IB World Religions 3.3.4. Interpretation: Literalism, Biblical Criticism and Individual Reading Notes

3.3.4. Interpretation: Literalism, Biblical Criticism and Individual Reading

Drawing meaning out

1. Christians agree that the Bible carries authority, and disagree about how to read it. The study of those methods is called hermeneutics, and the act of reading a passage carefully is called exegesis.
2. Exegesis is contrasted with eisegesis, reading one's own ideas into a passage. Every tradition claims to be doing the first and accuses opponents of the second.
3. Several questions divide readers. They ask whether a passage means what its first hearers understood, what its author intended, what the Church has always taught, or what it says to a reader today.
4. Christians also weigh passages against each other. The analogy of faith is the principle that no verse should be read in a way that contradicts the clear sense of Scripture as a whole.
5. The stakes are practical rather than academic. Rules of interpretation decide what churches teach about war, wealth, sexuality, the role of women and the shape of worship.
6. Interpretation is never purely private, even for readers who insist on their own judgement. Study Bibles, commentaries, sermons and denominational habits shape what a reader expects to find.

The literal sense

1. Reading a passage literally means taking it in its plain sense, as the words would ordinarily be understood. Almost all Christians read most of the Bible this way most of the time.
2. Medieval theologians made the literal sense the foundation of everything else. Thomas Aquinas argued that all other senses rest on it, and that arguments can be drawn only from it.
3. The Reformers pressed the point harder. Luther and William Tyndale attacked elaborate allegory and insisted on the plain grammatical sense, which fitted their conviction that Scripture is clear enough for ordinary believers.
4. Modern literalism goes further than the literal sense. It holds that the Bible is accurate in every statement it makes, including its statements about history and the natural world.
5. That position hardened into fundamentalism in early twentieth century America, taking its name from a series of pamphlets called The Fundamentals, and later statements such as the Chicago Statement of 1978 defended inerrancy in detail.
6. Other Christians distinguish sharply between the plain sense and literalism. Catholic, Orthodox and mainline Protestant teaching generally holds that a passage means what its literary form intends, so poetry, parable and chronicle are not read the same way.

Allegory and the fourfold sense

1. The early Church read Scripture on more than one level. Teachers in Alexandria, above all Origen, looked for a spiritual meaning beneath the surface, while teachers in Antioch such as John Chrysostom kept closer to the historical sense.
2. Medieval schools settled on four senses: the literal, the allegorical meaning about Christ and the Church, the tropological or moral meaning for conduct, and the anagogical meaning about the life to come.
3. A common medieval rhyme fixed the scheme in memory. The letter teaches deeds, allegory what to believe, the moral sense what to do, and anagogy where you are going.
4. Typology is the most durable of these readings. Christians treat persons and events in the Old Testament as patterns pointing forward to Christ, so Jonah's three days become a figure of the Resurrection and the Passover lamb a figure of the crucifixion.
5. Orthodox worship still reads this way. The hymns of Holy Week set Old Testament passages beside the events of Christ's death and rising so that the congregation hears them as one story.
6. Protestant churches kept typology while dropping most of the rest, and modern Catholic teaching in Dei Verbum presents the spiritual senses as growing out of the literal sense rather than floating free of it.

Biblical criticism

1. From the eighteenth century onwards scholars applied to the Bible the methods used on any ancient document. The family of approaches is called biblical criticism, and the word criticism here means careful analysis rather than attack.
2. Textual criticism comes first. It compares thousands of surviving manuscripts to work out the most likely original wording, which is why modern Bibles carry footnotes about variant readings.
3. Source criticism asks what earlier material an author used. Julius Wellhausen popularized the theory that the Pentateuch weaves together several strands, and most scholars hold that Matthew and Luke drew on Mark and on a further collection of sayings.
4. Form criticism looks behind the written sources. Hermann Gunkel classified the Psalms by their type and setting, and Rudolf Bultmann applied the method to the Gospels, asking what use the early communities made of each unit.
5. Redaction criticism turns to the writers themselves, studying how each evangelist arranged and edited his material to make a particular case about Jesus.
6. Bultmann pushed further with demythologizing, arguing that the message must be restated for people who no longer share a first century picture of the world. Many Christians accepted his methods while rejecting that conclusion.

How the churches responded

1. Responses have varied sharply, and the differences still mark the denominations. Each tradition had to decide how far critical study could go without unsettling the authority of Scripture.
2. Catholic teaching moved from caution to cautious welcome. Providentissimus Deus of 1893 was defensive, while Divino Afflante Spiritu of 1943 encouraged scholars to study the original languages and the literary forms of the ancient world.
3. The Second Vatican Council confirmed that direction. Dei Verbum told interpreters to look for what the human authors intended in their own time and culture, while reading Scripture within the living tradition of the Church.
4. The Pontifical Biblical Commission stated the position plainly in 1993, calling the historical method indispensable for serious study and rejecting fundamentalist reading as a distortion.
5. Orthodox Christians have been more reserved. They read Scripture with the Church Fathers and inside the liturgy, and treat interpretations that detach the text from the worshipping community with suspicion.
6. Protestants divided. Liberal Protestant churches adopted critical scholarship early, while conservative evangelical and fundamentalist churches rejected much of it as an attempt to subject God's word to human judgement.

Reading for oneself

1. The Reformation gave individual reading a theological basis. The priesthood of all believers and the claim that Scripture is clear on what matters for salvation together implied that ordinary Christians could read for themselves.
2. Some traditions push this furthest. Quakers wait in silence for the inner light to illuminate the text, and many evangelical churches build the week around personal study and home groups.
3. Methodists set individual reading in a wider frame. Their tradition weighs Scripture together with tradition, reason and experience, a pattern later nicknamed the Wesleyan quadrilateral.
4. Communities as well as individuals read distinctively. Latin American base communities associated with liberation theology read the Exodus as a story about the poor, and feminist and African interpreters have opened questions earlier readers did not ask.
5. Catholic and Orthodox teaching encourages personal reading but denies that it is self-sufficient. Dei Verbum urges the faithful to read Scripture often, while holding that its authentic interpretation belongs to the Church.
6. The common danger both sides name is proof-texting, lifting single verses out of context to settle an argument. It is one of the few faults every denomination criticizes in the others.