Hamlet was born too soon. That melancholy Dane, thrust into the dark, disordered world of early modernity, pined his life away, searching for a subject worthy of his capacious mind. Over the course of Shakespeare's early play, the young man constantly agonizes about his own indecision and tries to quit reflection and take action against his father's murder. Unable to act, Hamlet compounds his frustration with guilt about his cowardly indecisiveness. "Conscience does make cowards of us all," he concludes, "And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."

Had he come upon the scene in the second half of the twentieth century, Hamlet might have found in hermeneutics the proper subject for his "pale cast of thought." It might have been the perfect subject for a dithering prince. With its seemingly infinite capacity for prompting reflection on the conditions for the human act of interpreting, hermeneutics could have fit the needs of a man prone to endless rumination about the conditions that make human action and understanding possible. Guilt-free and grant-supported, our contemporary Hamlet could spend his time in tenured reflection upon textuality rather than in tenuous meditations about vengeance and sexuality.

Yet poor Hamlet will always be a source rather than a beneficiary of our contemporary passion for thinking and talking about our talk and thought. Situated as he was in the sixteenth century, this Wittenberg student was a party to the process that would eventually generate the interpretive preoccupations of our present age. Hamlet's world is a thoroughly Protestant one, forsaking the interpretive uniformity and sacramental faith of the Middle Ages for the hermeneutical liberty and psychic inwardness of modernity. Indeed, if we try to track down the sources of our contemporary fascination with the theory of interpretation, the trail takes us to the century between Martin Luther and William Shakespeare, for it is there, at the beginning of the Protestant era, that we discover the mix of theological ideas, ecclesiastical practices, and social and historical changes in which our present preoccupation with interpretation is rooted.

Modernity and the loss of consensus

If one doubts the degree to which we are at present consumed with questions of understanding, he or she might do well to survey the eight books under review in this essay. All have been written by North American or English Protestants and have appeared within the last two years.1 These books represent the wide array of viewpoints available within Protestantism about hermeneutics; they stake out positions that range from dispensationalism to postmodernism.

Just as one wonders what it is that unifies the multitudinous diversity of the Christian churches spread across the world, so might one ask what conceivable principles could unite such disparate books about such a controversial topic. What do Duke and Dallas have in common?

At the most fundamental level, these books share an earnestness of purpose. The authors consider the practices of right reading and biblical interpretation either to be threatened or in dire need of reform. "The holy Scriptures carry immense authority," explains Eugene Peterson in the foreword to The Act of Bible Reading. "Read wrongly, they can ignite war, legitimate abuse, sanction hate, cultivate arrogance. Not only can, but have … do. This is present danger."

Gerald Bray begins his treatment of the history of interpretation by pointing to contemporary scholars who are "confusing issues and muddying the waters of biblical study. … In the midst of such confusion, the church needs to reflect again on the whole process of biblical interpretation."

And to Wesley Kort, matters have reached such an impasse that we no longer have any idea what it means "to read a text as scripture." We once did, but "since the late medieval and reformation periods," we have gradually but relentlessly lost hold of this ability. In Kort's words, "an understanding of what it would be like to read a text as scripture must be recovered and reconstructed."

The sober tone of these books reflects the serious developments that have complicated the interpretation of the Bible and other texts in modernity. At the ecclesiastical level, the last four centuries have witnessed a proliferation of sects and denominations—as well as biblical translations—throughout the Protestant world. This proliferation has been one of the unintended consequences of the Reformers' belief in the perspicuity of the Scriptures and the priesthood of all believers. In theory, the self-evident clarity of the biblical text was to make it easily interpretable by the Spirit-filled believer; and the church, in turn, would manifest the unity of a community built out of countless right readers. In practice, these Protestant ideals have fostered innumerable denominational traditions and interpretive practices; fragmentation, rather than unity, has been the order of the Protestant day.

At the same time, an assortment of cultural practices and philosophical beliefs have chipped away at our confidence in both the biblical text and our ability to understand it. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, philosophical rationalism and the historical-critical study of the Scriptures undermined the authority of the Bible as an indubitable source of knowledge about all matters historical and heavenly. The world of modern science, first in the form of the Newtonian vision of a mechanistic universe and then in the Darwinian view of natural selection, proved increasingly inhospitable to a text shot through with references to the supernatural and miraculous. In a playfully defensive moment, Emily Dickinson noted in 1873 that "Science will not trust us with another World. Guess I and the Bible will move to some old fashioned spot where we'll feel at Home."

Schleiermacher's long shadow

For the last half-century, conservative biblical studies have found a "home" for Bible and believer in the school of historical exegesis built, ironically enough, upon the foundations laid by the main source of modern theological liberalism, Friedrich Schleiermacher. This great German Romantic theologian drew upon resources in both rationalism and intuitionism. He developed a theory of interpretation that was a curious amalgam of methodical study and creative illumination, as the Romantic theorists employed procedural means to suggestive, intuitive ends.

According to Hans-Georg Gadamer, Schleiermacher did not seek "the unity of hermeneutics in the unity of the content of tradition to which understanding is applied, but … in the unity of a procedure." We need procedures and a universal hermeneutic to understand texts, whether they are oral or written, because "the experience of the alien and the possibility of misunderstanding is [sic] universal."

With Schleiermacher, in a new and universal sense, alienation is inextricably given with "the individuality of the Thou." Hermeneutics is the "art of avoiding misunderstanding," but it must be practiced with the rigor of a science: in Schleirmacher's words "misunderstanding occurs as a matter of course, and so understanding must be willed and sought at every point." Indeed, the interpreter must work strenuously to overcome the obstacles to proper comprehension.

To understand a text, Schleiermacher argued, "the interpreter must put himself both objectively and subjectively in the position of the author." The interpreter does so objectively through an exhaustive study of the historical and linguistic background of the text. Only when any particular utterance has been set fully within its original context, and considered "in [its] relation to the language as a whole," can a serious misunderstanding of an utterance be avoided.

But with the proper blend of "historical and divinatory" techniques, we can do more than merely avoid misconstruing the meaning of another person's utterance; we can potentially understand that person's words better even than he or she comprehended it. "The more we learn about an author, the better equipped we are for interpretation," the ultimate goal of which is "to understand the text as first as well as and then even better than its author."

This means that to understand a text we must proceed methodically, employing all the tools of historical research, as we reconstruct the life-world behind the text. The goal of the process was for Schleiermacher the removal of the mediating traditions separating the interpreter from the work. Schleiermacher believed that we come to perfect clarity about the object of our study only when we have bridged the gap of opinions, traditions, and prejudices that separate us from it. He was confident that the final span of the bridge could be built by a creative act of illumination, by what he called the "divinatory" act of knowing and intuiting the "inner and outer aspects of the author's life." In Schleiermacher's hermeneutics, Gadamer explains, "what corresponds to the production of genius is divination, the immediate solution, which ultimately presupposes a kind of congeniality." This act of divination "depends on a pre-existing bond between all individuals."

For the Enlightenment and Romanticism, that "bond" was made possible through the presence in the self of a God-given capacity for knowledge and understanding; the clockmaker God of the Newtonian universe may have distanced himself dramatically from his creation, but before stepping back and shrouding himself, he had planted within the human mind a means to the truth. In Gadamer's words, according to Romanticism, each individual manifests a portion of the "universal life and hence 'everyone carries a tiny bit of everyone else within him, so that divination is stimulated by comparison with oneself.' "

As a result, the individuality of an author can "be directly grasped 'by, as it were, transforming oneself into the other.' "

For conservative evangelical scholars, this "transformation into the other" has most often entailed the claim that it is necessary for the contemporary reader to project himself or herself back into the position of the original audience of a text. Only after having determined what one contributor to the Roy Zuck volume calls "the original historical, cultural, grammatical, syntactical, theological meaning of the text" may the contemporary reader begin to inquire as to its relevance for the present day. Or as the lead essay in the book edited by Elmer Dyck puts it, the first step toward valid interpretation involves "exegesis, which means the determination of the originally intended meaning of a text. … The task of interpretation is nothing less than to bridge the historical—and therefore cultural—gap between" the biblical texts and us. For a number of the contributors to these two volumes, the history that stretches between us and the biblical texts, including the history of the Christian church, represents a kind of desert across which the interpreter must travel to reach the springs of the texts' original meaning.

At the other end of the Protestant theological spectrum, Wesley Kort also questions the value of the history that mediates our understanding of the biblical text. But he does so for strikingly different reasons. Like the conservative intentionalists, Kort sees history obscuring the meaning of the biblical text, but where they discover stable meanings and conventional values he suggests that "the principal conditions of human life as recounted in biblical texts are uncertainty, change, dislocation, and cultural trauma." Kort calls for a return to the reading of the "Bible as scripture," by which he means a "centripetal" reading of the text that tears us loose from the moorings of certainty or, to use one of his own metaphors, frees us from our "addiction to biblical patriarchy."

That addiction is a strong one: "So I am faced again with being a white male American academic professional," Kort laments,"—to use Zorba's words, 'the whole catastrophe.' " Since "all identities, including that of white males, are complicitous in a culture that has turned identity construction into a lethal practice," the act of reading and interpreting Scripture must be one of overcoming the corruption of a history in which "the principal constructors of lethal representations of others" must be "divested" of the habit and returned "to the culture freed from its addictive powers."

Beyond the impasse: Recovering tradition

In contrast to the intentionalists' picture of history as an arid wasteland and Kort's portrayal of history's lethally addictive powers, several of these books construe the role of history in interpretation more appreciatively, showing how we might consider the two millennia of Christian history constructively as well as critically. In charting a course between the Scylla of a rigid objectivism and the Charybdis of subjectivism, a number of these authors are offering correctives to the excesses and aberrations of the Protestant era of interpretation.

Gerald Bray undertakes a balanced survey of the history of interpretation and searches for a constructive "way forward in biblical studies." Charles Scalise seeks to chart his way through "the maze of contemporary reflection and speculation on the problem of how thinking Christians can move from the Bible to doctrine." The essayists in Richard Muller and John Thompson's book illuminate the background of contemporary hermeneutical disputes by discussing the history of the Reformers' practices of interpretation. In reaffirming the value of "precritical exegesis," they seek to shift somewhat the emphasis of contemporary Protestant theory and practice of interpretation. In their words, " 'precritical' exegesis may well offer some invaluable guidance for how historical-critical exegesis may be employed alongside and in the service of a more holistic and ecclesial approach to the text of Scripture."

Finally, Anthony Thiselton surveys and analyzes the vast body of contemporary literary, philosophical, and theological reflection on the nature of interpretation. Bray says of Thiselton's work that it "offers an outstanding example of how a [conservative evangelical] scholar … can penetrate the abstruse world of German philosophy at the deepest level," and New Horizons in Hermeneutics is indeed comprehensive and insightful in its handling of German, French, English, and American theories of interpretation.

Deftly combining the rigors of historical and theoretical reflection with a pastoral concern for proclamation, Thiselton offers a nice example of how we might overcome the temptations of Hamlet's radical isolation and disabling self-consciousness.

Almost four decades ago, the poet W. H. Auden observed that Protestant individualism had contributed to "our current lack of belief in and the acceptance of the existence of others." While Protestantism is correct in "affirming that the 'We are' of society expresses a false identity unless each of its members can say I am," Catholicism is also correct when it affirms "that the individual who will not or cannot join with others in saying We does not know the meaning of I." Auden concludes: "A solution to our difficulties cannot be found by protestant approach because it is protestantism which has caused them."

In hermeneutical terms, that is another way of saying that in its slighting of the question of ecclesiastical authority, its denigration of the role of history, and its neglect of the role of the Holy Spirit in the history of interpretation, the evangelical community has reached a significant impasse. While remaining faithful to the biblical witness and historic orthodoxy, the best of these books seek constructive, creative ways out of that impasse.

Roger Lundin is the Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, a biography, published this spring by Eerdmans. Disciplining Hermeneutics: Interpretation in Christian Perspective (Eerdmans), a collection edited by Lundin, was published last year.

1. Anthony Thiselton's work was first published in 1992; the edition under review is a paperback reissue.

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