Category Archives: Scripture

On ‘Allegorical’ Interpretation

I’m taking a quick break from Sarum to jot down some thoughts that I’ve been having after Dean Knisely’s post on study plans. He notes that he’d like to do some thinking about hermeneutics, particularly any native Anglican form of hermeneutics, and brings up the issue of pre-modern forms of reading that tend to loosely travel under the label of “allegorical.”

This is kinda my *thing*; it’s what my dissertation was on. (Actually, if he’s not careful, I’ll send him a copy of it…)

In pondering what resources I should refer him to, I think back to my fundamental findings and to discussions about basically all pre-modern forms of reading that I had with my dissertation director. One of the points that he made (fairly constantly) and that I found to be concretely true in my research is that too many who are interested in this topic completely miss the forest for the trees.

The problem is context. The great grand-daddy of the modern study of figural interpretation is Henri De Lubac who, living in a pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic world, writes with some unconscious assumptions about contexts that it seems never occur to him to make explicit. Most medievalists (Beryl Smalley, I’m looking at you…) are interested in “interpretation of the Bible” and, in pursuit of what they think their focus is, so narrow that focus to the point where the context fundamentally disappears or is regarded as a layer that gets in the way.

The danger that everybody likes to get hyper about is the fear that if you go down the allegorical road, you can make any text say anything. Suddenly, the unbinding of Lazarus is actually about the sacrament of confession; the injunction about not eating weasels in Deuteronomy is actually about 0ral s3x (no, seriously, and that’s one from the late first/early second century Epistle of Barnabas…). Thus, the chief question becomes: what are the controls? What prevents you from plowing into totally crazy, over-the-top readings?  Or, alternatively, how do we know when an OTT reading must be reined in? In a word, context.

Figural interpretation happens within a structure of communal liturgical practices. In the patristic and early medieval periods in particular, interpretation was done by people who were enmeshed in their community’s liturgical cycles and it’s these fundamental communal practices that gave them a grounding. Constant repetition of the Offices, and constant contact with the Mass, presented a daily repetition of the Christian core practices and beliefs: the Creeds—the Canticles—the Gloria—the Canon. This grounding, in turn, gave them a flexibility for play in both their interpretive and theological musings. The playing field was marked off by the creeds, the goal was the edification of the Church centered in charity, defined by Augustine as the cultivation of virtue and the restraint of vice.

(As a side-note, this is always one of the problems with many modern readings of medieval mystics.  You can be way more “out there” and have it not be a major threat to fundamental Christianity if it’s set within the grounding practices.)

The major change with Reformation biblical interpretation, I’d argue, is the jettisoning of the context. I think it could be argued that with the rise of the Schoolmen, the mendicant orders, and the turn into Nominalism the liturgical context had already lost its important restraining function making it appear to the Reformers that they were pruning away the bad rather than losing a key component. Nevertheless, that’s what happened. Suddenly biblical interpretation was not and could not be an act of play. It was serious business. Without the grounding practices of Mass and Office, how each text was read suddenly mattered a lot more because the interpretive act was transformed into the grounding practice of the faith.

So—the liturgy was the context. But that’s not all. Particularly in the early medieval church and most especially in my world of the early medieval monastics, the liturgy was not simply the guiding context but was the fundamental tool through which Christians were inculturated into the hermeneutics of the Church. They learned to read through the liturgy.

On one hand, this is a literal truth: new monks or child oblates learned how to read through the memorization of the Latin psalter, then learning to match the words on the page with the texts they already had in their heads. They literally learned how to read from reading the liturgy. On the other hand, they also learned how to interpret the Bible from the liturgy and this happened in two ways, the first explicit, the second not so explicit. The explicit is that readings from the Fathers in the third nocturn of the Night Office gave them examples. They learned to interpret through what they heard and what was modeled for them by the patristic teachers every Sunday and feast day in the early morning.  And again at Chapter. And again at Mass. The not-so-explicit is the way that the liturgy introduces under-determined interpretive possibilities through the use of scriptural antiphons and responsories in the Mass and Office. When an antiphon taken from the Gospel of the Day is appended to the Magnificat it makes you hear it in a new way, as you are using  new lens. When a Pauline snippet is paired with a psalm, the mind begins working at it to find what the implied logical connection must be between the two. The hymns held together Scripture and Season for mutual reflection. (As it happens, the first paper I gave at the big medievalist meeting in Kalamazoo was on this topic. I’ll try and put it up on Scribd for those who are following me there.)

So—where does all of this bring us? Back to the notion of a distinctively Anglican way of reading and interpreting the Scriptures. Is there one? Maybe… Is there the potential for one? Most certainly, because we of all of the Western Non-Roman ecclesial bodies have retained in theory that which was most important in the heyday of figural reading: the Mass and the Office.

What we have to realize, though, is that our Mass and Office is not theirs. While we have inherited the structures of the early medieval pattern, we have deliberately shorn ours of the richness through which catholic biblical interpretation was learned. We have no appointed patristic readings into which we are formed. We have no cycle of antiphons and responsories  that shape our readings. We have divested our Mass of the minor propers that complemented and guided the public proclamation of the Word.

Sure, I’d like to recover these things. That’s one of the key reasons why the St Bede’s Breviary puts back into place traditional or traditionally-shaped patterns of antiphons and the old Office hymns. But can we recover them? I honestly don’t know and I honestly fear not. We have a hard enough time getting people to come to Mass on Sundays let alone Holy Days that don’t fall then. (Epiphany, anyone?) Our clergy lac a familiarity with the Office, let alone those upon whom they—and we—are relying for our biblical interpretation.

I don’t know.

I’d like to hold up the old model as the possibility for a vibrant new model—I just fear that we lack both the will and the discipline to make into what it could be.

Considering The Malice of Herodotus and Biblical Genre

One of the things that I find myself saying again and again to both clergy and parishioners is that moderns in general and modern Americans in particular seem to have real genre issues when it comes to the Bible.

Every act of reading happens within an interpretive frame. That is, we start making interpretive assumptions from literally the time we pick up a book until we close it and put it down. These interpretive assumptions shape what we find and how seriously we take it. Any book cover with a ripped bare-chested dude hovering over a voluptuous female automatically shunts the book into a certain interpretive category that shades what we find therein. This isn’t good or bad—it’s just how the interpretive process works.

I believe that one of the most important interpretive frames that we normally assume is genre—what kind of text we think we’re reading. For the most part this works when we pick up texts from our time because from the time we begin to read, we learn genre cues. Sometimes they’re book covers, sometimes they’re stock phrases: Once upon a time… Three nuns walk into a bar… We can automatically categorize these with no problems. It’s when we come to texts from radically different times and cultures that we run into problems. Like—biblical texts.

I see three major issues with our interpretive assumptions about genre when it comes to the Scriptures First, the genre cues aren’t the ones familiar to us. What does “Once upon a time…” look like in Hebrew? Are we completely missing the genre cues an ancient author would have thought so obvious? Second, the genres into which we map and categorize texts are not necessarily those of the past. Furthermore, the categories that do overlap don’t have the same contours. More on this below… Third, because of our inculturation as modern Christians, we have inherited “Bible/Scripture” as a distinct genre of its own that, in effect, tends to mentally “overwrite” the other genre options. Thus, when we pick up the chronicles of the reign of Esarhaddon and pick up 1 Kings, we tend to place them in different genres: “ancient history cum propaganda” and “Bible.”

The problem raised by these category errors is that we mistake the nature and intent of the texts. Trying to learn history from the visions of the Book of Daniel is analogous to trying to learn history from a bodice-ripping romance novel. Yes, it has a historical-ish frame, but that’s so not the point!

There are two steps that we can take as readers of the Bible to help overcome this issue. The first is simply being aware of our interpretive assumptions. Once we realize that we are making assumptions, we can examine them and get a sense of how on target they may be. Unquestioned assumptions aren’t always wrong, but it’s always better to examine them especially if something like your immortal soul is on the line…

The second step is to become more familiar with ancient genres from the inside. It’s when we start reading comparable and comparative ancient texts that we start getting a sense of what an ancient genre looked like, how authors of that time understood it, and what the stock tropes and genre cues really are. And that brings us to The Malice of Herodotus.

When considering the New Testament and texts analogous to it, one of my favorite authors is Plutarch. Essayist, moralist, and biographer, anyone who works with the gospels should, in my opinion, be familiar with his works. Folks with a classical education will be familiar with his essays on the lives of the great Greeks and Romans. However, he also wrote a host of other essays on moral, religious, and literary topics. I recently came across the Malice of Herodotus, a text of his that I had never encountered before. This is a great text because it exposes an educated author contemporary with the writing of the New Testament thinking out loud about the craft of writing history and biography. (Not a common thing, although Lucian does it too in his aptly titled The Way to Write History—he’s a satirist so watch your step…)

Plutarch is annoyed because of the way that Herodotus paints his people, the Boeotians, in a bad light because they sided with the Persians in the eponymous Persian Wars. As a result, he accuses Herodotus of malice and in making his case he gives us an interesting set of both explicit and implicit genre rules for the category of history in his day. This online version of On the Malice of Herodotus helpfully pulls out to the side Plutarch’s eight major charges against Herodotus.

What I take away from this text is an even greater certainty that for Plutarch history is a sub-discipline of moral philosophy. Note how many of the signs of malice pertain to the depiction of vice and virtue… In particular, I draw your attention to sign 6. This is, in my estimation, the great difference between modern (and especially popular/populist) history and classical history:

An historical narration is also more or less guilty of malice, according as it relates the manner of the action; as if one should be said to have performed an exploit rather by money than bravery, as some affirm of Philip; or else easily and without any labor, as it is said of Alexander; or else not by prudence, but by Fortune, as the enemies of Timotheus painted cities falling into his nets as he lay sleeping. For they undoubtedly diminish the greatness and beauty of the actions, who deny the performer of them to have done them generously, industriously, virtuously, and by themselves.

Digging into Plutarch’s claim here (especially when you couple it with sign 5), this criterion looks like nothing more than an explicit preference for moral instruction over against the facts of history. That is, Plutarch argues that whenever motives are attributed they should always be the most noble even when other motives are available and even more likely. If there’s a conflict between the two, Plutarch is willing to sacrifice “historicity” for the sake of moral edification…

What does this mean for us as readers of the New Testament? It reminds us that we cannot assume that the purpose of historical narrative in Antiquity is the same as ours. There is overlap—no doubt—but modern categories of what is considered edifying and necessary for “good” history cannot be mapped directly onto ancient texts.

Imprecatory Psalms

I got to scratch one item off the list last night—along with our twice-yearly crab cake supper (yum!) I taught our Christian Formation class. The title was “The Spirit of the Monasteries for the Modern Church.” The content was what you would expect, exploring the monastic roots of the Anglican Church and the prayer book with an emphasis on the counter-cultural qualities of obedience, stability, and conversion of life/habits.

I did get a good question when I was talking about the formative role of the Psalter—specifically, do the monks give us anything to help us make sense of the imprecatory psalms? These are those psalms that make us cringe when they get used in public worship (or at least have sections that do) and, as a result, have been chopped out of most denominations’ worship books and even get short shrift in the current BCP’s Daily Office lectionary: Pss 7, 35, 55, 58, 59, 69, 79, 109, 137 and 139.

Because we headed off to talk about other difficult passages where God or the people act in ways that seem amoral or immoral, I never got back to my usual answer. My usual tack is that these psalms function akin to a mirror. When we see these thoughts expressed openly, we recoil from them—and rightly so; it means that our moral sense is fully intact. How they assist us, though, is that they confront us with their honesty. When we are truthful about ourselves and the effects of sin within us, we must acknowledge that these psalms express real feelings that we feel. When they confront us, we have an opportunity to recognize the ugliness contained in our own interior life, an ugliness that can only be addressed when it is admitted, then confronted.

So—that’s where I didn’t go. Instead, I took another angle that I think I want to explore more. The patristic and medieval Christians took much more seriously than we the notion that all of Scripture is edifying. With our modernist notions of what’s right and wrong and convinced that our moral discernment trumps the text, I think we can and do often put ourselves in judgment over the biblical text and simply reject the portions that overly offend us. That approach both is and is not how the monks dealt with both the imprecatory psalms and some of the hard sections of the Old Testament.

First off, let’s acknowledge that there are certain biblical texts that should offend Christian sensibilities. Sometimes (like with Hosea and Ezekiel), I think the author was being intentionally provocative and intended to offend. In other portions (I’m thinking events in the historical books as well as the psalms), the author thought that the behavior narrated (genocide, what have you) was completely fine. And we can’t be fine with that.

In the second case, how do we deal with the text? On the surface, both moderns and medievals do the same thing: a rejection of the plain sense of the text. The difference is what happens next. For moderns, when we reject the plain sense of the text, we tend to also reject the text as a whole. For the medievals, they remained with the text, confident that somewhere in there was something edifying. Turning again to the fundamentals of obedience, stability, and conversion of life, they kept chewing on the text until they could extract some form of edifying meaning from it, no matter how tortured it appears to us. These meanings then, would co-opt the literal meaning and would, in effect, become the new “plain sense” of the text.

For instance, a common monastic trope is to talk about dashing incipient vices against Christ. Nobody had to ask what this related to. The literature inculcates the moral meaning of Ps 137:7-9 to the point where the substitution of “vices” for “the little ones” of the “daughter of Babylon” and “Christ” for “the rock” is automatic. So on one hand, the medievals were being more obedient towards the authority of the text than we tend to be. On the other hand, they were also more subversive of its meaning to the degree where the more palatable and edifying interpretation would be adopted as a wholesale replacement for a more obvious but less edifying one.

My questioner wasn’t totally satisfied with this answer—that we just make an end-run around the literal sense—and wasn’t convinced that this is a case where the monks can inform the modern church. Perhaps he’s right. But the lesson that we could stand to learn, though, is the patience and discipline of wrestling with texts that confront us with a moral perspective alien from our own.

Discernment or Death: The Interpretation of 1 Cor 11:27-34

In the discussion of the Communion without Baptism, at some point the discussion inevitably turns to—or at least towards—1 Cor 11:27-34:

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some of died. But if we have judged ourselves truly, we should not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord we are chastened so that we may not be condemned along with the world. So then, my brethren, when you come together to eat, wait for one another–if any one is hungry, let him eat at home–lest you come together to be condemned. (RSV)

What exactly is Paul saying here? I think sometimes th first section is pulled out of context—but. Paul is connecting unworthy reception of the Eucharist to becoming ill and dying and to waiting for one another.

What I haven’t seen recently in the debate is a sufficient unpacking of this cluster of thoughts. What’s the connection between reception and death? Paul is being allusive here. Is he alluding to a supernatural punishment for those who eat and drink unworthily? Is he alluding to a social problem in the community where some are sick and weak from lack of food and Paul is complaining that the social & ecclesial dimensions of the Eucharistic feeding are being lost?

How do you read what’s going on here?

Further Morning Musing

Picking up on the theme from yesterday morning…

In my almost two decades of academic training in the interpretation of Scripture, I’ve met quite a lot of methods and techniques for doing so. Not all methods are equal. That’s fairly obvious and nowhere moreso than when trying to teach students how to preach.

The fundamental goal of interpreting the Scriptures is forming Christian habits within the community of the faithful. Not all interpretive methods tend towards this goal.

As I reflect on the matter, I believe that:

  • some methods are edifying: that is, they are good and efficacious ways to nurture Christian habits within congregations.
  • some methods are stultifying: that is, they become a comfortable means of ignoring the text to maintain a status quo. (I think of parish Bible studies that seem to consist purely of “This is how this text makes me feel” coupled with hearty wallops of “everyone’s entitled to their opinion”…)
  • some methods are pointless: that is, their aims and abilities are so removed from the goal of forming mature Christian communities that it’s a waste of time of attempt to engage them with parish realities.
  • some methods are destructive: that is, they are fundamentally incapable of contributing to Christian maturity in any way, shape, or form.
  • some methods are corrosive: that is, in small doses they may be helpful, but when used habitually and with out adequate safeguards they become destructive.
  • some methods are complementary: that is, some methods need to be paired with one or more other methods in order to be edifying—some methods work well in combination that would function poorly are negatively in isolation.

Having said that, we get to the truly hard part and the place where I find myself pondering the most. To what degree can various interpretive methods be assigned to these categories flatly and to what degree does the assignment depend on the character and composition of the congregation?

I think there are a certain number that can be classed absolutely (i.e., structuralism moves straight to “pointless”), there are some that can be classed conditionally, and yet others that require judicious classification and application.

Like I said, I’m still pondering… What do you think?

Morning Musing

You can observe a clock. Then you can deconstruct it, find out what it’s made of, how it fits together, take out and observe each individual piece, consider what parts make it function, which are decorative, which are essential, and which are not. Then you can put it back together and observe it again.

You can observe a cat. Then you can deconstruct it, find out what it’s made of, how it fits together, take out and observe each individual piece, consider what parts make it function, which are decorative, which are essential, and which are not. But you can’t put it back together and observe it again.

Now, how are spiritual texts like clocks—and how are they like cats?

On the Hill of Circumcision

Those who used the breviary early this morning may have gotten a glitch at the First Reading. I currently have the entire contents of the KJV and WEB Bibles in the database. As a result, the file pulls a Scripture reference and passes it to a parsing function which looks at it for colons, dashes, and commas. The short reason why there was an error this morning is because today’s first reference: Joshua 4:19-5:1, 15:10-15 overwhelmed the parser with the sheer volume of its punctuation. The longer answer is that I didn’t fully program the parser to handle this kind of Scripture reference because of a fundamental disquietude concerning our current Daily Office lectionary.

I know—the rule is common prayer. And I abide by it (99% of the time…). As a result, the Daily Office lectionary from the BCP is what is in there and what will remain in there.

But on occasion I have to register my objections, and this is one of them.

Whenever I look at a reference that causes my parser to break a sweat, I always have the same question: why? Why is there a gap here that we have to deal with? What is it about the intervening verses that the BCP Daily Office lectionary doesn’t include them. Did the compilers feel that they were too boring? Too strange? Too uncomfortable? Too raunchy? And how does the absence of these texts from our day-to-day biblical experience skew our understanding and apprehension of the Bible?

Here are the verses that we were instructed to—er—cut out today…:

At that time the LORD said unto Joshua, Make thee sharp knives, and circumcise again the children of Israel the second time. And Joshua made him sharp knives, and circumcised the children of Israel at the hill of the foreskins. And this is the cause why Joshua did circumcise: All the people that came out of Egypt, that were males, even all the men of war, died in the wilderness by the way, after they came out of Egypt. Now all the people that came out were circumcised: but all the people that were born in the wilderness by the way as they came forth out of Egypt, them they had not circumcised. For the children of Israel walked forty years in the wilderness, till all the people that were men of war, which came out of Egypt, were consumed, because they obeyed not the voice of the LORD: unto whom the LORD sware that he would not show them the land, which the LORD sware unto their fathers that he would give us, a land that floweth with milk and honey. And their children, whom he raised up in their stead, them Joshua circumcised: for they were uncircumcised, because they had not circumcised them by the way. And it came to pass, when they had done circumcising all the people, that they abode in their places in the camp, till they were whole. And the LORD said unto Joshua, This day have I rolled away the reproach of Egypt from off you. Wherefore the name of the place is called Gilgal unto this day.

What about this was deemed unnecessary? Who got to decide that we shouldn’t encounter this, and what were their reasons for doing so? In a time when we are arguing over identity and covenants (recalling both the Anglican Covenant and the whole Communion without Baptism controversy) aren’t these verses worth hearing?

One enterprising reader compiled and sent to me a reverse Daily Office Lectionary which identifies which passages are, and therefore are not, included within the Lectionary. It makes for enlightening reading. He gave me permission to put it into a database with a web front-end but my current massive busyness has prevented me from accomplishing this yet. Soon, however…

I think it’s time to start revisiting the lectionary. I have no problem with a Mass lectionary with gaps. After all, that’s not the purpose of a Mass lectionary. But the function of the Daily Office lectionary is to move us through the entire Scriptures each year. Ours doesn’t—and that’s worth a serious discussion.

The Church as the Interpreter of Scripture

I commend to all Fr. Haller’s thoughtful reflection on Scripture and its interpretation.

I have quite a lot to say on this topic that I cannot write now. Thus, let me leave you with just a few teaser thoughts:

  • The point of the Christian faith as I understand it is to participate within the community of those invited into the interior life of the Triune God. As a result, one of the key factors here is relationships. We as individuals are in a relationship with God and are also in a relationship with a community. The Scriptures are one record of one part of that relationship and the community as a whole has privileged them as an essential and sufficient record. A record is not a relationship, however.
  • At the root of the faith is the relationship between God and “his people”–variously identified as those God has called into relationship with himself. As a result, history itself is a key factor. However, we have no access to the history. We have a written record which means that what is normative amongst us is a document which describes, among other things, history which reveals the on-going character of the relationship between God and his people. A document, while it may be historical, is not a direct window into history.
  • I think it’s important to constantly remind ourselves what Scripture says about itself in one of its most beleaguered and put-upon sets of verses: 2 Timothy 3:14-17  “But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it  15 and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.  16 All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,  17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” Hmmm. From this one might suspect that the purpose of the Scriptures is to reveal the character of the relationship between God and humanity and from there to direct what character a Christian ought to be forming.  And that seems to me to be both quite a bit more and quite a bit less than what others often use these verses to claim.

Daily Office Text Note

While many of the modern lectionaries are fun to hate, it’s worth pointing out when they get something right.

Yesterday started Genesis in the Daily Office lectionary. We’ll continue in Genesis through much of Lent, and move into Exodus before jumping to Lamentations for Holy Week. This follows the old sequence of starting Genesis at Septuagesima and reading Genesis and Exodus through Lent.

For reflections on the monastic reading of Genesis and Exodus as read through the Responsaries, see here.

Of course, the detour through Proverbs during the later weeks past Epiphany is odd, but I suppose you have to fill it in from somewhere…