THE SUPERIORITY OF

PRE-CRITICAL
EXEGESIS
By DAVID C. STEINMETZ

''The medieval theory of levels of meaning in the

biblical text, with all its undoubted defects, flour-
ished because it is true, while the modern theory of
a single meaning, with all its demonstrable virtues,
is false. Until the historical-critical method
becomes critical of its own theoretical foundations
and develops a hermeneutical theory adequate to
the nature of the text which it is interpreting, it will
remain restricted-as it deserves to be-to the guild
and the academy, where the question of truth can
endlessly be deferred. ..

I
N 1859 Benjamin Jowett, then Regius Professor of Greek in the
University of Oxford, published a justly famous essay on the
interpretation of Scripture.' Jowett argued that "Scripture has
one meaning-the meaning which it had in the mind of the Prophet or
Evangelist who first uttered or wrote, to the hearers or readers who first
received it.,,2 Scripture should be interpreted like any other book and
the later accretions and venerated traditions surrounding its interpreta-
tion should, for the most part, either be brushed aside or severely
discounted. "The true use of interpretation is to get rid of interpretation,
and leave us alone in company with the author.,,3
Jowett did not foresee great difficulties in the way of the recovery of
the original meaning of the text. Proper interpretation requires imagi-
nation, the ability to put oneself into an alien cultural situation, and
knowledge of the language and history of the ancient people whose
literature one sets out to interpret. In the case of the Bible, one has also
to bear in mind the progressive nature of revelation and the superiority
of certain later religious insights to certain earlier ones. But the

David C. Steinmetz is Professor of Church History and Doctrine at the Divinity School
of Duke University and the author of Misericordia Dei: The Theology of Johannes von
Staupitz in Its Late Medieval Setting (1968) and Reformers in the Wings (1971). He
also contributed an article, "Reformation and Conversion," to the April 1978 issue of
THEOLOGY TODAY.
'Benjamin Jowett, "On the Interpretation of Scripture," Essays and Reviews. 7th ed.
(London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1861), pp. 330-433.
'Ibid.. p. 378.
'Ibid., p. 384.

27
28 Theology Today

interpreter, armed with the proper linguistic tools, will find that
" ... universal truth easily breaks through the accidents of time and
place"4 and that such truth still speaks to the condition of the unchang-
ing human heart.
Of course, critical biblical studies have made enormous strides since
the time of Jowett. No reputable biblical scholar would agree today
with Jowett's reconstruction of the gospels in which Jesus appears as a
"teacher ... speaking to a group of serious, but not highly educated,
working men, attempting to inculcate in them a loftier and sweeter
morality."s Still, the quarrel between modern biblical scholarship and
Benjamin Jowett is less a quarrel over his hermeneutical theory than it
is a disagreement with him over the application of that theory in his
exegetical practice. Biblical scholarship still hopes to recover the
original intention of the author of a biblical text and still regards the
pre-critical exegetical tradition as an obstacle to the proper understand-
ing of the true meaning of that text. The most primitive meaning of the
text is its only valid meaning, and the historical-critical method is the
only key which can unlock it.
But is that hermeneutical theory true?
I think it is demonstrably false. In what follows I want to examine the
pre-critical exegetical tradition at exactly the point at which Jowett
regarded it to be most vulnerable-namely, in its refusal to bind the
meaning of any pericope to the intention, whether explicit or merely
half-formed, of its human author. Medieval theologians defended the
proposition, so alien to modern biblical studies, that the meaning of
Scripture in the mind of the prophet who first uttered it is only one of its
possible meanings and may not, in certain circumstances, even be its
primary or most important meaning. I want to show that this theory (in
at least that respect) was superior to the theories which replaced it.
When biblical scholarship shifted from the hermeneutical position of
Origen tc! the hermeneutical position of Jowett, it gained something
important and valuable. But it lost something as well, and it is the
painful duty of critical scholarship to assess its losses as well as its
gains.
I
Medieval hermeneutical theory took as its point of departure the
words of St. Paul: "The letter kills but the spirit makes alive" (II Cor.
3:6). Augustine suggested that this text could be understood in either
one of two ways. On the one hand, the distinction between letter and
spirit could be a distinction between law and gospel, between demand
and grace. The letter kills because it demands an obedience of the sinner
which the sinner is powerless to render. The Spirit makes alive because

'Ibid.. p. 412.
'Helen Gardner, The Business of Criticism (London: Oxford University Press, 1959),
p.83.
 Pre-Critical Exegesis 29
it infuses the forgiven sinner with new power to meet the rigorous
requirements of the law.
But Paul could also have in mind a distinction between what William
Tyndale later called the "story-book" or narrative level of the Bible and
the deeper theological meaning or spiritual significance implicit within
it. This distinction was important for at least three reasons. Origen
stated the first reason with unforgettable clarity:
Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and
the third day, and the evening and the morning existed without the sun and
moon and stars? And that the first day, if we may so call it, was even without
a heaven? And who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a
farmer, "planted a paradise eastward in Eden," and set in it a visible and
palpable "tree of life," of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his
bodily teeth would gain life; and again that one could partake of "good and
evil" by masticating the fruit taken from the tree of that name? And when
God is said to "walk in the paradise in the cool of the day" and Adam to hide
himself behind a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these are
figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance
of history and not through actual event. 6

Simply because a story purports to be a straightforward historical

narrative does not mean that it is in fact what it claims to be. What
appears to be history may be metaphor or figure instead and the
interpreter who confuses metaphor with literal fact is an interpreter
who is simply incompetent. Every biblical story means something, even
if the narrative taken at face value contains absurdities or contradic-
tions. The interpreter must demythologize the text in order to grasp the
sacred mystery cloaked in the language of actual events.
The second reason for distinguishing between letter and spirit was the
thorny question of the relationship between Israel and the church,
between the Greek Testament and the Hebrew Bible. The church
regarded itself as both continuous and discontinuous with ancient
Israel. Because it claimed to be continuous, it felt an unavoidable
obligation to interpret the Torah, the prophets, and the writings. But it
was precisely this claim of continuity, absolutely essential to Christian
identity, which created fresh hermeneutical problems for the church.
How was a French parish priest in 1150 to understand Psalm 137,
which bemoans captivity in Babylon, makes rude remarks about Edom-
ites, expresses an ineradicable longing for a glimpse of Jerusalem, and
pronounces a blessing on anyone who avenges the destruction of the
temple by dashing Babylonian children against a rock? The priest lives
in Concale, not Babylon, has no personal quarrel with Edomites,
cherishes no ambitions to visit Jerusalem (though he might fancy a
holiday in Paris), and is expressly forbidden by Jesus to avenge himself
on his enemies. Unless Psalm 137 has more than one possible meaning,

60 rigen, On First Principles. ed. by G. W. Butterworth (New York: Harper and Row,
1966), p. 288.
30 Theology Today
it cannot be used as a prayer by the church and must be rejected as a
lament belonging exclusively to the piety of ancient Israel.
A third reason for distinguishing letter from spirit was the conviction,
expressed by Augustine, that while all Scripture was given for the
edification of the church and the nurture of the three theological virtues
of faith, hope, and love, not all the stories in the Bible are edifying as
they stand. What is the spiritual point of the story of the drunkenness of
Noah, the murder of Sisera, or the oxgoad of Shamgar, son of Anath? If
it cannot be found on the level of narrative, then it must be found on the
level of allegory, metaphor, and type.
That is not to say that patristic and medieval interpreters approved of
arbitrary and undisciplined exegesis, which gave free rein to the
imagination of the exegete. Augustine argued, for example, that the
more obscure parts of Scripture should be interpreted in the light of its
less difficult sections and that no allegorical interpretation could be
accepted which was not supported by the "manifest testimonies" of
other less ambiguous portions of the Bible. The literal sense of Scripture
is basic to the spiritual and limits the range of possible allegorical
meanings in those instances in which the literal meaning of a particular
passage is absurd, undercuts the living relationship of the church to the
Old Testament, or is spiritually barren.
II
From the time of John Cassian, the church subscribed to a theory of
the fourfold sense of Scripture. 7 The literal sense of Scripture could and
usually did nurture the three theological virtues, but when it did not, the
exegete could appeal to three additional spiritual senses, each sense
corresponding to one of the virtues. The allegorical sense taught about
the church and what it should believe, and so it corresponded to the
virtue of faith. The tropological sense taught about individuals and what
they should do, and so it corresponded to the virtue of love. The
anagogical sense pointed to the future and wakened expectation, and so
it corresponded to the virtue of hope. In the fourteenth century Nicholas
of Lyra summarized this hermeneutical theory in a much quoted little
rhyme:
Littera gesta docet,
Quid credas allegoria,
Moralis quid agas,
Quo tendas anagogia.
This hermeneutical device made it possible for the church to pray
directly and without qualification even a troubling Psalm like 137.
After all, Jerusalem was not merely a city in the Middle East; it was,
according to the allegorical sense, the church; according to the tropolog-
'For a brief survey of medieval hermeneutical theory which takes into account recent
historical research see James S. Preus, From Shadow to Promise (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 9-149; see also the useful bibliography, pp. 287-93.
 Pre-Critical Exegesis 31
ical sense, the faithful soul; and according to the anagogical sense, the
center of God's new creation. The Psalm became a lament of those who
long for the establishment of God's future kingdom and who are trapped
in this disordered and troubled world, which with all its delights is still
not their home. They seek an abiding city elsewhere. The imprecations
against the Edomites and the Babylonians are transmuted into condem-
nations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. If you grant the fourfold
sense of Scripture, David sings like a Christian.

III
Thomas Aquinas wanted to ground the spiritual sense of Scripture
even more securely in the literal sense than it had been grounded in
Patristic thought. Returning to the distinction between "things" and
"signs" made by Augustine in De doctrina christiana (though Thomas
preferred to use the Aristotelian terminology of "things" and "words"),
Thomas argued that while words are the signs of things, things
designated by words can themselves be the signs of other things. In all
merely human sciences, words alone have a sign-character. But in Holy
Scripture, the things designated by words can themselves have the
character of a sign. The literal sense of Scripture has to do with the
sign-character of words; the spiritual sense of Scripture has to do with
the sign-character of things. By arguing this way, Thomas was able to
show that the spiritual sense of Scripture is always based on the literal
sense and derived from it.
Thomas also redefined the literal sense of Scripture as "the meaning
of the text which the author intends." Lest Thomas be confused with
Jowett, I should hasten to point out that for Thomas the author was
God, not the human prophet or apostle. In the fourteenth century,
Nicholas of Lyra, a Franciscan exegete and one of the most impressive
biblical scholars produced by the Christian church, built a new herme-
neutical argument on the aphorism of Thomas. If the literal sense of
Scripture is the meaning which the author intended (presupposing that
the author whose intention finally matters is God), then is it possible to
argue that Scripture contains a double literal sense? Is there a literal-
historical sense (the original meaning of the words as spoken in their
first historical setting) which includes and implies a literal-prophetic
sense (the larger meaning of the words as perceived in later and
changed circumstances)?
Nicholas not only embraced a theory of the double literal sense of
Scripture, but he was even willing to argue that in certain contexts the
literal-prophetic sense takes precedence over the literal-historical.
Commenting on Psalm 117, Lyra wrote: "The literal sen'se in this Psalm
concerns Christ; for the literal sense is the sense primarily intended by
the author." Of the promise to Solomon in I Chronicles 17:13, Lyra
observed: "The aforementioned authority was literally fulfilled in
Solomon; however, it was fulfilled less perfectly, because Solomon was a
32 Theology Today
son of God only by grace; but it was fulfilled more perfectly in Christ,
who is the Son of God by nature."
For most exegetes, the theory of Nicholas of Lyra bound the
interpreter to the dual task of explaining the historical meaning of a text
while elucidating its larger and later spiritual significance. The great
French humanist, Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples, however, pushed the
theory to absurd limits. He argued that the o'1ly possible meaning of a
text was its literal-prophetic sense and that the literal-historical sense
was a product of human fancy and idle imagination. The literal-
historical sense is the "letter which kills." It is advocated as the true
meaning of Scripture only by carnal persons who have not been
regenerated by the life-giving Spirit of God. The problem of the proper
exegesis of Scripture is, when all is said and done, the problem of the
regeneration of its interpreters.
IV
In this brief survey of medieval hermeneutical theory, there are
certain dominant themes which recur with dogged persistence. Medi-
eval exegetes admit that the words of Scripture had a meaning in the
historical situation in which they were first uttered or written, but they
deny that the meaning of those words is restricted to what the human
author thought he said or what his first audience thought they heard.
The stories and sayings of Scripture bear an implicit meaning only
understood by a later audience. In some cases that implicit meaning is
far more important than the restricted meaning intended by the author
in his particular cultural setting.
Yet the text cannot mean anything a later audience wants it to mean.
The language of the Bible opens up a field of possible meanings. Any
interpretation which falls within that field is valid exegesis of the text,
even though that interpretation was not intended by the author. Any
interpretation which falls outside the limits of that field of possible
meanings is probably eisegesis and should be rejected as unacceptable.
-Only by confessing the multiple sense of Scripture is it possible for the
church to make use of the Hebrew Bible at all or to recapture the
various levels of significance in the unfolding story of creation and
redemption. The notion that Scripture has only one meaning is a
fantastic idea and is certainly not advocated by the biblical writers
themselves.
V
Having elucidated medieval hermeneutical theory, I should like to
take some time to look at medieval exegetical practice. One could get
the impression from Jowett that because medieval exegetes rejected the
theory of the single meaning of Scripture so dear to Jowett's heart, they
let their exegetical imaginations run amok and exercised no discipline at
all in clarifying the field of possible meanings opened by the biblical
text. In fact, medieval interpreters, once you grant the presuppositions
 Pre-Critical Exegesis 33
on which they operate, are as conservative and restrained in their
approach to the Bible as any comparable group of modern scholars.
In order to test medieval exegetical practice I have chosen a terribly
difficult passage from the Gospel of Matthew, the parable of the Good
Employer or, as it is more frequently known, the parable of the Workers
in the Vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16). The story is a familiar one. An
employer hired day laborers to work in his vineyard at dawn and
promised them the standard wage of a denarius. Because he needed
more workers, he returned to the market place at nine, noon, three, and
five o'clock and hired any laborers he could find. He promised to pay
the workers hired at nine, noon, and three what was fair. But the
workers hired at the eleventh hour or five o'clock were sent into the
vineyard without any particular promise concerning remuneration. The
employer instructed his foreman to payoff the workers beginning with
the laborers hired at five o'clock. These workers expected only one-
twelfth of a denarius, but were given the full day's wage instead. Indeed,
all the workers who had worked part of the day were given one denarius.
The workers who had been in the vineyard since dawn accordingly
expected a bonus beyond the denarius, but they were disappointed to
receive the same wage which had been given to the other, less deserving
workers. When they grumbled, they were told by the employer that they
had not been defrauded but had been paid according to an agreed
contract. If the employer chose to be generous to the workers who had
only worked part of the day, that was, in effect, none of their business.
They should collect the denarius that was due them and go home like
good fellows.
Jesus said the kingdom of God was like this story. What on earth
could he have meant?
VI
The church has puzzled over this parable ever since it was included in
Matthew's Gospel. St. Thomas Aquinas in his Lectura super Evange-
lium Sancti Matthaei offered two interpretations of the parable, one
going back in its lineage to Irenaeus and the other to Origen. The "day"
mentioned in the parable can either refer to the life-span of an
individual (the tradition of Origen), in which case the parable is a
comment on the various ages at which one may be converted to Christ,
or it is a reference to the history of salvation (the tradition of Irenaeus),
in which case it is a comment on the relationship of Jew and Gentile.
If the story refers to the life span of a man or woman, then it is
intended as an encouragement to people who are converted to Christ
late in life. The workers in the story who begin at dawn are people who
have served Christ and have devoted themselves to the love of God and
neighbor since childhood. The other hours mentioned by Jesus refer to
the various stages of human development from youth to old age.
Whether one has served Christ for a long time or for a brief moment,
one will still receive the gift of eternal life. Thomas qualifies this
34 Theology Today
somewhat in order to allow for proportional rewards and a hierarchy in
heaven. But he does not surrender the main point: eternal life is given to
late converts with the same generosity it is given to early converts.
On the other hand, the story may refer to the history of salvation.
Quite frankly, this is the interpretation which interests Thomas most.
The hours mentioned in the parable are not stages in individual human
development but epochs in the history of the w0rld from Adam to Noah,
from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to David, and from David to
Christ. The owner of the vineyard is the whole Trinity, the foreman is
Christ, and the moment of reckoning is the resurrection from the dead.
The workers who are hired at the eleventh hour are the Gentiles, whose
complaint that no one has offered them work can be interpreted to mean
that they had no prophets as the Jews have had. The workers who have
borne the heat of the day are the Jews, who grumble about the
favoritism shown to latecomers, but who are still given the denarius of
eternal life. As a comment on the history of salvation, the parable
means that the generosity of God undercuts any advantage which the
Jews might have had over the Gentiles with respect to participation in
the gifts and graces of God.
Not everyone read the text as a gloss on Jewish-Christian relations or
as a discussion of late conversion. In the fourteenth century the
anonymous author of the Pearl, an elegy on the death of a young girl,
applied the parable to infancy rather than to old age. What is important
about the parable is not the chronological age at which one enters the
vineyard, but the fact that some workers are only in the vineyard for the
briefest possible moment. A child who dies at the age of two years is, in
a sense, a worker who arrives at the eleventh hour. The parable is
intended as a consolation for bereaved parents. A parent who has lost a
small child can be comforted by the knowledge that God, who does not
despise the service of persons converted in extreme old age, does not
withhold his mercy from boys and girls whose eleventh hour came at
dawn.
Probably the most original interpretation of the parable was offered
by John Pupper of Goch, a Flemish theologian of the fifteenth century,
who used the parable to attack the doctrine of proportionality, particu-
larly as that doctrine had been stated and defended by Thomas
Aquinas. No one had ever argued that God gives rewards which match
in exact quantity the weight of the good works done by a Christian.
That is arithmetic equality and is simply not applicable to a relationship
in which people perform temporal acts and receive eternal rewards. But
most theologians did hold to a doctrine of proportionality; while there is
a disproportion between the good works which Christians do and the
rewards which they receive, there is a proportion as well. The reward is
always much larger than the work which is rewarded, but the greater
the work, the greater the reward.
As far as Goch is concerned, that doctrine is sheer nonsense. No one
can take the message of the parable of the vineyard seriously and still
 Pre-Critical Exegesis 35
hold to the doctrine of proportionality. Indeed, the only people in the
vineyard who hold to the doctrine of proportionality are the first
workers in the vineyard. They argue that twelve times the work should
receive twelve times the payment. All they receive for their argument is
a rebuke and a curt dismissal.
Martin Luther, in an early sermon preached before the Reformation
in 1517, agreed with Goch that God gives equal reward for great and
small works. It is not by the herculean size of our exertions but by the
goodness of God that we receive any reward at all.
But Luther, unfortunately, spoiled his point by elaborating a thor-
oughly unconvincing argument in which he tried to show that the last
workers in the vineyard were more humble than the first and therefore
that one hour of their service was worth twelve hours of the mercenary
service of the grumblers.
The parable, however, seems to make exactly the opposite point. The
workers who began early were not more slothful or more selfish than the
workers who began later in the day. Indeed, they were fairly representa-
tive of the kind of worker to be found hanging around the marketplace
at any hour. They were angry, not because they had shirked their
responsibilities, but because they had discharged them conscientiously.
In 1525 Luther offered a fresh interpretation of the parable, which
attacked it from a slightly different angle. The parable has essentially
one point: to celebrate the goodness of God which makes nonsense of a
religion based on law-keeping and good works. God pays no attention to
the proportionately greater efforts of the first workers in the vineyard,
but to their consternation, God puts them on exactly the same level as
the last and least productive workers. The parable shows that everyone
in the vineyard is unworthy, though not always for the same reason. The
workers who arrive after nine o'clock are unworthy because they are
paid a salary incommensurate with their achievement in picking grapes.
The workers who spent the entire day in the vineyard are unworthy
because they are dissatisfied with what God has promised, think that
their efforts deserve special consideration, and are jealous of their
employer's goodness to workers who accomplished less than they did.
The parable teaches that salvation is not grounded in human merit and
that there is no system of bookkeeping which can keep track of the
relationship between God and humanity. Salvation depends utterly and
absolutely on the goodness of God.
VII
The four medieval theologians I have mentioned-Thomas Aquinas,
the author of the Pearl. the Flemish chaplain Goch, and the young
Martin Luther---did not exhaust in their writings all the possible
interpretations of the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. But they
did see with considerable clarity that the parable is an assertion of
God's generosity and mercy to people who do not deserve it. It is only
against the background of the generosity of God that one can under-
36 Theology Today
stand the relationship of Jew and Gentile, the problem of late conver-
sion, the meaning of the death of a young child, the question of
proportional rewards, even the very definition of grace itself. Every
question is qualified by the severe mercy of God, by the strange
generosity of the owner of the vineyard who pays the non-productive
latecomer the same wage as his oldest and most productive employees.
If you were to ask me which of these interpretations is valid, I should
have to respond that they all are. They all fall within the field of possible
meanings created by the story itself. How many of those meanings were
in the conscious intention of Jesus or of the author of the Gospel of
Matthew, I do not profess to know. I am inclined to agree with C. S.
Lewis, who commented on his own book, Till We Have Faces: "An
author doesn't necessarily understand the meaning of his own story
better than anyone else.... "8 The act of creation confers no special
privileges on authors when it comes to the distinctly different, if lesser
task of interpretation. Wordsworth the critic is not in the same league
with Wordsworth the poet, while Samuel Johnson the critic towers over
Johnson the creative artist. Authors obviously have something in mind
when they write, but a work of historical or theological or aesthetic
imagination has a life of its own.
VIII
Which brings us back to Benjamin Jowett. Jowett rejected medieval
exegesis and insisted that the Bible should be read like any other book. 9
I agree with Jowett that the Bible should be read like any other book.
The question is: how does one read other books?
Take, for example, my own field of Reformation studies. Almost no
historian that I know would answer the question of the meaning of the
writings of Martin Luther by focusing solely on Luther's explicit and
conscious intention. Marxist interpreters of Luther from Friedrich
Engels to Max Steinmetz have been interested in Luther's writings as
an expression of class interests, while psychological interpreters from
Grisar to Erikson have focused on the theological writings as clues to
the inner psychic tensions in the personality of Martin Luther. Even
historians who reject Marxist and psychological interpretations of
Luther find themselves asking how Luther was understood in the free
imperial cities, by the German knights, by the landed aristocracy, by
the various subgroups of German peasants, by the Catholic hierarchy,
by lawyers, by university faculties-to name only a few of the more
obvious groups who responded to Luther and left a written record of
their response. Meaning involves a listener as well as a speaker, and
when one asks the question of the relationship of Luther to his various
audiences in early modern Europe, it becomes clear that there was not
one Luther in the sixteenth century, but a battalion of Luthers.

8W. H. Lewis, ed., Letters ofe. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc.,
1966), p. 273.
9 Jowett, "Interpretation," p. 377.
 Pre-Critical Exegesis 37
Nor can the question of the meaning of Luther's writings be
answered by focusing solely on Luther's contemporaries. Luther's works
were read and pondered in a variety of historical and cultural settings
from his death in 1546 to the present. Those readings of Luther have
had measurable historical effects on succeeding generations, whose
particular situation in time and space could scarcely have been antici-
pated by Luther. Yet the social, political, economic, cultural, and
religious history of those people belongs intrinsically and inseparably to
the question of the meaning of the theology of Martin Luther. The
meaning of historical texts cannot be separated from the complex
problem of their reception and the notion that a text means only what its
author intends it to mean is historically naive. Even to talk of the
original setting in which words were spoken and heard is to talk of
meanings rather than meaning. To attempt to understand those original
meanings is the first step in the exegetical process, not the last and final
step.
Modern literary criticism has challenged the notion that a text means
only what its author intends it to mean far more radically than medieval
exegetes ever dreamed of doing. Indeed, contemporary debunking of the
author and the author's explicit intentions has proceeded at such a pace
that it seems at times as if literary criticism has become a jolly game of
ripping out an author's shirt-tail and setting fire to it. The reader and
the literary work to the exclusion of the author have become the central
preoccupation of the literary critic. Literary relativists of a fairly
moderate sort insist that every generation has its own Shakespeare and
Milton, and extreme relativists loudly proclaim that no reader reads the
same work twice. Every change in the reader, however slight, is a
change in the meaning of the text. Imagine what Thomas Aquinas or
Nicholas of Lyra would have made of the famous statement of Nor-
throp Frye:
It has been said of Boehme that his books are like a picnic to which the author
brings the words and the reader the meaning. The remark may have been
intended as a sneer at Boehme, but it is an exact description of all works of
literary art without exception. 10

Medieval exegetes held to the sober middle way, the position that the
text (any literary text, but especially the Bible) contains both letter and
spirit. The text is not all letter, as Jowett with others maintained, or all
spirit, as the rather more enthusiastic literary critics in our own time are
apt to argue. The original text as spoken and heard limits a field of
possible meanings. Those possible meanings are not dragged by the
hair, willy-nilly, into the text, but belong to the life of the Bible in the
encounter between author and reader as they belong to the life of any
act of the human imagination. Such a hermeneutical theory is capable

l"This quotation is cited by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1967), p. I, at the beginning of a chapter which sets out to
elaborate an alternative theory.
38 Theology Today
of sober and disciplined application and avoids the Scylla of extreme
subjectivism, on the one hand, and the Charybdis of historical positiv-
ism, on the other. To be sure, medieval exegetes made bad mistakes in
the application of their theory, but they also scored notable and brilliant
triumphs. Even at their worst they recognized that the intention of the
author is only one element-and not always the most important element
at that-in the complex phenomenon of the meaning of a text.
IX
The defenders of the single meaning theory usually concede that the
medieval approach to the Bible met the religious needs of the Christian
community, but that it did so at the unacceptable price of doing violence
to the biblical text. The fact that the historical-critical method after two
hundred years is still struggling for more than a precarious foothold in
that same religious community is generally blamed on the ignorance
and conservatism of the Christian laity and the sloth or moral cowardice
of its pastors.
I should like to suggest an alternative hypothesis. The medieval
theory of levels of meaning in the biblical text, with all its undoubted
defects, flourished because it is true, while the modern theory of a single
meaning, with all its demonstrable virtues, is false. Until the historical-
critical method becomes critical of its own theoreticfll foundations and
develops a hermeneutical theory adequate to the nature of the text
which it is interpreting, it will remain restricted-as it deserves to
be-to the guild and the academy, where the question of truth can
endlessly be deferred.