Hermeneutics and the Doctrine of Scripture: Why They Need Each Other

Hermeneutics and the Doctrine ofScripture: Why They Need Each Otherijst_505 118..143

FRANCIS WATSON*

Abstract: Current attempts to understand Scripture theologically typicallyappeal either to modern hermeneutics or to more traditional doctrines ofScripture – but not to both together. It is argued here that hermeneutics canhelp to identify and resolve certain problems bequeathed to posterity by thecharacteristic sixteenth-century equation of Scripture with ‘Word of God’.The problems in question relate to the past and present modes of divinespeech, the relation of text to community and the fundamental significance ofthe ‘Word of God’ concept itself.

If it is to be understood and used appropriately, the Bible needs interpretation. Itssense is a matter not only of passive reception but also of active construction.Different Christian communities are agreed on this point; in practice, no one actuallybelieves that the sense of the Bible is received in pure individual passivity. Thequestion is what principles or guidelines are to be followed in the act ofinterpretation, and two currently available proposals are of particular concern here.Some would seek their principles or guidelines from what they call ‘the doctrine ofScripture’, others, from what they call ‘hermeneutics’.

At first sight, these proposals seem almost to be mutually exclusive. Many whoappeal to a doctrine of Scripture have little time for hermeneutics. For them,appropriate interpretation of Scripture can only be guided by a correct understandingof what Scripture is, as defined by the doctrine of Scripture.1 For others,hermeneutics represents a substitute for a conventional doctrine of Scripture, an

* Theology and Religion, Durham University, Abbey House, Palace Green, Durham DH13RS, UK.

1 For a nuanced and instructive argument along these lines, see John Webster,‘Hermeneutics in Modern Theology: Some Doctrinal Reflections’, repr. in his Word andChurch: Essays in Christian Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2001), pp. 47–86.Webster rightly notes that ‘[s]trict governance by Christian theology is largely absentfrom much contemporary Christian writing in hermeneutics’ (p. 49). This lack ofgovernance by Christian theology obviously entails the virtual disappearance of adoctrine of Scripture.

International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 12 Number 2 April 2010doi:10.1111/j.1468-2400.2010.00505.x

© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

alternative conceptuality for grasping Scripture’s unique role and irreplaceablesignificance within the Christian community.2 For one side, hermeneutics isperceived as a threat to the stability and normativity of the Word of God in its writtenform, originating as it does in a divine act of inspiration extending to all the biblicalwritings and marking them out as canonical. For the other side, the text’s divineorigin is less significant than its present interaction with a contemporary reader,whose prior interests and commitments will shape and inform the act ofinterpretation. Hermeneutics and the doctrine of Scripture represent apparently self-contained discourses, each of which seems to have little need or room for the other.One may either take one’s stand on the once-for-all disclosure of saving truth, or onemay celebrate readerly freedom; but it is difficult to do both simultaneously.

If this mutual exclusivity is to be challenged, some rethinking is needed. Whatis ‘hermeneutics’? And what is ‘the doctrine of Scripture’? Can these two conceptsbe understood in such a way as to open them up to dialogue with each other? The aimof such a dialogue would be the renewal of the doctrine of Scripture, its liberationfrom its current entanglements (for example, with problematic anti-modernistaccounts of ‘inspiration’ and ‘inerrancy’) in order to restore it to its rightful positionat or near the threshold of Christian theology.

1. The shape of the problem: preliminary outline

The term ‘hermeneutics’ is often associated with a mainly German tradition ofphilosophical reflection on the concept of ‘understanding’, stemming fromSchleiermacher and variously developed by Wilhelm Dilthey in the later nineteenthcentury and by Heidegger and Bultmann, Gadamer and Ricoeur in the twentieth.These are the six paired figures who feature in most standard accounts of‘philosophical hermeneutics’, and who are supposed to represent an intellectuallycoherent tradition evolving under the impulse of its own inner logic.3 This sense ofcoherence is carefully cultivated: Dilthey refers back to Schleiermacher, Bultmann toDilthey and Heidegger, Gadamer to all four predecessors and Ricoeur to all five. Itis as if each link knows its own place in the chain. Yet, as so often with intellectualgenealogies of this kind, the coherence is illusory. In the six canonical figures,

2 That would seem to be the case for A.K.M. Adam, for whom the theologicalinterpretation of Scripture is to be renewed by appeal to a ‘differential hermeneutics’based on ‘postmodern premises’, and characterized especially by its criticism of ‘themyth of subsistent meaning’, i.e. the assumption that meaning is inherent in texts(Faithful Interpretation: Reading the Bible in a Postmodern World (Minneapolis:Fortress Press, 2006), pp. 81–103).

3 See, for example, Anthony C. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics (London:HarperCollins, 1992). Chapters 6–7 of this work introduce Schleiermacher and Dilthey,chapter 8 ‘the Earlier Heidegger’ and Bultmann, and chapters 9–10 Gadamer andRicoeur. Thiselton’s work as a whole does, however, extend the scope of ‘hermeneutics’far beyond this specific tradition.

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hermeneutics means at least six different things. To make this point is in no way todevalue this tradition; rather, it is to draw attention to the range of intellectualresources it has to offer, on which this article will freely draw.

Schleiermacher views hermeneutics as ‘the art of understanding’, an art whichcovers the whole range of significant texts, whether scriptural, classical or modern.In each case, the reader is addressed by the utterance of an Other, and the term‘understanding’ identifies the basic requirement on the receptive side of thisasymmetrical relationship. A given text may be simply representative of a particularera, with its distinctive language and thought-forms, or it may be marked by a strongauthorial individuality. In Schleiermacher’s usage, ‘understanding’ encompassestexts at any point on this spectrum, whether interpretation is more ‘grammatical’ or‘psychological’ in its orientation. In this text-centred hermeneutic, readers conformthemselves to the realities of the text, rather than reshaping texts in their own image.4

For Dilthey, ‘understanding’ characterizes the modus operandi of the humanitiesdisciplines or Geisteswissenschaften, in contrast to the ‘explanation’ of essentiallynon-human phenomena sought by the natural sciences. One ‘explains’ a naturalprocess whereas one ‘understands’ a person, and this interpersonal understandingextends to the cultural artefacts in which personhood is externalized and expressed.In the humanities, one adopts the privileged perspective of the insider. Herehermeneutics attains a foundational status, in response to the perception thathumanities disciplines are being called to account by the increasing culturalascendancy of the so-called ‘exact sciences’. Also notable here is the reductionistview of the text as one among a number of possible expressions of personhood –a view stemming from a flawed and one-sided reading of Schleiermacher.5

In Heidegger, hermeneutics becomes still further detached from textuality. Theart of understanding or of interpretation now has little to do with the skills cultivatedby readers, but is seen as the defining characteristic of specifically human existence.To be human is to understand the potentialities of one’s own being-in-the-world.More specifically, it is to find oneself confronted by the question of being, a questionthat discloses human nature’s fundamental orientation towards its own authentic

4 Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics lectures are available in two main versions, one that ofFriedrich Lücke (1838, ET in Schleiermacher: Hermeneutics and Criticism, ed. AndrewBowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)), the other that of HeinzKimmerle (1959, ET in F.D.E. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics: The HandwrittenManuscripts, AAR Text and Translations 1 (Scholars Press: Missoula, Montana, 1977)).The Kimmerle edition is based purely on Schleiermacher’s own manuscripts, whereas theLücke one includes additional material based on student lecture notes.

5 For Dilthey’s quest for a ‘foundational science’ for the humanities, see Wilhelm Dilthey,Selected Works Volume 1: Introduction to the Human Sciences, ET ed. Rudolf A.Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); for theunderstanding/explanation distinction, see pp. 439–40. A succinct introduction toDilthey’s hermeneutical thinking is provided by his ‘The Rise of Hermeneutics’ (involume IV of the Princeton series, pp. 235–58). While hermeneutics is here defined as‘the theory of the rules of interpreting written monuments’, the primary interest is in the‘psychic life’ of the author that comes to expression in the text (p. 238).


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form, persisting even in the ordinary state of fallenness. In this ontology of thealienated individual, the loss of the textual focus is also a loss of otherness: forthe voice that calls us from our fallenness within the everyday world is the voice ofour own true being. Understanding is always ultimately self-understanding.6

Much of this ontology remains intact in Bultmann, although the summons toauthentic being now occurs in the kerygma, the divine call that sounds forth inpreaching, whose content is the crucified Jesus as the final unmasking of our sinfulself-sufficiency. The New Testament texts are therefore subjected to a Sachkritik orcontent-criticism that seeks in them an awareness of the ontological determination ofhuman existence, and of its ontic fulfilment in the kerygma. In theological terms, theoutcome is that Christology must be grounded in anthropology if it is to be true to itsobject – as was rightly grasped especially by Paul and John. Yet the kerygma itselfis fundamentally viva voce speech, and for Bultmann textuality as such is of limitedinterest or importance.7

Hermeneutics and textuality are reintegrated in the work of Hans-GeorgGadamer. Here, to be human is to be embedded in streams of tradition whoseprivileged bearers – at least for Westerners – are classic or canonical texts. Thesetexts present themselves to us as sites at which disclosure of significant truth is to beexpected, and this self-presentation is the outcome of their Wirkungsgeschichte, thecommunally normative role they establish for themselves as they are read and rereadfrom one generation to another. Yet the text’s potential for truth-disclosure mustalways be realized anew, in view of the ever-changing social and cultural horizonswithin which its readers are located. Truth-disclosure occurs when the limitedhorizons of interpreter and text are encompassed within a single broad horizon,thereby realizing again the inherent potential of the classic text.8

6 Heidegger is incorporated into the Schleiermacher/Dilthey tradition by H.-G. Gadamer(Truth and Method (ET London: Sheed and Ward, 1979), pp. 235–45), and by PaulRicoeur (Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 45–59). There is some basis forthis in Heidegger, Being and Time (ET Oxford: Blackwell, 1962). Thus, without herenaming Dilthey, Heidegger argues that his understanding/explanation distinction is to beunderstood as a secondary derivative of ‘that primary understanding which is one of theconstituents of the Being of the “there” in general’ (p. 182). As Ricoeur notes, oneremarkable consequence is that ‘the question of understanding is wholly severed from theproblem of communication with others’ (Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, p. 55).

7 See, however, Rudolf Bultmann, ‘The Problem of Hermeneutics’, in Essays Philosophicaland Theological (ET London: SCM Press, 1955) pp. 234–61. (An alternative ET isavailable in Schubert M. Ogden, ed., Rudolf Bultmann: New Testament and Mythologyand Other Basic Writings (London: SCM Press, 1985), pp. 69–94.) Here, what ishermeneutically interesting for Bultmann is the interpreter’s ‘prior living relation to thesubject-matter which directly or indirectly finds expression in the text and which guidesthe direction of the enquiry’ (Essays, p. 252). Even here, the focus is not on the text as suchbut on the text as mediating the relationship between interpreter and subject-matter.

8 For Gadamer’s important concepts of ‘effective history’ (Wirkungsgeschichte) and‘fusion of horizons’ (Horizontverschmelzung), see his Truth and Method, pp. 267–74.



This reunion of hermeneutics and textuality remains intact in the more eclecticwork of Paul Ricoeur. For Ricoeur, the interpreter seeks to grasp ‘the world of thetext’ or ‘the world in front of the text’ – that is, the experienced world as construedby the text, the textually interpreted world which presents itself as a possible placeof habitation.9 In addition, Ricoeur seeks to mediate between diverse intellectualtrends and academic disciplines, including structural linguistics, Freudianpsychoanalysis, Marxist ideology-critique, biblical studies, literary theory andhistoriography. In contrast to Dilthey’s foundationalism and Gadamer’sdisparagement of ‘method’, Ricoeur’s instinct is to engage the diverse discourses ofthe humanities in dialogue, resisting their tendencies towards self-containment andself-sufficiency and seeking their mutual enrichment or correction.

This brief account of six key figures in ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ indicatesthat, even within this supposedly singular and organic tradition, hermeneuticsmeans not one thing but many. There is fundamental disagreement even over theobject that ‘the art of understanding’ purports to understand: is it texts, or persons,or human existence? For our purposes, the three figures who are interested intextuality as such (Schleiermacher, Gadamer and Ricoeur) will be more significantthan the three who are not (Dilthey, Heidegger and Bultmann). A doctrine ofScripture is likely to entail a high view of textuality, and to that extent it will havea natural affinity with that side of the hermeneutical tradition on which textualityis a primary rather than a derivative phenomenon. Even on its ‘textual’ side,however, this tradition offers a range of possibilities rather than a single coherentposition. Unlike Gadamer and Ricoeur, Schleiermacher has little interest in thereader per se; indeed, his author- and text-centred hermeneutics is sharplycriticized by these later figures. The hermeneutical tradition does not represent asingle, coherent ideology that would compel a doctrine of Scripture to conform toits dictates. And that is all to the good.

If hermeneutics has no ideology of its own to promote, then it may be viewedsimply as a resource, placed at the disposal of other discourses. But is it needed?What might a doctrine of Scripture hope to gain from it? Perhaps Christian doctrinesshould simply be themselves, without worrying unduly about whether they arepractising enough ‘dialogue’ with nontheological discourses? Reasonable thoughthey are, such questions cannot be answered until we have determined just what a‘doctrine of Scripture’ is. To this we now turn.

An initial distinction must be made between a doctrine and a theology. A‘doctrine’ is a communally acknowledged norm, classically defined at some point in

9 According to Ricoeur, ‘To understand oneself before the text is not to impose one’s ownfinite capacity of understanding on it, but to expose oneself to receive from it a larger selfwhich would be the proposed way of existing that most appropriately responds to theproposed world of the text’ (‘Towards a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation’, in Essayson Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis S. Mudge (London: SPCK, 1981), pp. 73–118; p.108).


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the past in a form that continues to shape the present.10 The understanding of the normmay change over time, perhaps drastically. It may be subject to dissent, and it may riseor fall in significance from one generation to another. A doctrine is not a monolith.Yetit is a relatively stable entity, capable of retaining a recognizable identity throughall the changes and chances of the historical process. In contrast, a ‘theology’ is anindividual proposal for the future development of doctrine. It addresses the Christiancommunity as a whole, or its leaders, and either advocates a new doctrinal definitionor reinterprets an old one. Thus, a ‘theology of Scripture’would take note of whateverformulations from the past make up the ‘doctrine of Scripture’, elaborating some ofthem and downplaying others. It would investigate the connections between this areaof Christian doctrine and others, and respond to contemporary challenges. At somepoints it might seek new conceptualities; at others it might find that traditionallanguage still served its purpose. Such a theology seeks a future consensus, which maynever be attained. In contrast, a doctrine marks an actual existing consensus, howeverpartial and attenuated. Although the boundary between doctrine and theology can bedrawn only approximately, it is ‘the doctrine of Scripture’ that is the concern here –rather than a more ambitious ‘theology of Scripture’.

A doctrine of Scripture is most clearly articulated in the Reformed Confessionsof the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this context, ‘Reformed’ includes theChurch of England, whose Thirty-Nine Articles predate the later Anglican convictionthat Geneva is to be avoided at least as much as Rome.11 The Reformed doctrine ofScripture is based emphatically on the identification of Holy Scripture as ‘Wordof God’. There is no equivalent doctrine in the Augsburg Confession or the otherLutheran confessional writings.12 The Council of Trent is concerned to establish a

10 Compare George Lindbeck’s understanding of doctrines as ‘communally authoritativerules of discourse, attitude, and action’ (The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theologyin a Postliberal Age (London: SPCK, 1984), p. 18). For Lindbeck, the corollary of thisview is that ‘[d]octrines regulate truth claims by excluding some and permitting others,but the logic of their communally authoritative use hinders or prevents them fromspecifying positively what is to be affirmed’ (p. 19). The claim that communal useprecludes affirmation is hard to accept. For criticism of the ‘nonrealist’ tendency inLindbeck’s position, see Francis Watson, Text, Church and World: Biblical Interpretationin Theological Perspective (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994), pp. 133–6. This strand inLindbeck seems more prominent to me than it does to others, who deny that it is there atall: so S. Fowl, Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (Oxford:Blackwell, 1998), pp. 23–4. The obvious fact that Lindbeck never ‘denies the existenceof extra-textual reality’ (!) does not preclude a nonrealist tendency or drift, evident aboveall in a consistent marginalizing of doctrinal truth-claims.

11 In the Anglican confession, elements of a typically Reformed doctrine of Scriptureare found in Article VI (‘Of the sufficiencie of the Holy Scriptures for saluation’,incorporating ‘Of the names and number of the Canonicall Bookes’), Article VII (‘Of theOld Testament’), and Article XX (‘Of the aucthoritie of the Church’).

12 In the Augsburg Confession or Confessio Augustana (1530), ‘the Word’ refers not toScripture but either to Christ (part 1, Arts. I, III) or to the preaching of the gospel (part 1,Art. V). In the Reformed confessions, ‘Word’ or ‘Word of God’ refers almost exclusively



parallel between Scripture and the unwritten traditions proceeding from Christthrough the apostles, and so cannot be said to be concerned with a doctrine ofScripture as such. The scriptural texts are listed, the Vulgate translation and theCatholic interpretation are commended, yet no rationale is offered for the existenceof normative writing alongside normative tradition. In contrast, the Reformedtypically view the doctrine of Scripture as the gateway to the rest of Christiandoctrine. Thus, chapter 1 of the Second Helvetic Confession is entitled ‘On HolyScripture, the true Word of God’, and chapter 2 ‘On how the Holy Scriptures are tobe interpreted, and on the Fathers, Councils and Traditions’. The Belgic Confessionopens with articles relating to God and the knowledge of God, but proceeds toaffirmations of Scripture’s divine origin, its contents, its authority, its differentiationfrom noncanonical writings and its perfection or sufficiency (Articles 3–7). Theseare the concepts and concerns that recur again and again in these confessionaltexts.13

This doctrine of Scripture is not to be labelled ‘fundamentalist’, for it is onlyindirectly related to the anti-modernist controversies of the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies. It is not necessarily incompatible with the results of modern scholarship,for the acknowledgement of the Bible’s divine origin was never intended to deny thecorresponding reality of its human origin. It seeks merely to identify a frameworkwithin which biblical interpretation may take place. It tells us that Scripture mattersnot just because the church tells us that it ought to matter. Yet the church is right totell us that Scripture matters, for Scripture speaks definitively of God and of thedivine saving action in Jesus and his Spirit, and it does so not on the initiative of itshuman authors – the prophets and apostles and their followers and editors – but onGod’s own initiative. In Scripture, God speaks of God. God’s saving action is as suchalso communicative action, and does not take place without a corresponding speechin which its reality is announced, with a view to human participation. God so lovedthe world that he gave his only Son. No doubt this might have happened without theworld’s knowing anything about it; God is presumably not obliged to speak when heacts. Yet, according to the doctrine of Scripture in its classic sixteenth-century forms,

to Scripture, and is only applied to preaching under the influence of the Augustana (e.g.Article XVI of the First Helvetic Confession; Article XIX of the Thirty-Nine Articles(henceforth 39A)). Incidentally, Barth’s account of ‘The Word of God in its ThreefoldForm’, i.e. as preached, written and revealed – see Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, trans.and ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957–75; hereafterCD) I/1, §4 – may be seen as an attempt to harmonize these Lutheran and Reformedemphases.

13 The texts cited above are referred to henceforth as 2CH (= Confessio Helvetica Posterior)and CB (= Confessio Belgica), respectively. For the Reformed confessions cited here,see Philip Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 3 vols. (repr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1977).Introductions to 2CH (1562) and CB (1561/1619) are found in 1.390–95 and 1.502–8;texts in 3.232–306 and 3.383–436.


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God did so speak. Scripture is the unique record of that divine communicativedynamic.14

Like the earlier doctrine of the Trinity, this doctrine of Scripture is aninterpretative construct which, for all its scriptural roots, goes well beyond the explicitstatements of Scripture itself. At no point does the Bible seek to determine its owncontents: even the attempt to determine the contents of the Old Testament fromcitations in the New runs into difficulties, and begs the question of the contents of theNew Testament itself, inner-scriptural citations of which are lacking. Scripture as awhole may be the Word of God, but explicit claims to originate in the word of Godare found only in the prophetic writings and the book of Revelation. There is nounambiguous inner-scriptural reason for extending this prophetic model to the OldTestament narrative and wisdom texts, or to the Gospels and the apostolic letters. A‘scriptural doctrine of Scripture’is not forthcoming, and the classic Reformed doctrineneed not be understood as a mere transcript of the claims of Scripture itself.15

Rather, the Reformed doctrine should be seen as the resumption of a debateabout Scripture that came to a premature close after the fourth and fifth centuries,when a degree of consensus about the contents of the scriptural canon was achieved.The patristic era did not produce a doctrine of Scripture in the sixteenth-centurysense. It believed that the Holy Spirit spoke through the prophets, so that the wholeOld Testament becomes the interpretative matrix of the Christ-event; but this patristic‘doctrine of Scripture’ does not extend beyond the Old Testament into the New. In thecase of what came to be called the New Testament, the crucial question – for Irenaeusin the second century and still for Eusebius in the fourth – was the question ofcontents: which writings were to be included, and which excluded? Fundamentalreflection on Scripture as an overarching category is little in evidence. There aretreatises on scriptural interpretation, but there is no significant attempt to reflect onthe role of canonical Scripture within the divine economy.16 In that sense, the

14 The concept of ‘communicative action’ reflects Barth’s simple assertion that ‘[a]sreconciliation takes place, it also declares itself’ (CD IV/3, p. 10). More fully stated (p.79), and paraphrasing the Johannine prologue:

Where God is present as active Subject, where he lives, as is the case of the life ofJesus Christ, life is not just possibly or secondarily but definitely and primarilydeclaration, and therefore light, truth, Word and glory. A mute and obscure Godwould be an idol. The true and living God is eloquent and radiant.

15 Unlike John Goldingay, I do not think that the question ‘whether a doctrine ofscripture . . . is itself scriptural’ is of fundamental importance (for this formulation, seehis Models for Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 2). Believing thatconventional accounts of Scripture are not sufficiently scriptural, Goldingay proposes aninductive approach based on the diversity of scriptural genres. Thus, ‘Word of God’ isrestored to its original context in the prophetic literature, from which it is only cautiouslyextended to other scriptural texts (pp. 252–60). There is a danger here of reducingdoctrine to exegesis.

16 This judgement seems to me to apply even to texts such as Origen’s De Principiis, BookIV, and Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana.



Reformed doctrine of Scripture takes up the unfinished business of the patristic era– not out of purely intellectual concerns but because the canonical role assigned tothe scriptural writings appeared to be threatened and undermined from within thechurch itself. In such a context it seemed essential to define more closely just whatthat canonical role is. Given the eventual patristic consensus that the Epistle to theHebrews was to be deemed ‘canonical’ whereas the Epistle of Barnabas was not,what exactly was at stake when this distinction was made? Set within a broaderhistorical perspective, the Reformed doctrine of Scripture addresses itself to theunresolved question of the significance of canonical status. In that sense, it ispotentially an ecumenical doctrine.17

The doctrine of Scripture is therefore the attempt to articulate the significance ofthe canonical status accorded to the writings of both Testaments. It presupposes thework of the church in determining this canonical status, although it insists that thishuman work is itself determined by the prior divine initiative. The phenomenon ofcanonicity is the foundation on which the doctrine is constructed. And the doctrineitself is most fundamentally concerned not with inspiration, authority, sufficiencyand the like, but with the identification of the canonical texts as ‘the Word of God’.

How might hermeneutics relate to the doctrine of Scripture, understood alongthese lines? No common ground has emerged as yet. At this point, we note simplythat the doctrine of Scripture is the product of the sixteenth century, whereashermeneutics (in the form discussed here) is the product of the nineteenth andtwentieth. Hermeneutics might therefore make it possible to restate the doctrine ofScripture, or elements of such a doctrine, in a more contemporary theological idiom.In raising this possibility, we presuppose that the question of the significance ofcanonical status is still worth asking, and that the theologians of the Reformationperiod were not wholly mistaken in the answers they gave.

Textuality and the Word of God

The Reformed confessions speak of Scripture as Verbum Dei, Word of God, andagree that this is the first thing that must be said about it: ‘We believe and confess thecanonical Scriptures of holy prophets and apostles of both Testaments to be the trueWord of God’ (2CH, 1.1). So close is the relationship between text and divine wordthat ‘the Word of God written’ can serve simply as a synonym for ‘Holy Scripture’(WCF, 1.2).18 ‘Word of God’ asserts not just a divine origin but an identification of

17 Indirect evidence for this claim may be seen in the impressive article on Sacred Scripturein the Roman Catholic catechism prepared under the chairmanship of Cardinal JosephRatzinger (Catechism of the Catholic Church (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1994), pp.28–35). In compiling an article on this topic, the Catholic Church follows a Reformedprecedent.

18 WCF = Westminster Confession of Faith (1647). See Schaff, Creeds, 1.727–82; text,3.600–73.


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Scripture with God’s self-revelatory speech. God makes himself known by ‘by hisholy and divine Word’ (CB, 2), that Word ‘which was in the beginning revealedthrough oracles, and which was afterward committed to writing in the books we callHoly Scripture’ (CFG, 2).19 To identify Scripture with the Word of God is no mereformality; rather, it is to assert the fundamental role of humanly authored texts withinthe divine economy. According to these confessions, God’s action is communicativeaction. God does not act in his Son without addressing us in his Word, and hisspeech intends our participation in his act. It is not the only means of divineself-communication, as later articles on the sacraments will show, but it is neverthelessunique and indispensable. Thus, there is no attempt to coordinate Scripture andsacraments, as though these were simply variant forms of a single phenomenon.Scripture as divine self-disclosure can, however, be coordinated with creation andprovidence. Yet, while the world itself is ‘a most elegant book, wherein all creaturesgreat and small are as so many characters leading us to contemplate the invisible thingsof God, namely, his eternal power and deity’, it is in Scripture rather than the book ofnature that God ‘makes himself more clearly and fully known to us’ (CB, 2).

In these statements, it is notable that the divine speaking in Scripture ischaracteristically referred to in the present tense. God ‘manifests himself to humans’in his Word (CFG, 2), he ‘gives himself to be known by us’ (CB, 2), he ‘speaks to usstill through Holy Scripture’ (2CH, 1.1). Though grounded in the past, the divineself-communication continues. The written Word is in no sense a substitute for aspeaking God; rather, it is the place and the means of God’s continued speaking. Thisraises the question how we are to envisage God as having spoken once yet as stillspeaking – a question on which later accounts of Scripture have tended to divide. Forsome, the divine speech that constitutes Scripture as Word of God occurs at themoment of the text’s origin: that is the assumption underlying most versions of adoctrine of inspiration.20 For others, the divine speech occurs primarily in the presentmoment of encounter, in which readers find themselves addressed by God throughthe scriptural word.21 In the sixteenth-century confessional texts, this problem has notyet arisen. God is the author of Scripture and still speaks in it, and there is no sensethat authoring Scripture and speaking through it are heterogeneous activities onlyremotely connected to one another.

19 CFG = Confessio Fidei Gallicana (1559). See Schaff, Creeds, 1.490–98; text, 3.356–82.20 According to B.B. Warfield, inspiration may be defined as ‘that extraordinary,

supernatural influence (or, passively, the result of it) exerted by the Holy Ghost on thewriters of the Sacred Books, by which their words were rendered the words of God, and,therefore, perfectly infallible’ (The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia:Presbyterian & Reformed, 1948), p. 420). Here, the concept of inspiration serves toexplain the identification of the Bible as the Word of God; the Bible is Word of God byvirtue of its origin.

21 This is the case in Barth’s insistence that the Bible is the Word of God only in the formof a past, present and future event, so that ‘we cannot regard the presence of God’s Wordin the Bible as an attribute inhering once for all in this book as such . . .’ (CD I/2, p. 530).



If we ask how it was possible to hold together the past and present moments ofdivine speech, we must enquire into the general characteristics of scriptura –that is, of writing, or inscription. We begin by noting the characteristic Reformedassumption that writing belongs within the sphere of the prophetic and apostolicvocation. All prophets and apostles are called in order to speak, but some are alsocalled to extend the range of their speaking by writing. Scripture consists in ‘thewritings of holy prophets and apostles’ (2CH, 1.1); it was ‘through prophets andapostles’ that the written Word of God was ‘declared to the world’ (1CH, 1).22 Thereis no reason to suppose that writing is anything less than integral to their vocation.

Writing preserves an original moment of utterance in such a way as to ensure itsiterability, the possibility of unlimited though non-identical repetition. The apostlePaul spoke once to the Galatians, but he did so by dictating a letter to them rather thanby visiting them in person. Because his speech took written form on this occasion, hecan continue to say what he once said: for his writing preserves the possibility of sucha repetition.Yet Paul speaks not on his own initiative but as an apostle of Jesus Christ,authorized to proclaim the Word of God, embodying in his own person the divineself-communicative dynamic. What an apostle says is divinely authorized, since‘whoever receives one whom I send receives me, and whoever receives me receives theone who sent me’ (Jn 13:20; cf. 2CH, 1.3). The speech of the apostle is to be receivedas the speech of Christ and of God; and conversely, the speech of Christ and of Godis to be received in and through the speech of the apostle. The divine speaking ismediated through the apostle. This is as true of apostolic writing as it is of apostolicspeech; indeed, it is only apostolic or prophetic writing that gives the apostle orprophet a permanent role within the divine economy. If an apostle is called not only tospeak but also to write, then the writing too will represent the speaking of Christ andof God; and the iterability that writing confers on speech will in this case be theiterability of the divine speech. In and through his text, Paul still speaks what he oncespoke; but because Paul is an apostle, it is also and above all God who continues tospeak what God once spoke, in and through the apostolic speech. Scripture is the Wordof God by virtue of the prophetic and apostolic scriptura that is its content: that is, byvirtue, first, of the divine commissioning of its human authors, and second, of theiterability characteristic of writing. The identification of Scripture as Word of Godmeans that God spoke once through prophets and apostles who both spoke and wrote,and that God speaks still in their writings. These theological claims are necessarilyentailed in the concept of prophetic or apostolic writing. If the Holy Scriptures are thewritings of prophets and apostles, then Scripture is the Word of God, both in its originand in its ongoing dynamic.23

22 1CH = Confessio Helvetica Prior, the First Helvetic Confession (1536). On this, seeSchaff, Creeds, 1.388–9; text, 3.211–31. Translations from this text are based on the Latinversion rather than the German one.

23 On this account, the equation of Scripture and Word of God derives from the nature of theprophetic and apostolic vocation – in contrast to the more conventional assumption thatthe Scriptures ‘are the word of God because they were given by the inspiration of the


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This is at least a possible reconstruction of the logic underlying the Reformedidentification of Scripture as Verbum Dei. The reconstruction has drawn onspecifically theological conceptuality, but in characterizing writing in terms ofiterability we have also encroached on the sphere of nontheological hermeneutics.24

The nature of writing or textuality is a fundamental hermeneutical concern. If thecanonical Scriptures are the Word of God, then this entails the general claim that awritten text embodies the enduring and iterable speech-act of its author.

According to Paul Ricoeur, it is the term ‘distanciation’ that most appropriatelycharacterizes the relationship between writing and speech.25 Speech occurs withinthe immediacy of a given situation, in which one person communicates with anotherabout matters of common concern. With the passing of the situation, speech toopasses away. Setting aside the (admittedly important) phenomenon of memory,speech does not last. It has no capacity to transcend or distance itself from itssituation of origin, and it is wholly dependent on that situation for its significance.Writing is no less the product of a specific situation than is speech. Unlike speech,however, it endures. It possesses the capacity to distance itself from its situation oforigin, and the distances it traverses are both spatial and temporal. Its ‘range’ will bedetermined in part by its genre, but above all by the decisions taken by its readers,both those who were originally envisaged by its author and those who were not.Thus, for Ricoeur, writing passes out of the sphere of its own author. The author‘dies’ – both literally and in the sense that he or she becomes an irrelevance to thetext’s autonomous existence. Freed from authorial constraints, the text becomesavailable to its variously situated readers, to whom it will disclose semanticpossibilities beyond anything envisaged by the author.

Ricoeur’s account has considerable merits. It can explain how a text that isapparently bounded by its original situation – Galatians, for example – has aninherent capacity to transcend that situation, purely by virtue of its textuality. Whenthe text’s distance from its originating situation is formalized and perpetuated by‘canonical status’, there is nothing arbitrary about this procedure. It is not that a text

Holy Ghost’ (Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,n.d.), 1.153). Hodge speaks of ‘the sacred writers’ as ‘the organs of God, so that what theytaught, God taught’ (1.156), noting that ‘[i]t was men not machines; not unconsciousinstruments, but living, thinking, willing minds, whom the Spirit used as his organs’(1.157). It is a problem for Hodge’s comprehensive doctrine of inspiration that thisconcept is more naturally associated with the prophetic vocation than with the apostolicone (cf. 1.158–63).

24 Even the specifically theological conceptuality – prophets and apostles as speaking onbehalf of God – may be seen as instantiating a general linguistic possibility, that of‘double agency discourse’ such as ‘deputized discourse’ or ‘appropriated discourse’. SeeNicholas Woltersdorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim thatGod Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 38–54.

25 Ricoeur, ‘The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation’, in Hermeneutics and theHuman Sciences, pp. 131–44. Writing ‘renders the text autonomous with respect to theintention of the author’, and this ‘distanciation’ or autonomous existence ‘is constitutiveof the phenomenon of the text as writing’ (p. 139).



that is ‘really’ just a personal letter is converted into something quite different,artificially and against the grain. On the contrary, canonical status realizes the text’sinherent potential for an autonomous existence far beyond the circumstances thatinitially gave rise to it.

Yet Ricoeur’s death-of-the-author thesis is problematic on both theological andhermeneutical grounds. Theologically, the identification of canonical Scripture asWord of God is obviously incompatible with authorial absence, especially if ‘Wordof God’ includes the claim that God ‘speaks to us still through Holy Scripture’ (2CH,1.1). Hermeneutically, Ricoeur’s theory draws too sharp a disjunction betweenwriting and speech. A sequence of words will always be taken to embody acommunicative intent, irrespective of whether they are spoken or written. A text mayannounce its author (‘Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus . . .’), or it may emerge out ofthe anonymity of complex authorial and redactional processes, as is more usually thecase in biblical literature. In either case, reading can only proceed on the assumptionof a communicative intent. One construes the words, ‘In the beginning was theWord . . .’ on the assumption that someone here is saying something aboutsomething. There is a locution and an object, but there must also be an originatorof the locution if the text is to be regarded as intelligible and meaningful, acommunicative act rather than a random series of impenetrable hieroglyphs. Withouta locutor there can be no locution – for locution remains an act even in the form ofinscription, and an act necessarily entails an agent.26 That is perhaps why Jewish andChristian tradition has assigned named authors to almost all the books of thescriptural canon, ignoring the complexities of redaction and preferring to associatethe texts with figures well known from the texts themselves – Moses, David,Solomon, Isaiah, Matthew or John. If God ‘speaks to us still through Holy Scripture’,it is because Scripture’s human authors speak to us still through their texts. There isno disjunction between their speaking and their writing, for it is their speaking thatis preserved in their writing in order that they may continue to speak. And, since theywrite as prophets or apostles, their speaking is also and primarily divine speaking, theWord of God.

If that is correct, then writing is better characterized in terms of iterability thanof distanciation. If writing traverses unlimited spatial and temporal distances, it bearsits author with it so that what was said once (at the moment of inscription) may besaid repeatedly and without limit. If distancing occurs, it is not distancing from anauthor. The Fourth Evangelist utters the words ‘In the beginning was the Word . . .’as many times as his text is read. Yet, although what is said is the same thing,the repetitions are far from identical. Since the reception of an utterance isco-determined by context, a single utterance may have a quite different significance

26 According to Kevin Vanhoozer’s striking formulation of this point, we are to ‘think ofmeaning not as something that words and texts have (meaning as noun) but rather assomething people do (meaning as verb). Better said: a word or text only has meaning(noun) if some person means (verb) something by it’ (Is There a Meaning in This Text?(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), p. 202).


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or pertinence when repeated in a new context. On account of this shifting contextualfactor, iteration is characterized as much by diversity as by identity; authorialpresence does not result in monotony.27 Yet the sameness implied by the concept ofiterability should not be ignored or devalued. There is a sense in which the words, ‘Inthe beginning was the Word . . .’ mean the same thing wherever and whenever theyare read or heard – even after allowance has been made for the vagaries of translatorsand for inevitable non-equivalences between one linguistic system and another.28

The concept of iterability can explain how the Bible can be the Word of Godas spoken once and as spoken still. The sixteenth-century Reformed doctrine ofScripture assumes that this is the case, yet a theological conceptuality that doesjustice to this unity has proved hard to find. The problem is best addressed bydrawing on the resources of nontheological hermeneutics.

Text and community

How do we know that some texts are to be regarded as canonical and authoritative,whereas others are not? The Reformed confessions are concerned to avoid theobvious answer to this question, which is that we know this on the authority ofthe church. It was, undeniably, the church of the early centuries that collectivelydecided that canonical Scripture should include four narrative renderings of thegospel – rather than one, three or six – and that a collection of ‘catholic epistles’should be added to the existing Pauline letter collection. If the Christian communitydecided the contents of its own Scriptures, then there is arguably no need to postulatea prior divine decision to which the human decision conforms. Christ bestowed onhis church the authority to bind and loose, giving the assurance that its earthlydecisions would be ratified in heaven. Why should this not apply to the formation ofthe canon?29

27 It is on account of the constantly shifting reading context that ‘one and the same text findsin every new reading act a new and in each case individually justified semantic form’ (W.Jeanrond, Text and Interpretation as Categories of Theological Thinking (ET Dublin: Gill& Macmillan, 1988), p. 104). The converse is also true, however: that the text thatassumes a different form or significance in each new reading act is nevertheless ‘one andthe same’.

28 Compare the meaning/significance distinction of E.D. Hirsch: ‘Meaning is that which isrepresented by a text; it is what the author meant by his use of a particular sign sequence,it is what the signs represent. Significance, on the other hand, names a relationshipbetween that meaning and a person, or a conception, or a situation . . .’ (Validity inInterpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); p. 8; emphasis original).

29 Calvin puts the following questions into the mouths of his opponents:

Who can convince us that these writings came from God? Who can assure us thatScripture has come down whole and intact even to our very day? Who can persuadeus to receive one book in reverence but to exclude another, unless the church



On that view, the church bestowed an authority on the chosen texts thatthey did not possess antecedently in themselves, rather than acknowledging theirinherent authority. If so, Scripture cannot be ‘the Word of God’. The church canperhaps decree a certain writing to be canonical and authoritative, but it can hardlydecree that God should speak in it, if it is not already the case that God speaks init. Thus, ‘we believe that the Word which is contained in these books proceededfrom God, from whom alone it derives its authority, and not from humans’ (CFG,5). It is logically impossible for the books in question both to be Word of God andto derive their authority from human decisions. This logical error poses an acutethreat:

We firmly maintain, therefore, of those who wish Scripture to possess onlysuch authority as is conceded to it by the decisions of the church, that theyblaspheme against God and insult the true church – which hears the voice ofits own Spouse and Shepherd, and obeys it, and does not arrogate to itself anauthority over it.30

The Word of God is the Voice of the Good Shepherd, which the church must hear andobey and not control or dominate. The ascription of supreme authority to the textover against the community is wholly dependent on the identification of Scripturewith the Word of God. If the Bible is not divine speech, then it may well derive itsauthority from the interpretative community that is its natural habitat. If it is divinespeech, its authority must be inherent to it, for it participates in the self-groundeddivine authority:

The authority of the holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed,dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God(who is truth itself ), the Author thereof; and therefore it is to be received,because it is the Word of God.31

The fundamental role the Reformed confessions assign to the ‘Word of God’ modelof Scripture is once again evident. This is the point on which their doctrines ofScripture stand or fall. Here, identification with the Word of God means that theauthority of Scripture cannot be dependent on the church.

Yet the Word of God still consists in a selection of humanly authored writings,and it is important to know which these writings are and what the basis is for theirselection. The church’s testimony to the canon is not to be despised, but it is notdecisive. Following a listing of the canonical writings of the Old and NewTestaments, it can be said of them:

prescribe a sure rule for all these matters? (Institutes of the Christian Religion, i.7.1(ET Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960))

30 ICS, 19 (= Confessio Fidei Scoticana I (1560)); Schaff, Creeds, 1.680–5 (introduction),3.437–79 (texts). The translation is from the Latin version.

31 WCF, 1.4.


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We know these to be canonical, and the sure rule of our faith, not so much by thecommon accord and consent of the church as by the testimony and inwardpersuasion of the Holy Spirit, which enables us to differentiate them from otherecclesiastical books upon which, however useful they may be, no article of faithmay be founded.32

The distinction between ‘canonical’ and ‘ecclesiastical’ books refers to theApocrypha, and reflects the Reformers’ acceptance of the restricted Hebrew canon –a minority view within the Western church, derived from Jerome and Rufinus.33 Yetthis article is not primarily concerned with the Apocrypha, but with the basis onwhich canonical authority may be affirmed. Traditionally, canonical authority is heldto rest on an external basis, ‘the common accord and consent of the church’. But thetraditional view is here passed over, and an internal basis for canonical authority isasserted: ‘the testimony and inward persuasion of the Holy Spirit’. This testimonycan only occur in the experience of reading. In reading a canonical book, one findsoneself persuaded that in it God spoke once and still speaks. In reading other books,one experiences no such conviction – even if they are otherwise useful and helpful.Quite apart from the church, we notice the difference as we read.34

The testimony of the Spirit is not to be understood individualistically. Aconfession is an inherently communal document; even if it has a single author, it isa collectivity that speaks in it. It is therefore not an individual reader but a readingcommunity that has become inwardly convinced that some books but not othersconstitute canonical Scripture, the Word of God. Sixteenth-century Reformedreaders are inwardly persuaded by the Holy Spirit that Matthew, Mark, Luke andJohn are the only canonical Gospels, but presumably that was also the case withthose catholic readers of the late second century who took the same view, andwith their successors who confirmed the decision they took. There must be a subjectivebasis to the formation and preservation of the canon, as well as an objective one. Ifcertain writings are to function as canonical Scripture, their origin in the divinespeaking must be humanly acknowledged, through the testimony of the Holy Spirit.The God who speaks in these texts must also ensure their human reception: that is thebasis for the conviction that the church’s traditional view of the contents of the canonis essentially correct. Reformed Christians have no new texts to add, and the texts ofthe Apocrypha that they wish to remove are of limited significance. It might seem,then, that ‘the testimony and inward persuasion of the Holy Spirit’ cannot be sharplydifferentiated from ‘the common accord and consent of the church’. The question iswhy the confession feels the need to marginalize the testimony of the church, even at

32 CFG, 4.33 Rufinus, De Fide et Symbolo, 38 (ET in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers III, pp. 541–63);

Jerome, Prologus in Libris Salomonis, Biblia Sacra Vulgata (Stuttgart: DeutscheBibelgesellschaft, 1994), p. 957. According to Jerome, the church reads these books ‘forthe edification of the people, not to confirm the authority of the church’s dogmas’.

34 Elsewhere the exclusion of the texts of the Apocrypha is simply asserted (39A, 6) orjustified by their lack of ‘power and efficacy’ (CB 6) or divine inspiration (WCF, 1.3).



a point like this where it is potentially supportive. And the answer is that the church isnot only the place where the canonical texts are correctly identified as such, but also theplace where they are systematically misinterpreted, and where canonical authority isperversely ascribed to the misinterpretations themselves.

At issue here are two different conceptions of the text. According to the accountrejected by the Reformed confessions, the text is wholly bounded by its communallocation. As a thing in itself and apart from the community, it is obscure andambiguous. It could mean many things, or nothing at all; it could point its readers inany number of different directions. Thus, it is the community – in the person of itsaccredited representatives – that must authoritatively determine the meaning andsignificance of the text. Lacking an independent voice of its own, the text must echo thevoice of the community.35 If we ask (borrowing from Stanley Fish), ‘Is there a text inthis community?’, the answer is that there is not – if by ‘text’ we mean an entity witha being and a dynamic of its own, dictating the terms of its own reception, speaking inits own voice rather than merely providing the occasion for a meaning imposed byexternal authority. If the text is inherently ambiguous, then true authority will residewith those who collectively determine its meaning. The text is the problem to whichauthorized interpretation is the solution. But if the text can speak clearly for itself, it isthe authorized interpretation that is the problem, in so far as it makes the text say whatin reality it does not say. Does the text possess its own communicative agency, or isit an inert, passive, directionless entity whose meaning and significance must beassigned to it by its authorized readers? That is the hermeneutical issue underlying thesense that the church itself poses a dire threat to its own sacred texts.36

As a result, these confessions cultivate a certain suspicion of pre-Reformationexegesis and theology, on which they are in reality everywhere dependent:

35 In the realm of the papacy, according to Luther:

nothing is more commonly stated or more generally accepted than the idea that thescriptures are obscure and ambiguous, so that the spirit to interpret them must besought from the Apostolic See of Rome. Nothing more pernicious could be said thanthis, for it has led the ungodly to set themselves above the scriptures and to fabricatewhatever they pleased . . . (On the Bondage of the Will, ET in E.G. Rupp et al., eds.,Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation (Louisville: Westminster John KnoxPress, 2006), pp. 158–9)

36 This construal of the Scripture/tradition issue is dependent on Stanley Fish’s influentialclaim that textual meaning is determined by and within ‘interpretive communities’.In Fish’s account, ‘the text as an entity independent of interpretation and (ideally)responsible for its career drops out and is replaced by the texts that emerge as theconsequence of our interpretive activities’ (Is There a Text in This Class? The Authorityof Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 13).It seems to me that Fish must continue to presuppose a not-yet-interpreted text that ispassive, inert, obscure and directionless, but that at least constitutes the occasion forthe interpretative activity in which it is not so much written as rewritten. With thatemendation, Fish’s interpretation-theory is closely analogous to the one the Reformersattributed to their opponents.


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We do not despise the interpretations of the holy Greek and Latin fathers, nor dowe reject their disputations and treatises as far as they agree with the scriptures;but we do modestly dissent from them when they are found to set down thingsdifferent from, or altogether contrary to, the scriptures.37

On this view, serious interpretative errors are to be expected not just from theideologues of the sixteenth-century papacy but even from the revered figures ofthe patristic period. It is assumed that the church poses a constant threat to its ownScriptures. The question is whether a disjunction of text and community is theinevitable and necessary response, or whether they can be coordinated in ways thatavoid reducing the text to passivity.

Gadamer’s concept of Wirkungsgeschichte is valuable at this point. Accordingto Gadamer, we are who we are by virtue of the traditions we inhabit. While wemay react variously to our formation within particular traditions, we can neverescape from it, for it is a mark of our finitude that we are particular and notuniversal beings. Yet Gadamer’s main concern is with texts, seen not so muchas the product of traditions but as themselves generative of traditions.Wirkungsgeschichte or ‘effective-history’ ascribes historical agency to significanttexts. Gadamer’s term is not a mere synonym for ‘history of interpretation’. It isall too possible to study the history of interpretation on the assumption that textsare passive entities that take on whatever characteristics their readers ascribe tothem.38 In Gadamer’s model, however, texts possess an agency or Wirkung of theirown. The history of their interpretation is a history of reception, the community’sadjustment to an impetus deriving from outside its own boundaries. Texts have thepower to initiate a dialogue with their readers, the object of which is the ‘truth’mediated through the text which must be sought afresh in each new context, witha view to the ‘fusion of horizons’ of text and reader. It is this ongoing dialogue thatconstitutes the ‘tradition’ generated by the text. In one sense, the communitybestows authority on some texts but not others, elevating them to the status of the‘classic’, the text that one ‘ought’ to read or to have read because of the high valueaccorded to it. In another sense, this bestowal of authority is an acknowledgementof an inherent authority. Elevation to classic or canonical status is a responsegenerated by the text itself. Text and community each has its own form of agency,the one initiatory, the other responsive. There is no question of one side beingreduced to passivity by the other, in the form either of a text that imposes itsmeaning in totalitarian fashion, or of a reading community that reconstructs the

37 2CH, 2.2.38 Compare Fowl’s claim that ‘our discussions, debates, and arguments about texts will be

better served by eliminating claims about textual meaning in favor of more preciseaccounts of our interpretive aims, interests, and practices’ (Engaging Scripture, p. 56; myemphasis). The concept of Wirkungsgeschichte provides a way out of this fatal dichotomybetween the text and its readers.



text in its own self-image. If such cases occur at all, they are pathologicaldeformations of the true relationship between text and community.

From the standpoint of the Reformed confessions, Gadamer’s account has itslimitations. Traditions may be generated by the scriptural texts, but they may also beconstructed with wilful disregard for the texts – as in the case of the merely humantraditions that distort the gospel, against which the Reformers polemicize. Arguably,Gadamer’s model merely grafts a Protestant view of textual agency onto a Catholicview of tradition as an organic unfolding, free from conflict and contradiction.Yet themodel does allow space for interpretative conflict (even though this point is notdeveloped by Gadamer himself ).39 To engage in the dialogue initiated by the textis already to acknowledge that earlier interpretation is no longer adequate. Itslimitations have become clear, and its interpretative results cannot simply berepeated. There is room here for the suspicion that even the great theologians andinterpreters of the patristic period may have misinterpreted the texts in importantrespects. Their misinterpretations will not consist just in simple errors but also inperceptions and assumptions reflecting their cultural conditioning – the limitations ofwhich, in retrospect, now seem evident. It is precisely this sense of the inadequacyof previous interpretations that motivates renewed dialogue with the text, undertakenwithin a new set of cultural conditions.

Yet a generalized, pervasive suspicion of the community in which reception andinterpretation takes place is inappropriate. It reflects an anxiety that the text has notbeen able to resist its own reduction to passivity at the hands of the interpretativecommunity. Yet, if there is a textual agency at all, and if this agency is also that ofthe divine agent whose Word the text announces, general communicative failure isimplausible. While the overriding Reformed concern is to propagate the new readingof Scripture that is taking shape in the present, that is in principle compatible witha positive assessment of readings inherited from the past. An early Reformedconfession makes exactly this point. Having referred to the ‘rule of charity and faith’that must guide the interpretation of Scripture, it adds:

Where the holy fathers do not depart from an interpretation along these lines, wenot only regard them as true interpreters of scripture but revere them as chosenvessels of God.40

Where one interprets Scripture in the expectation of being instructed bythose who preceded us in the interpretation of Scripture, the text is restoredto its proper relationship to the community. The nontheological concept of

39 Compare Jürgen Habermas’s claim, in the context of debate with Gadamer, that the‘sheer fact that there is such a thing as tradition has within it a moment of flexibility: whathas been handed down must also be subject to revision, for otherwise the nonidenticalmoment in the group identity being maintained would be destroyed’ (On the Logic of theSocial Sciences (ET Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p. 164).

40 1CH, 3.


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Wirkungsgeschichte can help to differentiate the true form of this relationship fromits deformations.

Reason and the divine address

As we have seen, conceptuality drawn from general or philosophical hermeneuticscan help to address problems of one-sidedness within the doctrine of Scripture or itslater development. It has enabled us to identify and overcome the false dichotomiesthat divide the past of divine speech from its present, and the canonical text from itscommunal location. These are, however, issues internal to the doctrine of Scripture.Given the fundamental identification of Scripture as Word of God, we have enquiredinto the relationship between this written Word of God and temporality on theone hand and its communal mediation on the other. Yet, arguably, this kind ofclarification or adjustment fails to address the real question, which is whether theequation of Scripture and Word of God is tenable at all. If this equation isfundamental to the so-called ‘doctrine of Scripture’, then this doctrine shouldperhaps be seen as a relic of pre-Enlightenment conceptuality that is of little morethan historical interest today. On this view, the idea that we are divinely addressed ina written text has been so severely eroded that a quite different paradigm is required.There is no shortage of more-or-less helpful alternatives on offer. Perhaps it issufficient simply to regard the canonical writings as communally normative, withoutreference to a divine authorship? Perhaps we should conclude that, ‘if one wants touse Word-of-God type language, the proper term for the Bible would be Word ofIsrael, Word of some leading early Christians’?41 After the Enlightenment, the oldequation of Bible and Word of God has only limited currency in the marketplace oftheological concepts.

In what follows, I shall offer a diagnosis of why this is the case, with some helpfrom Kant and Schleiermacher. We will again have recourse to nontheologicalhermeneutical conceptuality – not because specifically theological conceptuality isnecessarily deficient in this area, and certainly not because nontheologicalconceptuality is inherently superior, but for purely pragmatic reasons.

In his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone,42 Immanuel Kant offers a‘rational’ account of biblical and Christian doctrine. According to this account, thebiblical narratives are to be read as articulations of moral concepts integral to ourhumanity, truths that do not need to be communicated to us by any external agencybecause we already have immediate access to them. For example, we are aware thatas humans we are by nature either morally good or evil, that we must freely chooseto be either one or the other, and that in practice we have mysteriously succumbed

41 James Barr, The Bible in the Modern World (London: SCM Press, 1973), p. 120.42 Citations from Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, are from the

ET by T.M. Green and H.T. Hudson (New York: Harper and Row, 1960). The Germanoriginal (1793) is entitled Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft.



to the evil of self-love, from which we need to liberate ourselves through the morallaw that is also the law of our own being. There is nothing ‘supernatural’ about thisknowledge. We do not need a divinely inspired text to inform us of our situation,for our inherent reasoning capacity gives us immediate access to a self-understanding along these lines. Thus, the biblical text does not and cannot tell usanything that we do not already know. Scriptural narrative must be interpreted asthe secondary expression of a prior self-knowledge. In the fall story of Genesis 3,for example, the text speaks of a supernatural agent (Satan, in the form of theserpent) to express the inconceivability of the ground from which moral evilsprings. While we know that in reality this ground lies only in ourselves, the storypresents it as an external agent in which the hidden depths of our own nature arepersonified. Correspondingly, the Gospels present in pictorial form the victory ofthe good principle over the evil one. In the figure of the Redeemer, we are to seeourselves portrayed in idealized form:

Even though there had never existed an individual who yielded unqualifiedobedience to [the] law, the objective necessity of being such a one would yet beundiminished and self-evident. We need, therefore, no empirical example tomake the idea of a person morally well-pleasing to God our archetype; for thisidea is already present in our reason.43

The presence of this archetype in the human soul is in itself incomprehensibleenough without our adding to its supernatural origin the assumption that it ishypostasized in a particular individual. The elevation of such a holy personabove all the frailties of human nature would rather . . . hinder the adoption ofthe idea of such a person for our imitation.44

The Gospels, then, tell us nothing that we do not already know. In them, we read notof an Other but of ourselves, for they merely give expression to our self-knowledgewithin the limitations of pictorial form. Ostensibly speaking of the accidental truthsof history, they speak in reality of the universally necessary truths of reason:

Once this vivid mode of representation, which was in its time no doubtnecessary for popular comprehension, is divested of its mystical veil, it is easyto see that . . . [the Bible’s] spirit and rational meaning are valid and binding forthe whole world and for all time, since to each person it lies so near at hand thathe knows his duty towards it.45

It is therefore our duty ‘to discover in scripture that sense which harmonizes with themost holy teachings of reason’.46 This reason is our very own reason, and Scriptureis therefore the (flawed and limited) projection of human autonomy. It is not a ‘Word

43 Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone Religion, p. 56.44 Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone Religion, p. 57.45 Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone Religion, p. 78.46 Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone Religion, p. 78.


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of God’, addressing us from outside ourselves. It is our very own Word, which musturgently be reclaimed as such from the arbitrariness of its official expositors.47

Kant’s work is the forerunner of all more recent attempts to interpret Scriptureon the basis of an ethical-political criterion that is already known independently ofthe texts. Scripture can only say what the criterion allows it to say, and what it isallowed to say is only what we can already say to ourselves even without Scripture.The textual embodiment of the criterion is of only limited usefulness, for theparticularity of biblical narrative is an imperfect and potentially misleading vehiclefor the universal truths of reason or for the various contemporary projects ofliberation. Textuality is dissolved back into speech, and the speech in question is thatof self-affirmation rather than a communication proceeding from one to another. Inimposing the criterion of what is already knowable and known, one deprivesScripture not just of its claim to embody ‘revelation’ but above all of its otherness,its form as address. As Word of God, Scripture embodies the address of an Otherwho seeks our participation in his own triune being by way of this address. Asrepresentation of our prior moral knowledge, Scripture ceases to communicate. Wespeak without being spoken to.

In response to this Kantian subversion of scriptural otherness, the resources ofthe hermeneutical tradition lie to hand. As defined by Schleiermacher, hermeneuticsis ‘the art of understanding’. In the programmatic first thesis of his 1819 lectureseries on hermeneutics, Schleiermacher writes:

Hermeneutics as the art of understanding does not yet exist in a general manner;there are instead only several forms of special hermeneutics.48

The special, discipline-specific hermeneutics are piecemeal in nature and lack theintellectual rigour of general hermeneutics – the new discipline whose adventSchleiermacher here announces. The new discipline does not belong to philosophy,since the philosopher’s concern is not normally to understand the discourse of others:

The philosopher has no inclination, as philosopher, to establish this theory [ofgeneral hermeneutics]. He is seldom interested in understanding, assuming thatit occurs by necessity.49

47 This rejection of scriptural otherness is more fundamental to Kant’s position than thefeatures underlined by Hans Frei – the traditional Protestant interest in conversion,the recovery of canonical unity, the renewed practice of allegorical interpretation(The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth CenturyHermeneutics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 264). Like Frei,Karl Barth too emphasizes the relative proximity of Kant’s work to traditional theologicalconceptuality (Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (ET London: SCM Press,1972), pp. 150–96).

48 Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics §1. For bibliographical details, see n. 4, above. I havedrawn on both the extant English translations. References are to the simplifiedenumeration of the Cambridge edition, and not to page numbers.

49 Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics, §2.1.



Philosophical work consists primarily in giving an account of its ethical, physicalor metaphysical subject-matter, not with the understanding of discourse in itsspoken and especially its written forms. That is (wrongly) thought to pose nospecial problems. Thus philosophy is independent and self-generating, whereashermeneutics is dependent on the prior utterance of another. As the art ofunderstanding, hermeneutics is the converse and corollary of the art of speaking:

The art of speaking and of understanding stand opposite each other andcorrespond to each other.50

Hermeneutics and rhetoric are intimately related in that every act ofunderstanding is the converse of an act of speaking, requiring one to grasp thethought that underlies the statement.51

Understanding is receptivity to the communication of another. Without beingaddressed by another, there can be no understanding, for there would be nothing tounderstand. To be addressed is to be perceived as one who lacks a knowledge ofwhatever is to be communicated, and as one who is in need of this knowledge. Acommunication may entail more than the impartation of a knowledge that is lackingand necessary – if, for example, it takes the form of a command or a promise; butit will not entail less than that. Similarly, it may well intend more than tobe understood, but not less than that. Understanding is fundamental, for withoutunderstanding any other actions intended in the communication cannot beforthcoming. A command or a promise must be understood before the consequentactions can be undertaken.52

This understanding is oriented both towards the language and towards thespeaker. Understanding is oriented towards language, in that any utterance requiresa prior knowledge of relevant linguistic conventions if it is to be understood.Understanding is oriented towards the speaker, in that any utterance is an eventwithin the specific context shared by speaker and hearer:

Just as every utterance is related both to the totality of the language and to thetotality of the speaker’s thoughts, so understanding always involves two

50 Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics, §3.51 Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics, §4.2.52 Focusing exclusively on ‘understanding’, Schleiermacher shows no awareness of the

illocutionary dimension of language. According to Woltersdorff, ‘illocutionary actionssuch as commanding, promising, and asserting’ are not instances of ‘communication’,that is, ‘the transmission . . . of knowledge (or true belief ) from one person to another’(Divine Discourse, p. 32). That would tend to undermine Schleiermacher’s assumptionthat understanding is intended in all speech-acts without exception. Yet to ‘understand’ acommand or promise is to acquire knowledge or true beliefs: that the speaker expectsa response from me (obedience or trust), that he or she considers our relationship to besuch that expecting such a response is reasonable and realistic, and so on. The limitationsof Schleiermacher’s theory of language do not seriously impair his hermeneutical theory.


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moments, of understanding the utterance in the context of the language and as anevent in the thinking of the speaker . . . 53

This observation gives birth to the two types of interpretation Schleiermacheridentifies and distinguishes, the ‘grammatical’ and the ‘psychological’, the oneoriented towards langue, the linguistic conventions deployed in the speech-act, theother towards parole, the speech-act as the act of a specific agent. There is noquestion of playing these possibilities off against one another, for ‘understandingonly takes place in the conjunction of these two moments’.54 The relationship of atext to a specific cultural-linguistic system does not detract from its relationship to itsauthor. Conversely, an understanding of the text in relation to its author does notexempt one from engagement with language and context. The author is present inand with the language of the text, and not apart from it.

For our present purpose (which is to identify and repudiate Kant’s subversion ofscriptural otherness), Schleiermacher’s ‘art of understanding’ proves particularlyuseful. According to Kant, there is no lack or necessity – no exigence – that wouldrequire humans to be addressed in Scripture by another, that is, by God. In andthrough the vivid scriptural imagery, practical reason communes with itself aboutitself. Schleiermacher shows in principle how reason’s soliloquizing might bereplaced by the address of one to another. In contrast to Kant and other philosophers,he proposes a general hermeneutics that assumes the fundamental status of languageand thus of speech and speakers, texts and addressees. According to the newdiscipline, understanding is consequent upon speaking, the communicative action ofa speaker which is itself preceded by language, the medium of communication.Hermeneutics is significant if and only if we are to view ourselves as mostfundamentally objects of another’s address, and not as subjects in and through whomreason communes with itself.

This analysis may be extended to the divine speaking (although Schleiermacherhimself has little recourse to this concept).55 To seek to understand the Bible, or anyother text, is to perceive oneself as addressed in it by an Other. This address entailsnot only the self-expression of the speaker (the point on which Schleiermacherprefers to dwell) but also a total communicative situation in which communicationpresupposes an exigence on the part of the addressee, which the speaker seeks toredress by way of the communication. The Bible is the Word of God in that, by wayof prophetic and apostolic writings, God speaks in it to address us in our exigence –

53 Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics, §5.54 Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics, §6.55 Schleiermacher ‘does not seem to have considered the possibility’ that what is

encountered in the scriptural text might be ‘the truth or Word of God . . . [H]ere we comeup against the frontier beyond which we do not pass in Schleiermacher’ (Karl Barth, TheTheology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923/24, ed.Dietrich Ritschl (ET Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), p. 183).Yet a general hermeneuticswhich remains within the sphere of purely human discourse may be theologically usefulprecisely as such.



that is, in our need to hear a word spoken to us by another because (pace Kant) wecannot articulate the final, decisive word about our being for ourselves.

Conclusion

As we have seen, the doctrine of Scripture ‘needs’ hermeneutics in the sense thathermeneutics provides conceptual resources for addressing some of the problemsthat this doctrine has historically encountered – problems with the very idea of a‘Word of God’, addressed to us by an Other, together with problems in clarifyingthe relationship of this written Word of God to temporality and to its communallocation. There is no reason in principle why we should use general hermeneuticalresources to address these problems, rather than exclusively theological ones. Itwas simply that these resources were to hand, and that they proved useful inpractice. It proved helpful to allow our view of Scripture to be informed byanalysis of, first, the phenomenon of writing; second, the text’s community-shaping potential; and third, the textual embodiment of otherness. There is noquestion here of seeking a foundation for the doctrine of Scripture in generalhermeneutical theory. Equally, there should be no question of renouncing suchnontheological resources as these merely because they are nontheological.Different theological tasks require eclectic use of a variety of conceptual tools, andthis has always been the case.

Do hermeneutics and the doctrine of Scripture ‘need each other’? Why shouldhermeneutics need the doctrine of Scripture, even in the restricted pragmatic sense inwhich the doctrine of Scripture needs hermeneutics? If general hermeneutics isnot a foundational discipline, then it needs to justify its own significance innonfoundational terms. Abstract reflection on textuality, reading and so forth has nojustification as a self-contained and self-sufficient discourse. Rather, its role andrationale is to offer conceptual resources for those engaged in specific practices ofinterpretation and in reflection on those practices.

Interpretative practices are different in some respects, similar in others. In thecase of scriptural interpretation, the doctrine of Scripture asserts that these texts aredifferent from other texts and that they should therefore be read differently. Incontrast, hermeneutics finds similarities or analogies between the phenomena oftextuality and reading in this field and in others. Difference and similarity can coexistwithout difficulty. There is no reason to orient ourselves towards one side to theexclusion of the other, as though some matter of principle were at stake.56 What is at

56 According to Webster (‘Hermeneutics in Modern Theology’, p. 58), the concern toestablish

the commonplaces and overlaps between Christian and other acts of reading . . .often serves the purpose of underwriting a foundational anthropology which eclipseswhat in fact is most interesting about what happens when Christians read the


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stake here is the renewal of the doctrine of Scripture, within the wider context ofthe renewal of Christian doctrine. It is a matter of some importance to show that thetriune God acknowledged in Christian faith is a God who acts and who does not actwithout speaking, addressing his speech to us in the communally normative writingswe call ‘Holy Scripture’.

Bible: that the Bible as text is the viva vox Dei addressing the people of God andgenerating faith and obedience.

In this article, I have tried to show that what is ‘often’ the case need not be the case.



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Hermeneutics and the Doctrine of Scripture: Why They Need Each Other