Divine Meaning: Studies in Patristic Hermeneutics 9780567660695

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PREFACE

Like my studies in Thc Hcnnencutics of John Calvin (1988) which appeared as a Monograph Supplement to the Scottish Journal of Theology, now published by T & T Clark Ltd of Edinburgh, most of the studies in this book were prepared some years ago to form the first of a three volume work on the history of hermeneutical thought in which particular attention was devoted to the epistemological issues involved. My long engagement with the conceptual interrelations between Christian theology and natural science delayed the revision and publication of these volumes, but they led me to see even more clearly that in theological inquiry as in natural scientific inquiry our concern is essentially hermeneutic, in which we seek to penetrate into the intrinsic intelligibility of the field in question in order to let it disclose and interpret itself to us. This is what the Greek fathers spoke of as the ~ x I ( J z + ~in~ )which biblical operation of a heuristic science (ESPEZLK~J interpretation and theological inquiry were inseparably interwoven with one another, and in which faith, the informal conceptual assent of the mind to objective reality, opens the way for understanding and guides its formulation. My studies of the way in which the Greek fathers pursued their heuristic hermeneutics led me to appreciate what they were doing in the early centuries of the Church, especially in their Christian conception of the contingent rational order immanent throughout the universe of visible and invisible reality created by God, and their struggle to secure the integrity of this understanding in the face of the dualist and determinist -frames of thought then prevailing in the Graeco-Roman world. I came to realise that theologians in the early centuries of the Christian Church were in fact laying the first foundations upon which our understanding of empirico-theoretic science is now based. I have written much about this elsewhere, for example, in Divine and Contingent Or& (Oxford, 1981). I am not concerned with drawing out that interconnection here, but simply with trying to elucidate the kind of depth-interpretation in which the Greek fathers were engaged as they sought to understand the biblical writings in the light of the divine realities to which they refer. Some readers may think that I am reading

INTRODUCTION: BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND GENERAL HERMENEUTICS

The source of all our knowledge of God is his active revelation of himself. We do not know God against his will, or behind his back, as it were, but in accordance with the way in which he has elected to disclose himself and communicate his truth in the historical-theological context of the worshipping people of God, the Church of the Old and New Covenants. That is the immediate empirical fact with which the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are bound up. They were composed under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and in the providence of God have been handed on to us as the written form of the Word of God. They are the Scriptures of the people of Israel, for Israel was the selected medium of God's revelation in which his Word operated prophetically in the life and understanding of a particular historical community in order to provide within mankind a place where divine revelation might be translated appropriately into human speech and where it might be assimilated and understood in a communicable form by all humanity. And they are the Scriptures of the Christian Church, for the Church was the appointed sphere in which the historical self-revelation of God through Israel, gathered up and transcended and hlfilled in Jesus Christ the Word made flesh, is given an evangelical form in the apostolic witness and tradition, kerygrna and didache, through which the crucified and risen Lord Jesus Christ himself continues to meet men and women as the living Word of God and to impart himself to them as the Way, the Truth and the Life, apart from whom, as our Lord claimed, no one has access to the Father. This means that the Church must always turn to the Holy Scriptures as the immediate source and norm of all revealed knowledge of God and of his saving purpose in Jesus Christ. Since all the doctrinal formulations of the Church take shape within the matrix of the biblical revelation where they have their kerygmatic and didactic basis, regular examination and interpretation of the Holy Scriptures are in order, so that the Church

Chapter 1

THE COMPLEX BACKGROUND OF BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION In the Christian era hermeneutics in all fields of literature has been greatly influenced by the traditional biblical emphasis upon word (131,hbyoq). Because the Word of God has primary place in all constitutive relations between God, the world, and man, word came to have a principal role in the realm of biblical life and thought. It is not surprising, therefore, that right from the start it is the primacy of word that characterises biblical hermeneutics, nor is it surprising that when this biblical way of life was rediscovered at the Reformation, renewed concentration upon the Word of God should leave its mark upon the basic structures of life and thought in the West, and should affect the whole subsequent tradition of hermeneutical theory and activity. Nevertheless, there is another side to this story: even biblical hermeneutics does not merely go back to the biblical tradition. Other influences were contributed from the outside, notably from Hellenism. That is apparent even in the hermeneutics of Judaism. After the 'sealing up' or cessation of the prophetic activity which characterised some of the later Hebrew Scriptures and the Apocrypha, and involved the reconstruction and redaction of the whole tradition, Judaism was faced with the question of formal interpretation of the Scriptures, as we can see in the institution of the Scribes as interpreters of the law. Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament was carried out in two ways designed to transmit the practical and the theoretical teaching of the Hebrew Scriptures and to bridge the gulf, as it were, between the ancient times and the present. This was done by providing expository material elucidating and supplementing the old records through Haggadah (xtln and Hakzkah ( n h ) . ' Haggahh took the form of narrative, often largely cultic and dramatic, designed for inspiration and

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See Emil Schiirer, History 4 t hJewish ~ Prop& in the Timr of Christ, Edinburgh, 1908.1. i, pp. 117% 11, pp. 327% Herbert Danby, Thr Mirhnah, Oxford, 1933, Introduction, pp. xxa.

Chapter 2

PHUSIKOS MI THEOLOGIKOS LOGOS: ST PAUL AND ATHENAGORAS AT ATHENS' In the early Christian treatise On the Resurrection of the Dead written in the last quarter of the second century, Athenagoras of Athens drew a distinction between two kinds of theological discourse or argument (hoyo~),'on behalf of the truth' ( h i p r f i &hqOsia