  It is, admittedly, of relative importance, but it is not unimportant.  So we will continue to strive towards regenerate church membership.  Perhaps in time our statistics will regain a sense of integrity, at least a sense of movement in the right direction, at the very least a departure from the realm of fiction.  When that happens, I think I can, in good conscience, fill in the blank.

Finally, let me make this perfectly clear:  I do not wholly (or possibly even mainly) blame the non-attending members for the predicament.  Perhaps most of the blame falls upon me, upon us as a church.  Had we lovingly ministered to and consistently reached out to our non-associating members, perhaps many would still be in open, visible association.  The predicament should cause the church to ask herself whether or not we have been negligent.  And, yes, it should cause the non-attending member (who is physically able to attend) to ask himself or herself why it is that they could join a church and then neglect it.

It is a painful path we will have to walk towards restoration.  But, by God’s grace, we can restore integrity to membership.

Our problem is this:  We have created a narcissistic form of Christianity, in which “conversion” is less a turning toward Christ than a turning toward success or fame or fortune.  Narcissus never had it so good than in best-seller Christianity, which has become self-centeredness wrapped up as “spirituality,” which has become the latest fashion accessory for the person who has everything.  A survey of the Christian Book Association’s best-selling books as we began the twenty-first century found that family and parenting topics accounted for nearly half of the titles, with the rest focused mainly on the self.  Of the top 100 books, just 6 were about the Bible, 4 were about Jesus, and 3 were about evangelism.  “The Christianity of the bestseller lists tend to be personal, private, and interior,” wrote Gene Edward Veith, “with little attention to theology or to the church.”

We have made conversion primarily about ourselves, a finding of ourselves and a fulfilling of ourselves.  We’ve made it a journey of self-discovery rather than a journey of God discovery.  Yet conversion is not about us, but about God’s overture of love, without which we are devoid of sufficient motive or power to change and be changed.  True “conversion” is to lay hold of Christ, or rather, as Paul corrected himself, to allow Christ to lay hold of us.  True “conversion” is directed toward the one to whom we convert, the one to whom we turn.  It is a life of “fullness,” in which the “fullness” is Christ.

You are not the point.  And we are not the point.  Jesus Christ always has been and always will be the point.  All the arrows point to him and not to us.

Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola, Jesus Manifesto

(Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010), p.100-101.