Adversus Haereses?

Paul Chantler, John Pottage, David Tombs

The early Church engaged in a trenchant, philosophical debate

over the nature of scriptural interpretation. Some writers on
hermeneutical method showed great insight and perspicacity;
others seemed to make less of the problem it raised than they
ought. Although most held some general view of inspiration of the
scriptures, it was more often over the question of interpretation
that they disagreed. We shall examine one or two of the philo-
sophical difficulties of hermeneutics which were raised by early
Christians and which are debated still.
I
There were, of course, many areas of disagreement about how
scripture ought to be interpreted but we can distinguish two major
schools of thought, both of which cover a broad spectrum of
ideas: the literalists and the allegorists.
a) The literalists: these were the people who believed that scrip-
ture could, somehow or other, be taken “at face value”; that there
is an obvious and evident meaning of the text or, alternatively,
that there is no hidden meaning.
A great literalist was Porphyry (c. 230 - c. 305), one of Christi-
anity’s detractors. He attacked the allegorising tendency in the
Church when he wrote of those “who boast that the things said
plainly by Moses are riddles, treating them as divine oracles, full
of hidden mysteries, and bewitching the mental judgment by their
own pretentious obscurity, and so they put forward their own
interpretations” (Against the Christians, 111). The attack did not
always come from those outside the Church. Clement of Alexan-
dria (c. 150 - c 2 15) denounced those who do not accept the scrip-
ture at its face value: “but selecting ambiguous expressions, they
wrest them to their own opinions, gathering a few expressions,
here and there; not looking to the sense, but making use of the
mere diction . . . they attend to the words alone, while they alter
the meanings, neither knowing how they are spoken nor using the
quotations they adduce according to their true nature” (Stroma-
reis, vii 16). A wonderfully ambiguous passage!
b) The allegorists: of course, not all those who were non-literalists
were allegorists but we shall use this title because allegorical inter-
pretation was a device common to many.
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 Possibly as early as A.D. 70 (?) there is, in the Epistle of Bar-
nabas, a strong allegorising tendency. The author of Barnabas
thought that the Jews “shipwrecked” themselves because they
took the scriptures literally and not “according to the Spirit”. In-
deed, understanding the meaning according to the Spirit became a
somewhat elitist activity, requiring such things as knowledge of
philosophy. Clement (of Alexandria) tells us that Origen “instruct-
ed many of the less learned in the common school branches (of
philosophy), saying that these would be of no small help to them
in the study and understanding of the divine scriptures” (Strom.
vi 18). It seems that Origen (c. 185-254) accepted a three-fold
division of meaning in scripture:
“The right way, therefore . . . of approaching the scriptures
and gathering their meaning is the following, which is extract-
ed from the documents themselves . . . One must record the
meaning of the sacred writings in a three-fold way upon one’s
soul; so that the simple man may be edified by what we may
call the flesh of the scripture, this name being given to the
obvious interpretation; while the man who has made some
progress may be edified by its soul, as it were; and the man
who is perfect . . . may be edified by the spiritual law . . . for
just as man consists of body, soul and spirit, so in the same
way does the scripture, which has been prepared by God to be
given for man’s salvation.” (De Principiis, iv.2.4)
Origen, however, saw that interpretation according to the soul and
the spirit is somehow tied to that according to the flesh: “The care-
ful reader will detect thousands of passages like this (Genesis 1)
in the gospels, which will convince him that events which did not
take place at all are woven into records of what did happen” (De
Prin. iv.3.1).
Origen, and other Alexandrians, used the historical life of the
“human” Jesus as a point of departure for their quest for the spir-
itual truth and meaning of scripture. But even this presupposition
was attacked by those allegorists p w excellence, the gnostics. The
Valentinians, for example, dismissed as “literalism” the Church
Fathers’ “historical” view of the gospels. They claimed that evqn
the simplest narratives constitute allegories. In fact, the single
common link between the diverse methods and results of gnostic
interpretation was the belief that the Christians’ basic error was
their preoccupation with the historical reality of Jesus. Although
some, such as Heracleon, did not deny the historicity of all the
events in the gospels, they denied rather that the events have any
importance in themselves - on a literal understanding. In support
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of this,gnostics turned to the number of passages where Jesus re-
bukes his hearers for understanding solely on a literal level (e.g.
Nicodemus, John 3; the Samaritan woman, John 4; and Peter is
the worst offender [see Irenaeus, Adv. Huer. 3.12.93). For the
gnostics, “the literal level of any text, then, including that of the
gospels, offers only the outward manifestation of inner meaning;
it contains the metaphorical form of the ineffable truth”.2
For the most part then, the debate was between those who
accepted an evident (“literal”) meaning plus a hidden (“spiritual”,
usually allegorical) one, and those who accepted an evident mean-
ing only.
It was not only those who reflected upon the text of scripture,
however, who exercised the hermeneutical freedom of people like
the gnostics. The gospel writers themselves, for example, although
they do not say anything explicitly about their own hermeneutical
methods do displa9 tendencies which reflect a certain freedom of
interpretation. For example, if, as is likely, the author(s) of John
knew Mark then his placing of the Cleansing of the Temple and his
demythologised eschatology (among many other things) cannot
reasonably be accounted for except on the basis of a theological
motivation being allowed to suppress historical accuracy. That is,
we might reasonably assume that John exercised some hermeneu-
tical presuppositions in his reconstruction of Markan chronology
and Markan accounts of Jesus’ teaching.
I1
It is possibly the fact that allegorical method was the major
hermeneutical device of the early centuries that leads many to
assume that it is only since the “Lives” of Strauss (1835) and
Renan (1863) that it has been considered impossible to extricate
fact from fiction in the gospel stories. We believe, however, that
the Church Fathers, and even the gnostics, were rather more aware
of this difficulty than is sometimes assumed.
Professor Bornkamm’s assertion that “no-one is any longer in
the position to write a life of Jesus”3 encapsulates the general
trend of recent twentieth century opinion. Indeed, Bornkamm
goes on to note that “mathematical certainty in the exposition of
a bare history of Jesus, unembellished by faith, is ~nattainable”.~
But if this is the case, what can the historian hope to achieve? We
can answer this question, in some degree, by noting the trendsin
the development of hermeneutics itself.
The aim of the initial (objectivist) theories of hermeneutics of
the nineteenth century was to render biblical criticism as equally
objective as scientific procedures. This type of hermeneutic
attempted a reconstruction free from bias, prejudice and other
406
(often polemical) interests of the writer. The nineteenth century
quests for the historical Jesus typified this method. After Schweit-
zer, it came to be seen, however, that objectivity is not attainable.
The historian or interpreter cannot be free from self-interest and
influence, as G Radnitzsky has pointed out: “. . . the social discip-
lines have been too exclusively guided by internal interest^".^
With existentialist hermeneutics, the subject of debate became
subjectivity. Bultmann, for example, argued that anthropological,
or better, existential interpretation (rather than cosmological)
should be applied to the Bible. Authenticity and subjectivity are
not mutually exclusive and so the interpreter’s predisposition is
brought out into the open: “from the interest of the subject arises
the nature of the formulation of the enquiry, the direction of the
in~estigation”.~ Theological hermeneutics thus comes to be seen
as for the sake of the preaching of the Church and the life of faith.
If this is so, then the predisposition of the interpreter becomes vital
and itself important; interpretation is now governed by the inter-
preter’s existence and so interpretation changes as (interpreters’)
cultures change.
Bultmann’s pupil, H G Gadamer, took existentialist hermeneu-
tics one step further in his dialogic theory of hermeneutics. Gada-
mer argues that: “Actually, history does not belong to us, rather
we belong to it. Long before we understand ourselves in retrospect,
we understand ourselves as a matter of course in the family, soci-
ety, and state in which we live . . . the self-interpretation of the
individual is only a flicker in the closed-circuit of historical life”.’
Thus, while the existential theory sees the interpreter as a lone
individual faced with the message of the text, the dialogic sees him
as historically rooted in an opportunity for dialogue with the text:
“The work of hermeneutics is a conversation with the text”.* The
interpreter considers the text within a given “horizon” - the men-
tal range which circumscribes and includes everything visible from
his view-point - and this horizon can be broadened as his experi-
ence is broadened.
The fourth hermeneutic trend draws upon elements of the first
three but adds, often under the influence of Marxist theory, the
notion of praxis. J M Bonino states that: “we think always out of
a deffite context of relations and actions, out of a given praxis.
What Bultmann has so convincingly argued concerning pre-under-
standing must be deepened and made more concrete, but in the
concrete condition of men who belong to a certain time and people
and class . . . who reflect and read the texts within and without of
these condition^".^ So also, Schillebeeckx contends that “theolo-
gians . . . often have a barely idealist conception of history, they
407
tend to regard the history of the church’s kerygma and her dogma
purely as a kind of history of ideas”.’ History is a’sphere of hum-
an activity which emanates from the interpreter’s questions and
answers, so orthopraxis is an essential element in the hermeneuti-
cal process: “. . . it is in any case certain, on the basis of both
human and Christian motivation, that any praxis which manipu-
lates human freedom and brings about alienation is both wrong
and heterodox”.’ Hermeneutics becomes, therefore, a means of
emancipation.
We can see then, that there has been a movement away from
the objectivist conceptions of hermeneutics of the early Church,
whereby the meaning of a text was thought either to be evident or
hidden but, in either case, somehow or other still derivable from
the text itself, to modern theories which shift the locus of mean-
ing from the text itself to the interpreter who engages with the
text and within a particular social context. Because the historian
works within a living dialogue he can hope to achieve emancipation
from the fetters his existence places upon him, just as the writers
of the text were themselves emancipated by the living word.
111
We do not wish to assess the valuable insights afforded by rec-
ent hermeneutics so much as to question, at a very basic levef,
whether and how far the meaning of a text can be seen to be inde-
Rendent of the author; whether, in fact, the dialogue in which the
interpreter engages is actually dialogue and not monologue. In par-
ticular, two questions about biblical hermeneutics will be consid-
ered. First, the importance of the author’s intentions and how
these would have been understood by his contemporary audience.
Secondly, whether or not scripture may be interpreted in the pres-
ent day to give a different, but equally valid, meaning.
We shall suppose, without arguing the case, that, for the most
part, the authors of the canonical scriptures did not consciously
attempt to obscure their meaning in what they wrote (the book of
Revelation is a good counter-example here, but one of an entirely
different genre to most of the New Testament, and therefore des-
erving of particular hermeneutical considerations not appropriate
in respect of the rest). In other words, St Paul wanted the Corin-
thians to understand what he wrote; St Luke wanted Theophilus
to have “authentic knowledge about the matters of which (he) had
been informed” (Luke 1:4); St Mark wanted the Christians in
Rome t o . . . etc.
Given then, that the New Testament authors’ motivation was,
in this narrow respect, uniform were their intentions the same?
Obviously not. They had different audiences, different subjects to
408
communicate, etc. Although they did all intend that their readers
should understand and apprehend what they meant. We must dis-
tinguish then, between this general intention of understanding, i.e.
what the author hoped would be the readers’ relationship to the
text, and the particular intention of meaning, i.e. the author’s own
relationship to his text.
Let us consider now the latter question, viz the author’s rela-
tionship to his text and, particularly, the question of whether it is
possible that his “subjective intentions” (as if there were such
things) only have currency in a public context. This, in effect, is
one of the major criticisms levelled against truthconditional theor-
ies of meaning, viz that they treat natural language as a sort of
context-free calculus and this, it is argued, cannot be done.
If I say “Fermez la porte” in an English speaking context, and
by that I intend to mean “Close the door”, it will not be under-
stood by other English speakers who do not speak French. They
will (correctly) assume that I am either speaking some other lan-
guage or nonsense. No matter what the intention, I will not be
understood in such an instance because language is public property
and intention can only be conveyed given that the public require-
ments of certain noises arranged in a particular syntax are met.
Now if this is the case, then hermeneutics must be a wider ranging
activity than simply the recovery of intention: recovering meaning
will be more than recovering the intention of the language speaker.
But will it entail more than the (apparent) additional requirement
of the recovery of the public meaning of past utterances? And of
what does this public meaning consist? Weber certainly thought
that such an enterprise was possible and constructed his “rational-
istic” hermeneutic which attempted to provide classifications for
the world of historical experience. Nevertheless, we can conclude
of intention-recovery alone that it is insufficient for a complete
hermeneutic. As B Hanison suggests: “The capacity to predict other
competent speakers’ linguistic judgements is essential to the con-
cept of a language. Without publicity, the responses of an isolated
speaker would become simply a curious pattern of behavioural
response, without linguistic significance”.’
Here some might want to consider the argument that a rejec-
tion of an intention-belief theory of meaning has application in a
theory of discourse Cparole) but not in a theory of semantics and
syntax as a timeless entity (langue), i.e. that intention may be sig-
nificant in a theory of discourse or speech but not in one relating
to a written text. We do not propose to consider this difficult
question but will operate on the assumption that what a speaker
or writer can mean by a given sentence (p) depends on what p
409
means, whether it is written or not.
All this would seem to indicate that the meaning of a sentence
is more fundamental, in language theory, than the intention of the
utterer. But having said this, is it possible to extract the meaning
of a sentence without regard to an author’s intentions? J E Altham,
in considering theories of reference, suggests a reason to consider
that intentions are significant:
“The possibility which is sometimes considered by philoso-
phers that there might have been, unknown to Jane Austen, a
woman satisrying all the descriptions of Emma Wodehouse in
the novel, will not do as an example . . .Certainly, if the imag-
ined possibility were actual, ‘Emma Wodehouse’ as we use
the name, would not thereby be a name of the real woman . . .
The proper explanation would seem to lie in Jane Austen’s and
our intention.”’
So surely if Matthew, for example, intended that his descriptions
of the nature of the post-resurrection Jesus were to be under-
stood as visionary experiences then, even if we mistake his inten-
tions and read them as reports of a physical nature and it happens
to be the case that Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances were of a
physical nature, we still misconstrue Matthew’s meaning precisely
because we misunderstand his intention. So what bearing does the
author’s intention have on the meaning of a text where the latter
is thought to have its meaning, in some way, independently of the
author’s intentions? And once we have recovered the author’s inten-
tions, if this can be done, together with the “independent” mean-
ing of a text, can we say that there’s an end of it; that the meaning
of the text is exhausted?
It might assist if we identify three areas of meaning to be re-
constructed:
a) the meaning intended by the author
b) the meaning independent of the author taken by his (intended)
audience
c) the meaning independent of the author taken by any audience
(other than (b) above).
All of these meanings are, to some extent, hidden. (a) and (b) are
hidden in a different language than our own, a different culture
with its own thought forms, etc. To that extent they need to be
searched out and laid as bare as possible. Professor Meyer calls the
beginnings of this task “pure exegesis”.’ * But is there such a thing
as (c), one which can, asit were, be extracted from or even imposed
upon the text by any reader. As an example of (c) we might think
of Barth’s commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, where
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he was less concernea with literary “critical history as such as with
the inadequacy of a theology that regarded its findings as an
understanding of scripture”.’
Let us consider whether the meaning of the text is exhausted
by (a) and (b) and thus that (c) is illegitimate. There can be no
doubt that language is dynamic in the sense that, over the course
of years, words and phrases and the sentences which contain them
come to mean different things. Professor W C Smith has argued ex-
tensively, for example, that “belief” does not mean now what it
meant in the time of King James I and Shakespeareand this affects,
at a fundamental level, our understanding (or, as he sees it, our
general misunderstanding) of the occurrence of the word “belief/
faith” (pistis) in the New Testament.’
It is also true that words acquire a different meaning for each
individual in the course of his development. What “God” means
to a child will generally be quite different from what it means to
that same person as an adult. In all cases, however, it is true to say
that a piece of language, if it is meaningful at all, is meaningful for
someone. Even though the meaning of a word, phrase or sentence
may be elusive to us (e.g. what did Mark mean by “. . . when you
see the abomination of desolation . . .” 13:14?) It is always true to
say that if a word’s meaning is hidden or obscured for some, it
cannot be hidden or obscured for all. The fact that Mark had a
meaning for the phrase “abomination of desolation” that we do
not have means, quite simply, that we do not use it as language as
he used it. If, for example, we say that “the abomination of deso-
lation usurping a place which is not his” refers to the Russian inva-
sion of Afghanistan then we cannot mean that it so refers in the
senses (a) or (b) above, in that Russia and Afghanistan were mean-
ingless to Mark and his audience. Here we do not mean that
“Russia” and “Afghanistan” had no referents in Mark’s day but,
quite simply, that there were no definite descriptions available to
Mark or his audience which could be substituted for “the abomin-
ation of desolation” and “a place which is not his” to render any
kind of semantic identity with what we now call “Russia” and
“Afghanistan”.
We have already noted the tendency to think of meaning as
somehow independent of the speaker but we have also seen the
importance of a speaker’s intentions in any given utterance. H
Grice argued that the latter case is prior to the former and that
what a word means is ultimately reducible to what a speaker
means. This distinction is accounted for in some semantic theories
by speaking of what a name denotes and what a speaker denotes.
Gareth Evans makes the point thds:
411
 “Suppose for example on a TV quiz programme I am asked to
name a capital city and I say ‘Kingston is the capital of Jam-
aica’; I should want to say that I had said something strictly
and literally true even though it turns out that the man from
whom I had picked up this scrap of information was actually
referring to Kingston-upon-Thames and making a racist observa-
”’
tion.
But even in this example we can see that is the speaker’s intention
which makes it possible to say of it that he said something strictly
and literally true; just as it is the speaker’s intention, and the audi-
ence’s apprehension of that intention, which makes it possible for
this also to be a racist observation in the original case. But while
this distinction between what the name denotes and what the
speaker denotes (i.e. roughly (b) and (a)) may be seen to obtain,
what of (c)? The problem here seems to be that there is an assump-
tion that there is an “objective” meaning beyond what (a) and (b)
allow. Of course, such a thing can be done. It could, for example,
be the case that over the course of time “Kingston” came to be
the name for the letter “J”. In which case, when a schoolboy is
asked the question, “What is the capital of Jamaica?” he answers,
“Kingston is the capital of ‘Jamaica”’. But notice just how arbit-
rary this is and how unconnected it is with either (a) or (b). Were
this a written text, the relation to the text would be lost and
hence the value of that text in terms of its authority. That such a
new meaning is possible can have no bearing on the understanding
of texts precisely because it cuts the ties ((a) and (b)) with the text
altogether.
But is it not possible to say that the text, say, of Mark’s gos-
pel, has a hidden meaning other than that which Mark intended
and other than that which his readers understood but which, say,
God intended? It would not seem so because it would then be
necessary to assume that there is some meaning of a set of words
beyond which anyone had in mind when he used the words. The
meaning of a sentence might be hidden from some people but not
from all people, nor from those who are actually using the words.
If Mark used words which had hidden meanings, then the hidden
meaning cannot have been a part of his use of those words. So
either he had no meaning for the words (then why did he use them?
He certainly acted as though he meant something!) in which case
they did not function as language for him (like a parrot repeating
sentences!) or he did mean something by them, in which case the
meaning is not hidden from him. If there was some hidden mean-
ing, intended by God, of Mark’s language then it would have been
entirely irrelevant to his, and his audience’s, use of it. The possibil-
412
ity that what Mark said may undergo some reshaping in the course
of the centuries, as it no doubt has, does not bear retroactively on
Mark. This reshaping does not give his use of his langauge any
more meaning when he used it than he had for it when he used it.
Barth’s commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans must, if we
are correct, be entirely arbitrary in its appeal to Paul, except where
B a t h is able to capture Paul’s intentions and those of his readers.
This does not mean, however, that the book does not bring to us
the words of God. Presumably, Barth used St Paul as the basis for
his writing because of the authority that those writings enjoy for
the Church, but insofar as he ignores (a) and (b) his task is miscon-
ceived because the authority the writing has for the Church derives
from what is meant by Sf Paul, and what St Paul means entails (a)
and (b). Inasmuch as God did not write Paul’s letter to the Romans,
his language cannot consist of written marks; and even if God’s
intentions can be identified with that letter that does nothing to
explain how the letter is meaningful. Notice here that saying God
intends or means something by x is making a claim about God in
our language with our concepts.
IV
We conclude that the interpretation of a text is inextricably
tied to the intentions of the author and the understanding of his
audience. Of course, it may be true that an assessment of a text
independent of these two elements may promote “authentic exis-
tence” or “emancipation”. But if such an assessment is indepen-
dent then one should not pretend that it is the same faith as those
who originally wrote about it (as the gnostics did not). To para-
phrase Professor Cullmann:’* is it not illusion to think that we
can have the same Christological faith as the early Church if we
accept its Christological views, but still assert that its Christology
has to be interpreted in a way other than that which the early
Church interpreted it? We therefore conclude also, against the
gnostics, that the mundane, evident meaning (insofar as this can be
recovered) is cmucial if a deeper meaning is to be found, that is, if
faith is to have some historical continuity with the faith of those
who wrote the documents.”

1 This paper is remarkable, not because it contriiutes significantly to current theo-

logical debate or because it is in any way innovatory, but because it was written by
three Religious Studies A Level students as part of the course work I set them.
Although I directed their reading and gave general advice, they wrote the paper.
[Ian Walker, Head of Religious Studies, Dulwich College,London.]
2 pp 15-16, E Pagels, The Johannke Gospel in GnosricExegesis, Abingdon, 1973.
3 p 13,Jesus, Hodder & Stoughton, 1960.

413
 4 op. cit. p 14.
5 Contemporary Schools of Metascience, Akademi, 1968; forlaget, Goteborg, Vol2,
chap 1.
6 p 252, Essays Philosophical and Theological, S C M, 1964.
7 Quoted in, Peters, T, “Truth in History: Gadamer’s Hermeneutic and Pannenberg’s
Apologetic Method”, Journal of Religion, Autumn, 1975, p 40.
8 p 401, H G Gadamer, Truth and Method, Sheed &Ward, 1976.
9 p 90, Revolutionaly Theology Comes ofAge, S P C K, 1975.
10 p 131, m e UnderstandingofFaith, Sheed & Ward, 1974.
11 op. cit. p 91.
12 p 166, An Introduction to the fiirosophy of Language, Macmiuan, 1979.
13 pp 210-211, ‘The Causal Theory of Names” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Soci-
ery, Supp. vol xlvii, 1974.
14 p 77, The Aims o f Jesus, S C M, 1979.
15 H G Gadamer, op. cit. p 463.
16 Belief andffistory, University of Virginia Press, 1977.
17 p 194, “The Causal Theory of Names”, op. cit.
18 Preface, ChristorogY of theNew Testament, S C M, 1980.
19 We would like to thank Mr Ian Walker of Dulwich College for his help in w r i w
this essay.

Hope and Optimism

Adrian Hastings
/ A University sermon preached at Leeds, 24 January 19821

What hope does ‘the hope that is in us’ (I Peter 3 :15) offer to the
world in which we live today? That is the question to which I will
address myself.
Jesus said ‘when it is evening, you say, it will be fair weather;
for the sky is red. And in the morning, it will be stormy today,
for the sky is red and threatening. You know how to interpret the
appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the
times’ (Mt 16:2-4).
The Pharisees and Sadducees had just asked Jesus for some
extra ‘sign from heaven’, and with these words he refused it to
them: sufficient signs are already there, if they choose to see them:
the signs of the times. Good Pope John frequently made use of
this phrase, appealing to the modern church to read correctly to-
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