trinities

“I thank thee, O Lord, that Thou hast given me the ability
to quickly read this copy of The Message, and easily discern
what it really means, unlike that jerk Flanders.”

Some interesting and disturbing comments from R.P.C. Hanson, on Bible interpretation in the era of the 4th century “Arian” controversy. This comes near the end of this magisterial book, after he’s given numerous examples of exegesis - the good, bad, and the ugly - from that era.

The last word on the appeal to the Bible during this crucial period… must be of the impression made on a student of the period that the expounders of the text of the Bible are incompetent and ill-prepared to expound it. This applies as much to the wooden and unimaginative approach of the Arians as it does to the fixed determination of their [pro-Nicene] opponents to read their doctrine back into the Bible by hook or by crook. This impression emerges strongly in the fact that time and time again both sides produce diametrically different meanings from the same text, sometimes neither of them convincing. We must make allowance, of course, that nobody, except perhaps Didymus, knew the original Hebrew of the Old Testament, and indeed nobody gave it a thought. We must realize that the Latin speakers were labouring under a double disadvantage in that their Bible came to them in the form of a not particularly good translation of the Greek which itself as far as concerns the Old Testament was a very uneven translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic. But it is not so much the errors arising out of mistranslation that impeded a full understanding of the Bible by the theologians of the fourth century. It was much morethe presuppositions with which the approached the Biblical text that clouded their perceptions, the tendency to treat the Bible in an ‘atomic way’ as if each verse or set of verses was capable of giving direct information about Christian doctrines apart from its context, the ‘oracular’ concept of the nature of the Bible, the incapacity with a few exceptions to take serious account of the background and circumstances and period of the writers. The very reverence with which the honoured the bible as a sacred book stood in the way of their understanding it. In this matter they were of course only reproducing the presuppositions of all Christians before them, of the writers of the New Testament itself, of the tradition of Jewish rabbinic piety and scholarship. If the long and involved dispute resulting in leading figures like Athanasius to some extent standing back from the Bible and asking what was its intention, its drift… instead of plunging into a discussion of its details based on an imperfect understanding of them, this was a gain and not an unworthy attempt to evade the strict meaning of Scripture. (pp. 848-9, emphases added)

I’ve worried some about this problem: the NT authors sometimes make rather free use of the OT. Sometimes they make a point that seems to depend on a mistranslation, misreading, or disputed text. Sometimes they allegorize rather boldly. Sometimes they give an entirely new twist to some little detail of the text. Now, many times when looking at certain trinitarian theologians, past and present, I consider them interpretive lamers because they rip some passage or even a single word way out of context, merrily reading their own thoughts into the NT text in question. What makes it unobjectionable for NT writers to do this, whereas it is out of line for later theologians to do it? I’m somewhat aware of liberal (”nothing”) and Catholic and Orthodox (”we’re the true successors of the apostles and thus the authorized interpreters of the whole tradition”) answers, but don’t like them.

One thought - not too sure how helpful it is. Just because a NT author is referring to a text, it doesn’t always mean that he’s appealing to it to actually support his current claim. He may be using it illustratively, to make a point, a point which he assumes he has some other grounds for.

Another thought: if the text is God-inspired, God is the ultimate author, and authorial intent may include a lot more than the human author had in mind. God may have even meant the text to be taken different ways in different circumstances.

These are truisms. But what worries me is a sort of providential fallacy, which goes like this. “Me and my group say that passage X means Y. God foreknew and foreordained that me and my group should think this, so he always intended that we should read passage X as meaning Y. Thus, Y is what X means.” Or similarly, a pneumatic fallacy (yeah, I just made that up): “We (unlike our wicked miscreant opponents) have the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth. We say it means P. Therefore, it means P.”

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