Review of Divine Interpretation

Just as T. F. Torrance has endured criticism for ignoring concrete Christian life and ethics, so too has he been charged with neglecting Scripture. And while the first volume of Wipf and Stock’s Thomas F. Torrance Collected Studies series rebutted the former criticism, the second volume supplies background material for addressing the latter charge by bringing together nine of his writings on hermeneutics, fronted by an introduction by Adam Nigh. As that introduction explains, Torrance originally intended to compose an expansive book or even a trilogy on the history of hermeneutics but never completed it. Instead, he published much of his research into patristic hermeneutics as Divine Meaning (T&T Clark, 1995); another book on The Hermeneutics of John Calvin (Scottish Academic Press, 1988); and assorted pieces on medieval and modern hermeneuts in various journals and multi-author volumes, while leaving several draft essays on the hermeneutics of, e.g., Augustine, Chrysostom, Luther, and Bultmann unpublished. The draft essays remain archived at Princeton Seminary’s Thomas F. Torrance Manuscript Collection, but Nigh and Speidell have brought together the scattered medieval and modern published pieces to form this collected work. The result is not the trilogy that Torrance had planned but a third volume to place alongside Divine Meaning and The Hermeneutics of John Calvin as Torrance’s opus imperfectum on the history of hermeneutics.

After Nigh’s introductory essay, Divine Interpretation divides into two sections. Part 1: Foundations for the History of Hermeneutics comprises three chapters republished from earlier books of Torrance’s: the first two chapters from Divine Meaning and the third from Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian (T&T Clark, 1990). Like Noah’s three sons, these three chapters cooperate to build the “ark” of Torrance’s overall approach to hermeneutical history, which Part 2: Medieval and Modern Hermeneutics then populates with paired chapters on medieval theologians Anselm (chap. 4) and Aquinas (chap. 5); sixteenth-century biblical scholars John Reuchlin and Erasmus (chaps. 6 and 7, respectively); and modern Protestant theologians Schleiermacher (chap. 8) and Barth (chap. 9). Each of the two sections, then, gives Barth the last word, flagging up Torrance’s abiding debt to his Doktorvater.

Chapter One: “Biblical Hermeneutics and General Hermeneutics” examines the relationship between the two titular modes of hermeneutics. Echoing Barth, Torrance insists that we cannot know God in any way other than how God has chosen to self-reveal: through the covenantal history of Israel culminating in Jesus Christ, whom the apostles attest. Holy Scripture is the written form of the Word of God that bears witness to the incarnate Word, Christ himself. The Word of God is sovereign, not subject to our control, and so the application of hermeneutical methods to Scripture does not guarantee that we will hear God’s Word speaking through it. Nevertheless, there are general hermeneutical principles that apply to all literature and that we may employ as humble servants—not arrogant masters—in interpreting the divine Word that addresses us through Scripture. Yet the servant-relation between general hermeneutics and biblical hermeneutics is reciprocal, for the latter has assisted the former’s development profoundly, and learning to listen respectfully to the Bible fosters a respectful attentiveness when reading other works, too.

Chapter Two: “The Complex Background of Biblical Interpretation” traces the prevalence in the ancient world of Hellenistic dualisms of body vs. spirit in anthropology, physical senses vs. intellect in epistemology, and literal sense vs. spiritual sense in hermeneutics. These divisions, famously delineated by Plato but opposed by the more integrationist Aristotle, recur in the anthropological dualism of the Pharisees, the bifurcation in rabbinic tradition between Haggadah (edifying narrative) and Halakah (ethical instruction), and the recourse to allegorizing pagan myths by the Stoics and Israel’s Scriptures by Philo. Christianity inherited these dualisms, which ran to extremes at the hands of the Gnostics and Marcion. While the mainstream church rejected these extremes as unorthodox, Torrance detects their continuing infection of Christianity in two forms: first, the antithesis between creation and redemption led to the churchwide acceptance of allegorical interpretation of Scripture; secondly, the Marcionite split between law and gospel replicates the two-millennia “parting of ways” between Israel and Gentile Christianity.

Chapter Three: “Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy” builds out the history of Christian hermeneutics as a threefold repetition of churchly struggle against dualism or widespread capitulation to it followed by an eminent victory over dualism: once at Nicaea, when the homoousion demolished Arianism’s ontological walling off of God from Christ and the Holy Spirit; again in the Reformation, when the Reformers opposed Roman Catholicism’s sundering of grace from its divine Giver; and once again in the 20th century, when Barth said Nein! to liberalism’s reduction of the gospel to merely human religious categories. The second and third repetitions of this pattern indicate that, though the church formally rebuffed Arianism in the 4th century, “Arian-like habits of thinking in terms of external, symbolical or merely moral relations” persisted in Western Christianity (p. 48). Torrance dubs these habits of thought “the Latin heresy” and fingers Augustine, Descartes, Newton, and Kant among others as key purveyors of it. Using the paired lenses of revelation and reconciliation, Torrance surveys the history of the Latin heresy and Barth’s overcoming of it.

In terms of revelation, Tertullian conceived of “the Word as semi-detached from God” (p. 51) and of the Rule of Faith as an infallible set of doctrinal propositions that were identical with the truths they taught. Aquinas likewise detached the Word from God by positing that God communicates wordlessly with the angels and by mining Scripture for first principles to construct a “logico-deductive system of propositional truths” (p. 53). After the Reformation, Protestant scholasticism and later fundamentalism repeated Aquinas’s latter error, while pietism and then liberalism identified the Word and Spirit of God with human religious consciousness. By contrast, Barth preserved the consubstantiality of God and God’s Word, as well as the sovereign dynamism of that Word. The upshot is that Scripture is the medium through which the living God freely, continually speaks and dogmatics is ongoing human reflection on the inner logic of that speaking—neither Scripture nor theology is a closed system of inerrant truths that can be untethered from the actively self-revealing Trinity.

In terms of reconciliation, in the 5th century Leo’s Tome departed from the previous patristic principle that Christ had become incarnate in fallen, sin-estranged human nature so as to heal it from the inside out (“the unassumed is the unhealed” or non-assumptus). Instead, Leo introduced a dualistic disjunction between Christ’s person and work, between incarnation and atonement, by stating that Christ assumed an unfallen human nature from his mother. This teaching plowed the ground for the future dogma of the Immaculate Conception. It also reduced salvation to a purely extrinsic work, which later generations further bifurcated. On the one hand, an extrinsic atonement might be articulated in narrowly objective, forensic terms, as by Anselm “as usually interpreted” (p. 60) and later Protestant scholastic and fundamentalist penal atonement theory; on the other hand, it might be portrayed in strictly subjective, moralistic terms, as by Abelard and later liberalism. What both strands have in common is a rejection of the non-assumptus; the consequent inability of their atonement theories to address the original sin lodged in the depths of human nature rather than merely actual sins; and the subjection of the divine-human relation to the zero-sum logic of fallen human reason, which their Christ never assumed and so has not healed. One symptom of this fallen logic is the dilemma of universalism (“Christ died for all, therefore all must be saved”) vs. limited atonement (“Not all are saved, therefore Christ did not die for all”). Barth recaptured the patristic non-assumptus that trumps the dualisms between Christ’s person and work and between divine grace and human freedom: Christ has assumed and reconciled our original sin, including our fallen reason, in himself and over the course of his whole life. He has repented and believed for us so that we may repent and believe in union with him. Why anyone rejects the gospel is, like every manifestation of evil in God’s good world, simply a mystery that defies rational analysis, for evil is inherently irrational. God offers not reasons but Jesus, the Logos made crucified-yet-risen flesh.

Chapter Four: “The Place of Word and Truth in Theological Inquiry according to St Anselm” stresses the objectivity of both word and truth in Anselmian thought. Words gain their meaning not primarily from the speaker’s subjectivity but from the objective realities to which they refer. Likewise, truth lies not in propositions themselves but in the realities signified by the propositions. (There is an implicit comparison with Barth’s position and a contrast with Tertullian, medieval and Protestant scholastics, and fundamentalists.) Anselm emerges unscathed from Torrance’s analysis, as befits a thinker whose fides quaerens intellectum approach decisively influenced Barth’s theological development.

Chapter Five: “Scientific Hermeneutics according to St Thomas Aquinas” commends Aquinas’s Aristotelian emphasis on the literal sense of Scripture but disapproves of the Angelic Doctor’s use of Aristotle to create a procrustean bed of natural theology in which to fit revealed theology. Again, Torrance applauds Aquinas’s teaching that Word, Act, and Being are a consubstantial unity in God but faults the saint’s reduction of Christ’s human nature and Scripture’s human words to mere instruments of the divine Word. In the background of these missteps lurks a view of God’s impassibility imported from natural theology, one that blocks God from fully entering into the created realm of becoming. Lastly, Torrance celebrates Aquinas’s scientific methodology of drawing from Scripture’s literal sense a set of propositions about objective theological realities but decries its lack of a critical feedback loop. Aquinas sets up the church as an “inerrant interpreter” (p. 130) of Scripture, closed to any correction. It would take a Reformation to challenge this oversight.

Chapter Six: “The Hermeneutics of John Reuchlin, 1455–1522” studies the “father of Hebrew studies” in the modern West (p. 132). Four and a half centuries before Barth, Reuchlin anticipated him by recovering the divine Word as Act, to be heard by humble faith in covenantal context as God sovereignly, miraculously addresses us through Scripture. Against Aquinas, Reuchlin holds that neither Christ’s flesh nor the Bible are merely instruments of God’s Word; rather, they are the Word incarnate and inscripturate, respectively. Again against Aquinas, Reuchlin denies that God communicates wordlessly with the angels, affirming instead that God speaks to them in Hebrew! Though Torrance finds much to praise about Reuchlin’s doctrine of the Word, he grieves that Reuchlin’s passion for Hebrew lured him into later Jewish literature, especially Kabbalah, which “seriously distorted his Christological insight” (p. 148). Indeed, by rejecting Latin scholasticism but adopting Jewish kabbalism, Reuchlin merely replaced one flawed framework with another.     

Chapter Seven: “The Hermeneutics of Erasmus” turns to Reuchlin’s contemporary and fellow biblical scholar Erasmus, who like Reuchlin rebelled against medieval scholastic exegesis and laid the groundwork for the Protestant study of the Bible through reintroducing the West to the Greek New Testament. Erasmus was sure that language and culture rise and fall together, so that to improve the former was to improve the latter. To his credit, he advocated an ad fontes approach to exegesis, but he allegorized and treated history as simply illustrative of moral lessons rather than as the domain of God’s mighty, decisive acts. Torrance appreciates Erasmus’s attitude of reverence for the sacred text but adjudges him as ultimately Pelagian: rather than wrestling with Scripture long enough to discover the truth of total depravity and the crying need for repentant conversion, Erasmus treats Scripture superficially as a source for classical education and polite ethics. Torrance concludes, “Erasmus was the great forerunner of liberal and romantic hermeneutics” (p. 179), thus preparing the reader for the next chapter.

Chapter Eight: “Hermeneutics according to F. D. E. Schleiermacher” presents an evenhanded assessment of Barth’s archnemesis. Unlike Erasmus, Schleiermacher was not content with the superficial features of text and religion but sought to capture their inner meaning. In the case of a text, that meant entering sympathetically into the mind of its author. In the case of religion, that meant recognizing in the universal feeling of dependence (Gefühl) a signpost of God’s transcendent, objective reality. Unfortunately, the former procedure so blurs the distinction between the author’s inner self and one’s own that no room remains for any objectivity or self-criticism. By the opposite means but with the same effect, overstressing divine otherness to the point that God cannot self-reveal results in humans excavating their own feelings and religious consciousness in an effort to acquire knowledge of God. The Holy Spirit dissolves into the human spirit and the divine Word who descends in saving judgment loses place to uncritical human self-understanding that seeks to ascend to God. Torrance does express appreciation for how Schleiermacher brought to the fore the discipline of hermeneutics (both biblical and general) and how he sought when interpreting to attend to both the parts and the whole of a text, to both the author’s words and the author’s social context, and to one’s own intuitions and emotions as an interpreter alongside one’s discursive reasoning. Schleiermacher promotes a hermeneutical holism that Torrance finds attractive—if only it didn’t collapse into a closed subjectivistic system.

Chapter Nine: “Karl Barth, Theologian of the Word” returns to Basel for a second explication of Barth’s doctrine of the Word of God. That Word is nothing less than God in person speaking and self-revealing. Scripture is the written form of that Word, “the holy medium of the very revelation that God himself is” and the “inspired, objective, reliable witness to God” (p. 196). The Bible is neither a merely human record of religious notions nor an inert deposit of divine truths; either of these options detaches it from the living, speaking God. Just as the non-assumptus is operative in the incarnation of Christ, so it is in the inspiration of Scripture: God takes up fallen, fallible human speech to sanctify it so that ever and again the inerrant Word of God sounds through it. The truth of the Bible lies beyond itself, in the divine reality to which it testifies, and true theologizing occurs when a dogmatician does not merely assemble scriptural statements into a self-contained system but instead humbly, self-critically attends to the Word of God speaking through those statements. This is what Barth did, and his writings reflect his sustained wrestling with Scripture, interrogating of received dogmatic tradition, and penetrating into the triune self-revelation of God—God revealing himself through himself—as the reality behind all Scripture and theology. In these ways, Torrance concludes, Barth more than any previous Christian thinker has proved himself to be a theologian of the Word.

As for ourselves, what are we to conclude from Torrance’s studies in the history of hermeneutics? We should appreciate the balanced treatment he gives to figures like Aquinas, Reuchlin, Erasmus, and Schleiermacher in the individual chapters devoted to them, and we should recall these fine-grained portraits when he “zooms out” for a more panoramic—hence, more simplified—perspective on intellectual history. When he offers these more wide-angled views, Torrance usefully identifies broad trends and ideal types in history, but several cautions are in order. First, as Nigh notes in his introduction, Torrance is not as much concerned with what a particular thinker makes of an idea as with that idea’s long-term influence or consonance with larger historical patterns: thus, for instance, the homoousion carries less weight in Athanasius’s own corpus than in Torrance’s narration of Athanasius’s importance for church history (pp. 6–7). Secondly, correlation is not causation. For instance, the divide between synagogue and church across much of the past two millennia certainly resembles Marcion’s divorce between law and gospel but did not result from it in any straightforward manner (as an uncareful reading of p. 43 might suggest). Rather, Marcionism was one episode within a wider and more complicated “parting of ways” between Judaism and Christianity (as a more careful, contextual reading of p. 43 shows Torrance to mean). Thirdly, sometimes Torrance’s representations of persons or ideas prove inaccurate: e.g., his teacher H. R. Mackintosh in fact did not hold that Christ assumed a fallen human nature, nor was Abelard a mere moral exemplarist (or, more generally, extrinsicist) in his doctrine of atonement (pace p. 60). Rather than taking Torrance’s typecasting as the final word on individuals or movements, then, one should read them for oneself to determine to what degree they fit the type. In this way, one will follow Torrance’s own valuable insight into hermeneutical ethics: that practicing hermeneutics well should foster respectful, sympathetic attentiveness to what another has to say.