A transcription of a talk by David Bentley Hart on the Intersections of Scripture and Theology at Pepperdine University, June 2011
The proper title of this paper, this talk, is The Second Naiveté? I’ll try to be brief as I can because the point I want to make really is very simple and perhaps obvious, and I don’t want to obscure it through an excess of subtlety. In order to sort of keep this within the ambit of what I understood the theme of the larger conference to be, my remarks will deal mostly with Christian readings of the Old Testament. The New Testament — there’s a different history there, a different set of questions in Christian exegesis. I want to keep myself, I want to confine myself to what I think is an important, simple, but often neglected set of observations that should be made about the Christian tradition of reading Hebrew scripture as Christian scripture. I suppose I’d say in a lackadaisical way my question is how Christians read scripture, how they’ve done so historically, particularly what they understand themselves to be doing when they interpret scripture, what methods they think it legitimate to employ, how the presuppositions with which they work have been altered in the modern period, and why this has been so. To say that would be a rather lackadaisical way of stating it. So my question really is, how ought Christians to read scripture as scripture?
It’s hardly a question that admits to a single answer, of course. After all, nothing more completely determines the lines of divisions between Christians, or between ancient and modern Christians for that matter, which is an even greater gulf in some ways, than biblical hermeneutics. How Christians interpret scripture is a direct manifestation of what they mean when they speak of the Bible and more crucially what they mean when they speak of revelation as such. In the realm of Christian discourse, hermeneutics is always already theology, shaped and guided by faith. Hermeneutics is always already confession. This is true even of traditions that think it’s the other way around, that they’re getting their confession from their hermeneutical probity. But while biblical exegesis occupies this central place in Christianity self-understanding, it seems to me it’s often these days a hopelessly confused issue, at least confused in the academic world by a great number of orthodoxies that aren’t always properly sensible to the contingency of their own premises, and also by a number of academic disputes that are not, to my mind, always correctly related to theological history, not that I’m going to rehearse them here.
I suppose I could point to, just as an example, the sort of argument that shouldn’t ever have arisen but does as a result of the academic orthodoxies – the dispute that some of you may know about between James Barr and Brevard Childs back in the 70s and 80s. Does anyone know this story? All right. Well, Brevard Childs simply made a case for what he called “canonical readings” of scripture, that is, reading the Bible as a received Canon and not imagining that the sole work of biblical hermeneutics was etiological, was based on a reconstruction of the historical constitution of the text or an attempt to discern with absolute fidelity and clarity the intentions of the human authors. He made the argument that as scripture, the Bible was complete and a Canon which then reflects the Christian Community self-understanding and how God has revealed Himself to the community and so on and so forth. James Barr, a much more rigorous, largely British Scot, one of the great figures in the emerging versions of historical critical scholarship in the middle of the 20th century, attacked him and said that his work was of no use to biblical exegesis at all.
Anyway, when one looks — I don’t want to lay the whole dispute — but when one looks at it in the light of the whole history of Christian doctrine, it’s hard not to conclude that Childs’s proposals were not nearly as novel or as startling as many, including Childs himself, thought they were. In fact, I think they were rather timid when you compare them to Christian tradition. But more interesting to me was that Barr was working from a crudely, and I say this advisedly because he was a brilliant man, but he was working from a crudely circumscribed concept of what a text is or where its meaning is to be found, to the point that he really wasn’t talking about biblical interpretation at all. Another way of saying this is that he suffered inordinately from what I call the “genetic fallacy” which is that the meaning of the text is the meaning you can historically and even psychologically reconstruct regarding its origins.
Forgive me for repairing constantly to the coffee, but I’m not awake. I’m realizing as I stand here, I’m not awake. Sorry. I hope this is coherent. For all I know, I could be reciting Winnie the Pooh stories that I remember.
I come from a different set of traditions, not just one, but I gravitated early on in my education toward patristic and medieval sources where I discovered something rather interesting. Much of the academic discussion about biblical hermeneutics has its term set strictly by the historical critical project as we know it now. I have no objection to the historical critical method. In fact, I quite like it when it’s well-done. I don’t even object to it being, in some sense, the natural default position of the academic approach to scripture. But what I do find troubling is the tendency of many biblical scholars that I’ve known over the years and have read over the years to treat that method as a form of scriptural interpretation rather than as one of many useful propaedeutics to the interpretive act. Equally troubling, more troubling, is the hostility to the critical project of those who for various dogmatic reasons object to the historicization of the Canon in any way because they see it as an assault upon the unity of the Canon of scripture. In either case, it’s assumed that historical critical readings of the Bible somehow constitute an alternative or even a challenge to all the earlier traditions of biblical exegesis and that it lies within the power of this new method to render those traditions questionable or discredited.
Now during my years in the academy, certainly again as a student and as a teacher, I’ve repeatedly encountered the claim, often made perfectly innocently, that advances in historical critical scholarship have somehow made us too sophisticated, have made obsolete and even a little embarrassing not just literal readings of scripture but the allegorical methods of the early and medieval church. Invariably these claims strike me as suffering from an almost willful ignorance of what the actual practice and conceptual grammar of allegorical readings were, not only in Christian but in Jewish and pagan culture. More to the point, they reveal quite a large innocence in regard to the ambiguities of any kind of hermeneutics, scriptural or otherwise. I sometimes think, and it may be unfair, but I sometimes think that it is only in theology faculties today that one finds a significant number of contextual scholars committed to the idea that the full meaning of a text is determined principally and exhaustively by the intention of its author or authors which, taken to an absurd extreme, would make all hermeneutics an interminable task not only of cultural reconstruction but of intuitive psychology. I really don’t know what the Deutero-Isaiah was thinking when he wrote a lot of those passages, but I don’t believe those passages are meaningless as a result of my ignorance. There is no possible way [to know] when all is said and done, honestly, when you treat the history in which a modern critical method could be germane to the question of the validity or invalidity of allegorical readings of scriptures. That’s the first point, and maybe it’s an obvious one.
The relation between modern historical criticism and ancient allegory is not one between a more sophisticated and a more naïve approach to the text, or a more scientific or a more impressionistic approach, it is not. I’ll get to that later. If anything, I would go to say, though, that the modern method is often by far more simplistic in its premises and the more philosophically unrefined in the way it is practiced or presented and suffers from more logical confusions than you would find, say, in Origen, about what the Bible is saying. I think it’s actually only this difference in conceptual subtlety that creates any kind of conflict between ancient and modern understandings of scripture, and perhaps a certain theological poverty on the part of the historical critical method, but that’s a different matter. Otherwise, there’s a perfect, if usually, tacit harmony between them.
I think we can all understand this; what traditional allegory and modern critical method chiefly have in common is their awareness of an insufficiency and even the nonsensicality of the purely literalist approach to scripture. Now that said, some of the modern critical scholars which I know personally and like are themselves in a different sense very literalist readers. It’s just that they happen to think that it’s possible to exhaust, as I said, the significance of the text by reconstructing its material history, and once they’ve done that, there is no other meaning that is legitimate to find in the text in any context for any reason. They don’t always put it that way but they practice it that way. But in a different and more important sense, the critical project in biblical studies was a necessary and fortunate, if in some ways inadequate, corrective not to ancient views of scripture but to an early modern reading of the Bible. A tradition that treated scripture in what I can only call the “oracularist literalist” fashion.
Now what I’m about to say is wildly oversimplified, but my excuses are that time is limited and again I’m not awake. As movements toward reform took shape in the early modern period and as the unity of Christendom began to disintegrate, the rapid decay of any credible institutional warrant for the particulars of Christian belief had to be compensated for by the elevation of the canonical text of the Bible to a position of doctrinal authority conceptually prior, and I mean absolutely prior, in some sense to any act of interpretation. This was inevitable and it required the myth of the Bible as a kind of infallible and uniform catalog of direct, divine revelations. Not a testament to revelation, not simply a revealed text in the sense that by God’s grace it points to the full revelation of God and Christ, but in some sense as an immediate communication of the concrete truths of salvation history, of doctrine uncorrupted by human connivance or folly, and of divine oracles dictating to us what to believe, to desire, to do.
(It’s funny, if you read the Cappadocian Fathers or Origen or Augustine, you notice how often when they speak of scripture, they speak of it as revealing what is revealed, as a testament to a revelation. It’s very rare you find them speaking of the text of scripture as revelation itself. But you do on some occasions.)
This was true not only of Protestant theological culture but of a whole bunch of emerging Catholic counterparts as well. Really, you would not have had, for instance, the controversy between Urban and Galileo a century earlier. It wouldn’t have been an issue.
What this also meant was the interpretation of scripture could be understood essentially, should be understood, as transcription, direct transcription. The question it must address is not what is the Holy Spirit saying to us through the text but more simply what is the text telling us. It’s never in practice possible to separate those things absolutely. This question could be asked honestly only if the interpreter scrupulously refrained from any unseemly impulse to presume upon grace by reading into the text what the text did not explicitly warrant it. Now at a practical level, such a reading is impossible in some sense. It can never be done with absolute purity of intention and method. That was why it was necessary to rely to so great a degree on the myth of the uniformed text, the Bible whose true author was simply God speaking through His amanuensis. In the end, even those who sought to hear and obey the word of scripture could not really help but impose upon the plain and literal sense meanings and acceptations and typological iterations that were in fact inherited from doctrinal tradition which had, in its turn, arrived at its understanding of scripture by way of a radically different practice of reading, which is only a rather long-winded way of saying that the early modern readings of scripture were actually dependent upon ancient readings of scripture that shared none of their premises of what the text was actually doing in revealing Christ.
Over the course of the modern period, many Christians lost any sense then that the act of interpreting scripture, as it was understood, say, by the Church Fathers as a rule, is itself something inspired. The Bible may be inspired in the sense of dictated, but to read is chiefly to register what is written. That’s not to say that any Christian exegete of the early modern period suggested that the reader of scripture did not have to be guided by the Holy Spirit. I am not making that claim. I will assert, though, that within the modern understanding of reading what this principally means is the Spirit must guide the reader toward the one correct interpretation of the text which will be consistent with every other reading and every other part of the text. This at least functions as a tacit presupposition in any attempt to deduce the entirety of Christian revelation from the text of scripture in abstraction from the concrete history of the Church, of doctrinal debate, and the spiritual life. The whole truth must really be there in the ink, on the page, in the words of the text merely waiting to be enucleated by the obedient hearers of the word.
Now in the allegorical tradition, one can’t make that distinction. It simply wasn’t made that clearly between the written text and the reader where inspiration is concerned. In that tradition, the reader of the Bible, the hearer of the word, is not necessarily being led by the Spirit toward the single correct meaning of the text, but toward a true reading of the text in harmony with the mind of the Church, illuminated by the grace of the Holy Spirit and testifying to Christ, but that does not mean the exclusively true or exclusively correct meaning of that text. Clement, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Ephrem the Syrian, they all used the image of the Bible as the lyre of the Spirit, the inexhaustible source of spiritual and theological reflection but only insofar as the Spirit plays the strings, Who makes ever anew the occasion of Christ’s manifold self-disclosure to the mind of the Church and the believing Christian. Apart from that mystery, the truths of the faith are not to be found in the text in any but frankly the most elliptically suggestive and fragmentary form. To give you an example, have any of you read Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses? That would be the best example of an allegorical text that is widely available. You have to read it. You can’t be theologians if you haven’t read Gregory of Nyssa. I mention that one because there was a Paulist Press edition that came out in the 1970’s, which is still in print and it’s become a lot of the teaching of patristic exegesis and patristic spirituality. That’s the preferred text. It’s a beautiful book. And since you haven’t read it, my reference I have to explain.
It’s a magnificent example of patristic allegory, of what’s actually going on. Gregory first recounts the literal story of Moses as recounted in the Books of Moses. Tells his life story. That’s part one. Part two, the exegetical part, is a magnificent allegory. One of the most theologically illuminating readings of Torah that you’re going to find in the Golden Age of patristic literature. Now no one — if you read this though, and you will read it I’m sure now that I’ve suggested it — you should not imagine for a moment that Gregory is proposing his reading as a correct reading. It is a true reading, but it is not the single or exclusive or exhaustive correct reading. But, again, as I said, it is a true reading, an interpretation that truly speaks of Christ in the light of the Spirit who leads into all truth.
Let me step back a moment and say this. The more that the modern Christian self-understanding came to depend on the view of the Bible as the unique repository of inspired truth and as of itself the sole and sufficient source of Christian belief, which you may have guessed by now I don’t believe, the more inevitable a critical reaction became. The more that Christians came to vest their faith in the literal text of scripture and the myth of the Bible’s textual and theological uniformity, the more inevitable it became that such a critical reaction would take the form of a kind of reverse literalism – the discovery of not only the heterogeneity of the text but of its theological fluidity – and this ineluctably took the form not of a return to the older model of reading that had been basically forgotten — but of a practice of critique without reserve, without term, and, of course, without theological issue.
Once the Bible had been thoroughly mythologized as the oracular deposit of the faith, the de-mytholization that followed could be nothing more than the discovery, in fact, that the articles of faith are not there in its pages in a way that’s absolutely lucid. It is not only that the genuinely literalist reading of the Bible is self-evidently absurd – I mean a genuine literalist, like a fundamentalist, reading, irreconcilable with the text’s contradictions, incapable of making sense of the multi-valency of the text’s sources, dependent upon an almost willful refusal to recognize any difference between myth and history. This is the great reaction to the reaction, especially in America in the early 20th century, the absolute fundamentalism.
It is more the case that the Bible as the book that early modern theology required it to be simply does not exist. The more closely one looks at the text, the more this alleged book begins to fall apart. It is not there. Read strictly ad litteram, scripture simply does not say what we want it to say in the way we want it to say it. I mean not only that the text is not always consonant with theological readings, that’s a different matter. For instance, Western theology has the whole Augustinian reading, say, of St. Paul’s theology of grace, shared in common with Catholics and Protestants. I believe that is a profoundly defective reading of Paul, that Augustine got it very badly wrong in many respects with bad consequences for later theology. That’s a matter of simple exegesis of theology. Rather, that’s just a matter of reading or misreading, one of us has got it wrong.
I mean even something more radical, something that you see in the stories of the Old Testament that many of the most basic elements of faith, the most fundamental narratives upon which the story of salvation depend are not situated in the text except in an ambiguous way, or, to be more honest, are situated in the text in a certain tradition of reading the text. This is why there has never really been and can never really be a functioning Christian community that truly reads the Bible literally, not in the sense that we give the word “literally” today. Even these modern fundamentalists I mentioned are not really reading the text of scripture so much as using the text as an occasion to yet again reiterate the story that Christians tell of how things stand between creation and God.
You see it right from the early pages of Genesis where Christian tradition finds correctly, in one way, a story about the one God creating humanity out of omnipotent wisdom, endowing them with a nature that somehow is a distant image of His own, and then about how the parents of the race, tempted by Satan, fell from communion with God through disobedience and bound all their descendants to the consequences of sin, original sin. But, of course, at the most leadenly literal level of the text, no such story actually appears in the text. –This isn’t, I know, the Southern Baptist Convention so I’m not going to get drummed out. — But I sometimes think that even those of us who know this don’t know it clearly enough. We let it grow foggy in our minds.
Once you get past that first creation account, the Elohist narrative, that first cousin of the Enuma Elish, beautiful, grand, full of radiant trumpet fanfares, you come to a somewhat more buoyantly mythological story, the Jahwist story, which is a different account. The order of creation is different and we find ourselves in an element that is fabulous. You could even say fable at its most nimble and ironic at times. It could even be called, if you’re reading it literally, a droll just-so-story of how the snake lost its feet. As written, it has nothing clearly to do with original sin or spiritual death. The devil appears nowhere in the tale, and clearly the authors of the texts had no intention of suggesting that he did. In fact, they certainly had no concept of the devil at all if we’re really interested in reconstructing intentions. It’s a rather ordinary sort-of-folk-tale about how the chance of immortality was lost for the race due to a mishap or misunderstanding of a rather trivial variety, and in part because of some very clever beast who outwits both the human beings and the gods. I use the word “gods” quite intentionally because it’s not even a monotheistic story.
If we summarize Yahweh – let’s say the Lord, with periphrastic fear and trembling. THE LORD in all capital letters is king of all the gods. He plants a garden where two trees are growing. You might even say two magic trees, probably meant to nourish the gods. The one grants them wisdom to discriminate good from bad – not good from evil, but what’s worthwhile and what’s not, like the difference between a diamond and a worthless pebble. And then there’s the tree with fruit that endows them with unending life. These would be very common things in Mesopotamia and other mythologies. Then HE decides HE needs a gardener to tend — and again, this is how the text actually tells the story — Then HE needs someone to tend the heath and till the orchard, so HE forms a little clay creature for this purpose. Someone probably in the likeness of HIMSELF as in the Elohim account, meaning it looks like HIM, HE brings it to life with HIS own breath, sets the creature to work, naked and abject, but not bright enough to know that perhaps he’s being exploited. Then fearful lest the man eat from the garden’s trees, THE LORD — to be honest, and this becomes clear later in the text — THE LORD lies to him and says it’s a poison tree. It will kill you. Eat it and you’ll be dead by sundown.
Now we, of course, allegorically in our tradition as Christians, we see the story of spiritual death, but that’s not obviously what’s on the page. And rather torridly, THE LORD realizes the man will need help in his work, so HE goes about making an assistant, but HE does it maladroitly at first. HE starts creating animals and sending them to him, but none of them can do it. So finally HE puts him to sleep, plucks a rib from his side, and fashions it into a woman. Now the serpent, who’s not wicked and certainly not the devil but only the most cunning of the beasts THE LORD had made in those early experiments of finding Adam a helpmate, knows the truth and shares it with Eve. Just for the sake of mischief or because of revolutionary consciousness in its earliest dawn, he tells her the truth that the tree in the center of the garden is not poison. It will open her eyes, give her the wisdom and knowledge she lacks, and the reason THE LORD had hidden this from her is because HE fears the if they possessed this wisdom, they might become rivals to HIM and the other gods. So she eats. She prevails upon Adam to do the same. THE LORD makes HIS alarmed discovery of this. HE curses the man and woman with perpetual toil and corporal pain and death and expels them from the garden. The snake loses his feet.
But why? Again, THE LORD quite candidly goes to the other gods and confirms that what the snake was saying was true. They have eaten of the Tree of Wisdom and now man is like one of us, knowing what’s good and what’s bad. He knows that the jewels upon the Hill of Jewels where we have built our mansions are to be prized more than the pebbles in the mud, so to speak. If he should now stretch forth and eat from the Tree of Life and become immortal like us, he would be a rival to our power.
Now I think we all know this, but we never say it quite that way. We never make ourselves confront literally just how unchristian, just how remote from the Christian story this is.
The Tower of Babel is another good example. We always view or look at the text and read it as a story about a human attempt to storm the heavens by building a great tower, except that’s not what the text is about at all. The tower is just another incidental detail. The real story is about this terrifying new technology that human beings have invented, the brick, because the brick means they can create great cities, cities that have towers rather than just little hovels on the ground, towers that can reach three, four, five stories right up into the sky. And Yahweh is alarmed and goes to the other gods, etc.
Again as I said, I don’t know your tradition. I don’t know if this is obvious or not, but it is sad that at the far end of modernity, a significantly number of cultural deracinated Christians are committed to the impossible proposition, not that these stories have profound depths of spiritual truth which they do read within the tradition, but that they’re accurate historical records and they contain in a material form the theological meanings traditionally associated with them by Christians. Historically speaking, the only communities of faith ever really to approach the texts in anything like a fully literalist way successfully were the Marcionites and other proto-gnostic and gnostic churches of late antiquity. Marcion certainly took scripture at its word and believed that the meaning of the text lay in the plain literal sense of its words. Hence, he found that Christ was largely absent from scripture as we know it and indeed that that scripture might even have been testament to a god inimical to Christ. The Ophites noticed correctly that in the Eden narrative, the serpent is not a deceiver but an enlightener.
Why am I going through this? I’m trying to get around to explaining something about early allegory, the Christian exegesis of scripture. One of the more peculiar misunderstandings that I have encountered in the academic world regarding ancient allegorical readings of not only scripture but any other text, is that the exegete who was practicing allegory believed himself to be engaged in an act of decoding. That is, it was often assumed that readers proceeded as if the texts were actually consciously composed as an allegory and it was the interpreter’s task to reduce the tale to its hidden significance. Now this sort of exegesis had its advocates in the esoterical fringes of Christian intellectual culture for some time, and in the early modern period certainly. I mean, read Sir Isaac Newton’s scriptural commentaries if you have the time. And it would take a lot of time because they are immense. But you don’t find any of that in patristic or medieval commentaries. Allegoreim – the practice of reading otherwise – was not the reverse of, say, what the late Alexandrian grammarians were doing when they composed their atrociously dull epic poems on, say, the origins of the alphabet or the rules governing the use of the optative.
You know, it’s funny. In 1204 these crude Franks come into Byzantium and destroy the library of Constantinople so we lose most of what remained. There were texts of Sophocles, Euripedes, and Aeschylus. They didn’t destroy any of the Alexandrian grammarians’ work. They were in a separate library. That survived.
Pagans, Jews, and Christians all understood that to treat a text allegorically was a creative, I don’t mean inventive, but creative and ideally inspired act whereby one arrived at only one of an innumerable variety of perfectly true readings. Augustine states this pretty clearly in The Confessions. The reader of scripture is not really concerned with the intentions of the human authors of the texts or what they understood themselves to be doing. Have any of you read Augustine’s De Genesi ad Litteram, Augustine’s literal reading of Genesis? Well, I think you’ll notice that what he means by ad litteram is not what we necessarily mean as literal. You know, he doesn’t give it the full allegorical treatment in the sense that he’s not always pointing to how it speaks of Christ, but what he finds at the literal level is quite often the literal symbolic level. Still, it’s impossible for him to move to a level like, say, fundamentalism in the way late modernity thinks of it.
It’s remarkable that the authors’ original intentions are something that remarkably few ancient persons seemed to think worth considering. That was simply not what they thought a text to be or what they imagined reading to be. Nor was reading understood as merely the passive reception of something situated outside of the interpretive act. As Gregory of Nyssa said, “If one does not read Scripture in a philosophical fashion, one is reading only myths with contradictory narratives.” In most patristic commentaries, this is a rather common and rather casually accepted attitude toward the literal contents of the biblical stories. Origen – take Origen on the Genesis narrative; he’s not saying anything provocative when he says that one would have to be a simpleton to imagine that there could have been days before the creation of the sun or that God literally planted an orchard with physical trees capable of conferring wisdom or eternal life, or that God liked to amble through the garden in the gloaming, or that Adam could have hidden from Him behind a tree. No one could doubt, he says, that these are tales we read figurally so that we should extract by the wisdom of the Spirit those mysteries that Christ would have us know.
These are not historical occurrences. Yet Origen is aware that the authors of the texts were not conscientiously encoding meanings in the texts. And of course, Origen give us that precious notion that everything incoherent, unseemly, incredible, or contradictory in scriptures, everything repellant to reason or moral intelligence at the literal level of the text, though it be the intention of the authors of the text, serves for the Christian as the necessary skandalon – the necessary stumbling block, which would cause us to stumble and awaken us to the folly of treating the literal level as the place where the Holy Spirit comes to meet us in giving us the wisdom of Christ.
I’m going on a bit longer than I meant to. I’m sorry. It’s the exhaustion.
Let me put it this way, and here’s where I think patristic allegory is closer to the better hermeneutical philosophies of today. Where the meaning of the text was concerned, ancient and medieval exegetes were willing to view it often as a final or formal cause rather than as an efficient or material cause.
Another misunderstanding of patristic allegory and perhaps the more pardonable one, is that allegory is of its nature uncontrolled, unscientific, arbitrary willful, impressionistic, and in a word, entirely naïve. Hence the title of the paper. As you should know, it was Paul Ricoeur who said that the idea of a future Christian hermeneutics should be a post-critical naiveté, and I agree with everything except the naiveté part of that, because I don’t believe that there ever were naïve readings within the intellectual tradition of the Church. The ancient and medieval practices were not naïve. It’s all very well to say that the act of reading is inspired, but doesn’t this effectively mean that the reader can simply generate whatever readings he or she likes without limits or governing rationale? And again, putting aside the very modern presuppositions regarding textual meaning implicit in that question, I think it’s simply a misapprehension. It’s simply not the case that ancient allegorical readings of scripture relied upon no governing method whatsoever. They proceeded quite rigorously from premises that were simply very different from those of modern scholars, but they were not arbitrary.
The first principle was simple enough – Christ as an allegorical interpretation of a passage. It was understood it was not an attempt to get back to a meaning simply within the context of the history of that text, but within the act of the Church reading as something that testified to the truth revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore, it could not depart from the Church’s shared and traditional understanding of who Christ was, what the event of His presence and time had accomplished, and how He ought to be served. Thus no allegorical reading could simply spin out new discoveries or novel conclusions about God or creation as though one were engaged in a process, once again, of decoding a secret message concealed behind a deceptive narrative surface.
The second principle is that every true reading has to arise within and be confirmed over time by the community of faith that lives by its fidelity to Christian teaching and obedience to the Spirit. This is stated often and so often and so clearly by so many Church Fathers that it seems simply to have been a recognized claim. Thus every hermeneutical act, even one produced by some solitary in his cell in the desert, is ultimately a communal reading or it is not valid. This is not necessarily a view of the matter that would appeal very powerfully to a modern biblical scholar, but it was certainly assumed by Origen and his followers – Origen, who in time lost on just this point, and many of his readings were discarded because they didn’t conform to what the larger tradition was willing to recognize as its faith, with which he would have been quite happy, you know. He said if my readings are false, cut them off; if my hand offends, cut it off — But it was assumed by Origen and those in the whole tradition that followed from him that the Holy Spirit testifies regarding Christ to the mind of the Church and it is thus that the body of Christ participates in and is made receptive to the light of revelation. Outside this community, as I said, the Bible as such simply does not exist.
Thus, the third and most obvious principle of method is belief in the Holy Spirit, who guides the community and sanctifies the reader. — Today we may not think that a scientific principle, but why not? — And the act of faithful reading transforms a delightful and terrible and rather farraginous collection of myths, legends, annals, spiritual councils, not always consistent with one another, into the mirror of the beauty of Christ, and the reader into another mirror of that beauty, so that in looking at scripture, the reader is drawn ever more deeply into that splendor. And frankly, if one has no faith in this circle of light created ever anew by the Spirit, one isn’t really engaged in theology to begin with.
So what is the proper relation between modern critically and historically informed biblical scholarship and ancient Christian biblical exegesis? It’s not, as I said, a relation between a more or less scientific form of reading, or between a more sophisticated and a more naïve method of reading. Patristic allegory was never naïve about the text. It recognized the text for what it was at the literal level but without the wealth of detail that modern scholarship gives us. It proceeded according to a far different and I think perfectly rationally defensible understanding of textual meaning and a better one than many modern scholars presume. Modernity does have such a narrow view of causality after all, you know. Everything’s efficient and material. Nothing’s formal and final in nature, in culture, in texts, in the brewing of coffee, but neither is this relation one of hostility.
There simply can’t be a conflict between these two approaches to the texts. As far as I can see, the deliverances of historical critical scholarship make a wonderful contribution to a theological re-appropriation of the older, and to my mind, better logic of biblical exegesis that we often forget to the degree that the scholarship makes clear – it breaks down the literalist approach ever more corrosively. The more fragmentary, composite, imperfect and even disturbing the literal surface of the text appears to us, the more it helps us to recognize that the Bible never was the sort of book that early modern theology needed it to be. It was never a form of direct revelation neatly bound between Moroccan leather covers. Modern scholarship restores a sense of the skandalon of the text. At least it could do so if we could remember how to read a text as something more than the am sum of its material and efficient causes. And remember, that the meaning of the text, any text, but the text of scripture especially, is always in some sense of final cause, of formal cause, the end, the paradigm that assumes lower causes into itself.
I realize that ours is a culturally impoverished age in this respect as in so many others, and modern scholarship often lacks the intellectual refinements of ancient and medieval schools of interpretation – philosophically, not critically. Of course the only true way of reading theologically is that of allegory within confessions, when reading the Old Testament. I’m going to say that that’s the only way of reading theologically. It doesn’t mean that all the other methods are invalid. It’s just that they don’t yet become theology.
Always critically aware of the difference between the literal text and the text as assumed in the spiritual revelation of God and Christ, unless we can recover something of that richer and wiser and far-from-naïve understanding of scripture, we simply don’t have a Bible in any event. A Bible does not exist for us except as a myth, and we have nothing of theological interest to say. But again, it really does depend on whether we really do or do not believe in the Holy Spirit.
I’ll stop there.