Phillip A. Davis, Jr. | Daniel Lanzinger | Matthew Ryan Robinson (Eds.): What Does Theology Do, Actually? (Leseprobe)

Is it in the Bible? 91
standing of the biblical text in its original context, and the boundaries that need
to guide our appropriation of the text in our contemporary context.
2. Brief History of Developments and Methods in
Biblical Interpretation
Prior to any attempt to renegotiate interpretive boundaries, it is helpful to briefly
describe certain historical developments and methods that have dominated biblical
interpretation. For this, the three literary categories of finding meaning behind
the text, within the text, and before (in front of) the text are helpful. 3 This
will provide us with not only a clue as to which interpretive boundaries are
marked and / or crossed by each of the major interpretive categories, but also
which concerns motivated the various interpretive categories.
Meaning ‘‘behind the text’’ is what has come to be known in biblical studies
as historical-critical study of biblical texts. Porter and Stovell identify three salient
features of historical criticism that distinguish it from other approaches: first,
its focus on the evolutionary models of biblical texts; second, its focus on historical
reconstructions of biblical texts, and third, its focus on the original or intended
meaning of the text. Simply stated, historical-critical exegesis seeks to locate
the text, the author, and readers within their historical contexts.
The ‘‘within the text’’ category of biblical exegesis emerged as a remedy to
the weaknesses of the historical-critical approaches that sought for meaning
behind the text. This is a structuralist approach to hermeneutics, seeing meaning
as residing within the text in its linguistic structure, not behind it. This approach
led to the emergence of literary criticism, prominent in the 1970s. 4
Narrative
criticism and other related approaches within the broader framework of literary
criticism focus ‘‘on the text as the autonomous means of transmitting meaning,’’ 5
largely independent of what is behind the text. By implication, this approach is a
shift from evolutionary models, which concern themselves with the processes of
development of the text, to communication models, which focus on the nature of
the text in its final stage as we have it. The weakness of this approach, in the
light of our interpretive boundaries, is its neglect of the historical location of
meaning on the one hand, as well as the contemporary location of meaning on
3
For this brief history of the developments and methods in biblical interpretation, we will
depend on the summary presented by Porter and Stovell, Biblical Hermeneutics, 12, 13---
20.
4
Narrative criticism has its theoretical basis in what was known in secular literary criticism
as New Criticism, a form of literary reading that dominated literary theory from at
least the 1950s to the 1970s (cf. Porter and Stovell, Biblical Hermeneutics, 17).
5
Porter and Stovell, Biblical Hermeneutics, 17.