FROM EXEGESIS TO HERMENEUTICS - Rice School of Pastoral ...

28 HORIZONSrole of the Bible within the Church. The educated laity is becoming evermore biblically literate and increasingly scriptural in its liturgical andpersonal spirituality 19 but, simultaneously, less impressed with abstractbiblical esoterica from the experts. At the same time, respectable contemporarytheologians have come to an operative conviction that alltheology, however speculative in nature and philosophical in structure,must be firmly rooted in biblical revelation if it is to convincingly claimthe modifier "Christian." 20 And pastors, from pope to parish priest, arebeing confronted with the fact that moral or spiritual teaching that is notbiblically based will not be very credible either in the increasinglyecumenical world forum or even within Roman Catholicism itself. 21 But,if spirituality, theology, and pastoral morality are to be rooted in andinformed by biblical revelation the question of the contemporary meaningof the text cannot be avoided.In short, for both academic and pastoral reasons the question of thecontemporary meaning of the Bible is gaining ascendancy over the questionof authorial intent. Let me hasten to add, lest anyone conclude thatrigorous historical criticism is optional or can be bypassed in the interpretativeprocess, that the exegetical task of trying to discover what theauthor intended to say retains its full importance as an indispensableelement in biblical research because no interpretation which runscounter to the author's intent taken in its total context can be consideredvalid. But it is becoming ever more obvious that biblical interpretationis a far larger enterprise than it appeared to be in the 1940's and thathistorical criticism, although indispensable, is only one of a complex ofmethods and procedures that must be applied in the understanding of anancient text."This is easy to verify by consulting recent issues of popular reviews for the laity. Forexample, Today*s Parish 12 (September 1980) was virtually completely devoted to a"Symposium: Bible in the Parish,'* made up of articles by M. Boucher, E. Maly,S. Schneiders, G. Martin, D. Senior, and E. Trester. Several new middle level biblicalcommentaries have been inaugurated in the past few years to answer the growing demandof the laity for sound nontechnical aids to Bible study, e.g., The Doubleday New TestamentCommentary Series and the New Testament Message Series, ed. by D. Senior and W. Harringtonand published by M. Glazier.20 Two major recent examples of biblically based theological efforts are E. Schillebeeckx'smonumental two-volume study in christology, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology,tr. H. Hoskins (New York: Seabury, 1979) and Christ: The Christian Experience andthe Modern Worid, tr. J. Bowden (New York: Seabury, 1980); H. Küng, On Being α Christian,tr. E. Quinn (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976). For speculative efforts to explainhow Scripture functions in the theological project, see D. Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order:The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: Seabury, 1975), esp. pp. 49-87; B. Lonergan,Method in Theology (New York: Seabury, 1972), esp. pp. 153-73.21The reaction within and outside the Church to Inter Insigniores, the Vatican Declarationon the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood, especiallyin view of the nonsupport of the Declaration's position by the conclusions of the PontificalBiblical Commission, was a good example of this problem.