by Matthew Y. Emerson
Premodern Exegesis in 10 Sentences:
1. Interpretation is grounded in metaphysics; in that regard, there is a divine taxis in the life of the Godhead – the Father is Eternally Unbegotten, the Son is Eternally Begotten of the Father, and the Spirit Eternally Proceeds from the Father and the Son.
2. In accordance with this taxis, all of creation finds its life and pattern in the Father’s Son — the Father’s Image, the Father’s Wisdom, the Father’s Logos — and therefore everything is interconnected through this logocentricity.
3. Scripture’s primary author is the Holy Spirit — the One who Eternally Proceeds from the Son and thus the One who in his economic mission testifies to the Son — and therefore Scripture’s primary referent is Jesus Christ.
4. The goal of interpretation is to understand in any given biblical text the Spirit’s testimony to the Son so that we might know the Father.
5. The Spirit inspired the Scriptures to be written by human authors, and so understanding the Spirit’s testimony to the Son requires us to understand what the human author intended to communicate.
6. Understanding the literal sense — that is, the immediate, socio-culturally and literarily specific referent of the text — includes exegetical, literary, and typological considerations, always in light of the Christocentric metaphysic and view of inspiration articulated in points 1-3 above.
7. The Spirit’s intention is intricately connected to and not in contradiction to the human author’s intention, but it is also not limited to it.
8. Because the Spirit is God, he inspires human authors to write in such a way that their human intention contains his own intention; this fully-orbed consideration of the human and divine intentions includes reference to the literal sense as well as to three further senses: (1) allegorical (or spiritual); (2) tropological (or moral); and (3) anagogical (or eschatological).
9. These senses are intricately connected, and ideally — though not always in practice — the interpreter should “read the way the words go,” understanding the allegorical sense as intricately connected to the literal sense, and the other two senses as intricately connected to the first two.
10. The aim of interpretation is to love God and neighbor in Christ by the power of his Spirit.
A Summary:
1. Because all of creation is metaphysically patterned after the Father’s Son, all of Spirit-governed history and all of Spirit-inspired Scripture testifies to and centers on him, and is intricately connected historically, literarily, and theologically.
2. Therefore to interpret a text is to understand its literal sense in a way that points to and is intricately connected to its Christological referent, its tropological immediacy for the people of God, and its eschatological end so that we might follow the double love commandment (Matt. 22:36-40).
A Few Implications:
1. Most modern characterizations of premodern exegesis, whether from evangelicals or not, are inaccurate at best. Modernity’s arrogance toward the past is perhaps most entrenched here, with respect to theories and practices of interpretation.
2. To critique or reject a particular allegorical interpretation or school of interpretation is not to reject premodern interpretation as such, though these two things are often erroneously conflated.
3. Modern hermeneutical approaches, evangelical or not, share a set of metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that are often at odds with premodern theological foundations for interpretation — i.e., rather than “faith seeking understanding,” modern hermeneutics often reduces the interpretive task to methodological naturalism reliant on Enlightenment empiricism and rationalism.
4. The reduction of “authorial intent” to only what the human author could have consciously thought at the time of writing is a kind of pneumatological and bibliological kenoticism, wherein the Spirit must “turn off” his divine attributes in order to allow for the full humanity of the human author.
* For more reading and for an idea of who has influenced me on this, read Craig Carter’s recent book on biblical interpretation. But before him I was influenced by Irenaeus and Augustine and Maximus and John Sailhamer and Craig Bartholomew (see his seminal essay in “Renewing Biblical Interpretation”).