No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 November 2019
Against the backdrop of the debate about theological reading of scripture, this essay asks whether there ought to be theological interpretation of non-biblical texts. The claim is that there should be, since theology can serve as an encompassing framework that structures all of one's beliefs. On this view, non-biblical literary texts function as a set of non-privileged signs pointing toward the Christian God. These texts should therefore be read using a reading strategy that relates them to God. This raises some complexities in the argument, however, because if these texts not only do not form part of the biblical canon, but also are different in content from those that do, then it is not straightforward how they can be read with reference to the Christian God. The essay wrestles with this issue as well as the objection that the proposal advocates a version of natural theology.
1 Fowl, Stephen E., Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 8Google Scholar.
2 Sarisky, Darren, Reading the Bible Theologically (Cambridge: CUP, 2019), pp. 144–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Griffiths, Paul J., Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion (Oxford: OUP, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kort, Wesley A., Take, Read: Scripture, Textuality, and Cultural Practice (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.
4 On comprehensiveness as a mark of what it means to be genuinely religious, see Griffiths, Religious Reading, pp. 7–9.
5 For works in which Christian authors wrestle with scriptural texts from other religions, see the Christian Commentaries on Non-Christian Sacred Texts series, especially the inaugural volume: Cornille, C. (ed.), Song Divine: Christian Commentaries on the Bhagavad Gītā (Leuven: Peeters, 2006)Google Scholar.
6 Frye, Northrop, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, ed. Lee, Alvin A., vol. 19 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 52Google Scholar.
7 Jacobs, Alan, A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001), p. 111Google Scholar. A full exploration of why this is the case is beyond the scope of this essay; but Nicholas Wolterstorff rightly observes that religion is often thought to need explaining rather than as offering explanations, and this is surely part of why there is rather little literature on this issue. See his Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1980), pp. 86–8.
8 See the useful historical sketch of these two trajectories in Stroumsa, Guy G., ‘Scripture and Paideia in Late Antiquity’, in Niehoff, Maren (ed.), Homer and the Bible in the Eyes of Ancient Interpreters (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 30–5Google Scholar.
9 Carol Harrison helpfully notes that eastern writers are more sanguine than their western counterparts in bridging between the classical culture of antiquity and something specifically and distinctively Christian, though she confesses that not all the reasons for this are utterly clear: Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity (Oxford: OUP, 2000), pp. 53–4Google Scholar.
10 See, for instance, Bennett, Camille, ‘The Conversion of Vergil: The Aeneid in Augustine's Confessions’, Revue des Études Augustiniennes 34 (1988), pp. 47–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 There is a translation of the primary text, Jerome's letter 70, in Jerome: Letters and Select Works, ed. Philip Schaff, vol. 6 of The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1954), pp. 149–51. For useful analysis of the side of Jerome that, at least prima facie, seems to want to reject his classical cultural inheritance on Christian grounds, see Jeffrey, David L., People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), pp. 75–6Google Scholar.
12 St Basil, The Letters, vol. 4, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 378–435.
13 It is also worth noting that, in the patristic period and later, there came to be many rewritings of ‘pagan’ literary works. For a study of the Acts of Andrew, a retelling of Homer's Odyssey so as to bring the story within a Christian register, see MacDonald, Dennis R., Christianizing Homer: The Odyssey, Plato, and the Acts of Andrew (Oxford: OUP, 1994)Google Scholar.
14 There is also a historically oriented treatment of our issue in Jeffrey, People of the Book, pp. 71–96. In addition, there are relevent reflections in Gallagher, Susan V. and Lundin, Roger, Literature through the Eyes of Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2014)Google Scholar, though the book is essentially a textbook for students.
15 Jacobs, A Theology of Reading, pp. 10–11.
16 I will return below to the question of whether this is the best terminology.
17 Jacobs, A Theology of Reading, pp. 12–14. There is a very similar question in Jeffrey, People of the Book, p. 72, on which Jacobs is building.
18 Grant, Robert M. and Tracy, David, A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1984), p. 177Google Scholar.
19 Since this is a view of the Bible that not all readers have, one could potentially say that it is the convictions of the reader that impel interpretation in a specifically theological direction. I am framing the matter as a view of the text in order to stress that it is the reader's convictions about the text that are at issue. Seeing the biblical text as a set of signs pointing to God is to make a claim about what the text really is.
20 Here I differ from Tracy, David, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981)Google Scholar. On his view, a conversation between text and situation can take one of three basic forms: a confrontation of the situation by the message of the text, an agreement between the two as there is an identity in meaning or content, or a negotiation of both similarities and differences.
21 Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 16Google Scholar.
22 Ibid., p. 15. It will be evident that I am in sympathy here with Hans Frei's fourth type of theology, in which theologians draw other discourses within a specifically Christian framework, as described in his Types of Christian Theology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 38–46. Although Frei also explores how his first three types have implications for biblical interpretation (ibid., pp. 56–69), I am dealing with the consequences of seeing theology according to the fourth type for the interpretation of non-biblical material. For how interpretation of art and literary texts works for Frei's type two, see Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, pp. 99–135; if one has this strong a commitment to general hermeneutics, then the reading of both biblical and non-biblical texts becomes a process of mutually critical conversation between two sources, in which neither has a privileged position in the dialogue. For a classical example of Frei's type three, see Schleiermacher, Friedrich, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, 2nd edn (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), pp. 68–71Google Scholar, who also discusses art generally while making some application to literary art.
23 Ayres, Lewis, Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: OUP, 2004), p. 315CrossRefGoogle Scholar; emphasis added.
24 Ibid., p. 316.
25 Wolterstorff, Art in Action, pp. 86–8. He is articulating a theology of art more generally. I apply his view to literary art specifically.
26 Ibid., p. 86.
27 Ibid., pp. 88–90. The ‘world behind the work’, as Wolterstorff uses this language, is not identical in meaning to, though there is overlap with, Paul Ricoeur's category of the ‘world behind the text’. ‘The world behind the text’ refers to the text's circumstances of origin and the author's outlook. Another aspect of Ricoeur's outlook, ‘the world in front of the text’, signals, by contrast, the ‘direction of thought opened up by the text’, which the reader may explore as a possibility for her own life. For this quotation and the contrast between ‘in front’ and ‘behind’, see Ricoeur, Paul, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), p. 92Google Scholar.
28 Wolterstorff, Art in Action, p. 89.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Nussbaum, Martha, ‘Transcending Humanity’, in Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: OUP, 1992), pp. 365–90Google Scholar.
32 Averil Cameron is certainly right that there were strategic or tactical questions at issue in how early Christians decided to read classical texts. For some reference to Basil as well as others, see her Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 138–41Google Scholar.
33 Basil, The Letters, pp. 381–3. In connection with literary works, this does not so much mean that the category of general revelation includes imaginary and therefore non-existent things, as it does that the products of human culture may effectively function as a type of sign.
34 Ibid., p. 383.
35 Ibid., p. 393.
36 Fortin, Ernest L., ‘Hellenism and Christianity in Basil the Great's Address Ad Adulescentes’, in Neoplatonism and Early Christian Thought (London: Variorum Publications, 1981), pp. 189–203Google Scholar; Rousseau, Philip, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 53Google Scholar, 56, 59. Much more helpful is the treatment in Eden, Kathy, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and its Humanist Reception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 42–53Google Scholar, who uses concepts from Basil's rhetorical/interpretive training to analyse his reading, not as attending in a strict sense ‘to the letter’ of the classical works, but rather as focusing more on ‘the spirit’ of the text, accommodating it to the needs of the audience. (Interestingly, Jacobs speaks approvingly of this reading strategy, and cites Eden in doing so, though he does not explain how this differs from the allegorical mode of which he so clearly disapproves; see A Theology of Reading, pp. 138–9, 141–4.) Though his topic is slightly different, there is also value in Genette, Gérard, Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992), pp. 418–19Google Scholar. He is insightful on how reconfigurations of texts work to subvert certain values while uplifting and recommending others.
37 Michael Fishbane sees very deeply into the operation of an analogous phenomenon within the Hebrew Bible and is thus not tempted to offer ill-founded critique. He comments, ‘For in so far as the “later correspondents” occur in history and time, they will never be precisely identical with their prototype, but inevitably stand in a hermeneutical relationship with them. … In the Hebrew Bible such nexuses are the product of a specific mode of theological-historical speculation – one which seeks to adapt, interpret, and otherwise illuminate a present experience (or hope, or expectation) by means of an older datum’. See his Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 351–2.
38 Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 30–40Google Scholar.
39 Golding, William, Lord of the Flies, special edn. (London: Faber & Faber, 2014)Google Scholar.
40 I leave open precisely how broadly this model can be applied. Can absolutely all non-scriptural literary works function as non-privileged signs to the Christian God? My suggestion here is just that it can work with many texts that are non-canonical and different in their content from those that are. In practice, this approach is likely to be more fruitful in connection with some texts than with others.
41 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, IV.3/1. Study edn. (London: T&T Clark, 2010), p. 108Google Scholar.
42 Cited in Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. xii.
43 Young, Frances M., Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), pp. 209-13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
44 There is certainly a strongly paraenetic element as well. See ibid., pp. 209-10.
45 Basil, The Letters, p. 405.
46 Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, p. 191.
47 Again, there is an analytical distinction to be made between stages two and three, but what is key here is the difference between stages two and three taken together, as compared with stage one, which is the only stage that deals with the sense of the text as an integral whole.
48 Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.3/1, pp. 117-18.
49 I do not mean to suggest here that the Bible is the origin of its own light, as the sun is. What is important about Scripture is the way in which it functions as a set of signs pointing to its subject matter. To say more than this is to over-read my analogy.