Morality of Literary Understanding

...With regard to the moralityof literary understanding, Augustine advocates what is for him the prime hermeneutical virtue, namely, charity. This is a far cry fromt eh typical modern appraoch that puts a premium on distrust and suspicion, a strategy best exemplified perhaps by an essay by W.K. Clifford entitled "The Ethics of Belief." Clifford argues that it is immoral to believe something unless you first have sufficient evidence or proof: "To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." In contrast, Augustine's treatise On the Usefulness of Belief states that "nothing would remain stable in human society if we determined to believe nothing that we could not scientifically establish." With regard to reading, it "is most honorable to believe that an author was a good man, whose writings were inteded to benefit the human race and posterity." The first hermeneutic reflex, therefore, should be charity towards the author. If we come to a text believing that there is nothing in it, we are likely to go away as empty as we come. Augustine encourages readers to approach texts, paricularly the classics and especially the Scriptures, in the expectation that they contain something valuable and true...

...There is something in the text that is not of the reader's own making. The believing reader must not violate but venerate this "other." For readers come not only to knoweldge but also to self-knowledge when they allow the text to have its say. The interpretive virtues that I will commend throughout this work also figure among the cardinal virtues of Christian theology: faith, hope, love, and humility. These are the same virtues that make society possible. Life together is largely interpretation; good hermeneutics makes good neighbors. The Golden Rule, for hermeneutics and ethics alike, is to treat significant others--texts, persons, God--with love and respect.

Kevin Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 32

Messy Hermeneutics

Interpretation is not an exact science. Understanding--be it of God, works of art, ourselves, or others--is both messier and more provisional than explanations that work with causal laws. Why should this be so? Three reasons: 1) because what we're trying to understand is often singular and unique, 2) because meaning is a matter of seeing the parts in relation to larger wholes of which finite human interpreters have only partial glimpses, and 3) because interpreters often have vested interests for seeing things in one way rather than another and lack the requisite virtues to see things as they really are coram Deo (before God).

Kevin Vanhoozer, Everyday Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 36

Paul's use of the the Old Testament

When Paul quotes Scripture, he regularly intends to refer, not simply to the actual words quoted, but to the whole passage. Again and again, when you look up the chapter from which the quotation is taken, a flood of light streams back onto Paul's actual argument. Among many favorite examples, I mention 2 Corinthians 4:13. "We have the same spirit of faith," declares Paul, "in accordance with Scripture--'I believed, and so I spoke'--we also believe, and so we speak." What does the quotation of Psalm 116:10 add to his argument? Surely believing-and-so-speaking is rather obvious? Isn't that what one normally does? Yes, but look at the whole psalm--the one we know as 116 in the Hebrew and English, divided into two in the Septuagint. It is a prayer of one who is suffering terribly, but who trusts in God and is delivered. In other words, it is exactly the prayer of someone in the situation of Paul in 2 Corinthians 4. Paul has the whole Psalm in mind, and wants his readers to catch the "echoes" of it as well.

N.T. Wright, Justification (Downers Grove: IVP, 2009), 33.

The Fragility of Words

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, 1.5 in Wright, Justification, 86

"Natural" Readings

...What seems "ordinary" or "natural" as a reading of a particular biblical text may owe everything to habituation within a tradition (Think of the medieval reading of "repent" as "do penance"!) and nothing to actual awareness of what Paul was talking about. The legend that makes the point most strikingly is the Calvinist commentator who headed the story of Salome's dance and the Baptist's beheading as "the dangers of dancing." That seemed natural enough at the time.

N.T. Wright, Justification (Downers Grove: IVP, 2009), 83.

Finishing the sentence began by exegesis with theology...

The church can and must, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, develop words, concepts, discourse of all sorts, out beyond the narrow confines of exegesis. That is what happened with Athanasius, holding out for the nonbliblical term homoousion to express, against Arius, the radically biblical view of the divinity of Jesus Christ. We cannot reduce the task of theology to that of biblical commentary.

N.T. Wright, Justification (Downers Grove: IVP, 2009), 81.

She's a witch!