Lesson 7 - History of Exegesis & Allegory Exegesis Flashcards
Give a brief overview of how the church has interpreted Scripture up to the Enlightenment as assessed by Farrar.
- ) Rabbinic - 2nd temple Judaism (inner-biblical exegesis)
- ) NT - respect for context/Christ condemned Rabbinic System
- ) Allegorical Expression - very common in early church
- ) Antioch - Literal/Historical Grammatical Approach
- ) Middle Ages - return to Allegory
- ) Reformation - rejected allegory
- ) 17th Century - reintroduced scholastic mentality (very negative)
- ) Enlightenment - history/grammar/human author is emphasized; Goal = objective/scientific interpretation;
Evaluate Farrar’s Overview? What’s a better way?
Evaluation:
- ) Main benefit of studying the history of interpretation is that it shows us the errors to avoid
- ) The problem of attitude
- - Arrogant attitude toward different eras of history (can’t learn much from them) - ) Limiting the Holy Spirit in interpretation
- ) Holding the Bible hostage to expert interpretation
Better Way:
1.) Trying to understand why they did what they did (we face the same problems today)
What 2 approaches developed out of the Enlightenment?
- ) Historical-Critical Method: no presuppositions (non-believer)
- ) Historical-Grammatical Method: became the standard to interpret the text; what’s this mean in the original author/original context
Compare interpretation of the Bible before and after the Enlightenment. What is the combination approach?
Before Enlightenment
- Bible is God’s inspired revelation
- Theological reasons
- Purpose of scholarship is for the faith/church
- The OT is normative and theologically relative for the church
After Enlightenment
- Bible is man-made document
- Social, economic, political influences
- Purpose of scholarship is for the academy
- OT is historically limited to the period of the OT
Combination Approach
- Study like an academic, then reflect and apply it to the church (You can’t just shift like that)
- Exegesis - the text has no truth value (academic approach); then how do you apply it to the church?
How do lay people read the Bible? What is positive about such reading?
Personal and Private
– They read it apart from its context, but often get it right
Positive
– They often don’t get the center of the circle, but they get into the meaning of the circle
Be able to distinguish the different types of Philo’s works.
- ) Exegetical Commentaries on OT Texts
- ) The Exposition of the Laws of Moses
- - Rewriting the Pentateuch
- - Not as tied to Scripture as the Exegetical commentaries
- - Wanted to make Judaism credible to the Greeks
- - Apologetic toward Jewish people - ) On the Migration of Abraham
- Genesis 12:1 - depart out of the land
- Land: symbol of the body
- Kindred: symbol of sense perception
- Father’s house: symbol of speech
- Depart: to overcome the body and sense perception, speech, physical things
Be able to explain the roots of Philo’s ideas, his method of allegorizing, his discussion of the spiritual journey from Genesis 12, and his use of biblical characters.
Roots
– His religious background is Jewish, but he uses Greek philosophy to explain his exegesis of Scripture/inner meaning of the Bible. He brings to the Bible a system which he is working with. Systematic Approach to the Bible/Meaning/Hermeneutic
Method
- A unified, total system - Grand Allegory
- The narrative of Scripture is the setting for the Grand Allegory. Biblical characters become types of human beings who display universal characteristics of mankind
- Spiritual Journey: We should go on a spiritual journey to separate the soul from the body.
Spiritual Journey from Genesis 12
- Genesis 12:1 - depart out of the land
a. ) Land: symbol of the body
b. ) Kindred: symbol of sense perception
c. ) Father’s house: symbol of speech
d. ) Depart: to overcome the body and sense perception, speech, physical things
e. ) True meaning: God is telling Abraham to free himself from the physical things and start this spiritual journey.
f. ) Abraham’s journey is a picture of the migration of the soul.
- Genesis 12:1 - depart out of the land
How did the early church fathers interpret Scripture?
- ) Read the Bible christologically through Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension
- ) Saw a unity in the Bible centered on Christ
- ) Emphasized the importance of both the original historical context and the canonical context of the whole Bible
- ) Tended to emphasize details in the OT in making connections to Christ, which tended toward allegory
Why do Clement and Origen use allegory to interpret the Bible?
Divine inspiration and allegory went hand-in-hand
– If you believed a book was special/divinely inspired, then you had to have a method to get to hidden meaning, which they used allegory.
What is Clement’s two-fold way of interpreting Scripture?
- ) Literal meaning – relates to the body
2. ) Spiritual Meaning – relates to the soul
What is Origen’s three-fold way of interpreting Scripture?
- ) Body – literal interpretation
- ) Soul – human experience, moral aspect
- ) Spirit – spiritual meaning, God’s wisdom hidden in mystery
1What purpose does allegory serve for Origen? What justification does he give for using allegory?
- ) Jewish understanding of Scripture is wrong: Only see Scripture from a literal sense. Why they don’t see Christ.
- ) This is the way NT writers interpret the OT
- - 1 Cor. 10:3-11 - all ate the spiritual rock, that rock was Christ
- - Paul’s allegorizing the OT - ) Emphasizes Divine Author
- - Human author - literal meaning
- - Divine author - spiritual/soul meaning
What benefit does the literal meaning have in Philo and Origen?
- ) Passages which are historical true far outnumber the passages that just have a spiritual meaning.
- ) Literal meaning is especially used for apologetic approaches.
