Tragic hermeneutics

In an article in Theology Today (1980), David Steinmetz quotes Benjamin’s Jowett’s essay on the interpretation of Scripture (1859), which insists on a single meaning in a text – the meaning intended by the author and understood by the original audience. Steinmetz admits that critical scholarship has moved on since 1859, but says “Biblical scholarship still hopes to recover the original intention of the author of a biblical text and still regards the pre-critical exegetical tradition as an obstacle to the proper understanding of the true meaning of that text. The most primitive meaning of the text is its only valid meaning, and the historical-critical method is the only key which can unlock it.”

Steinmetz claims that this view is “demonstrably false” and “a fantastic idea,” and says that pre-critical interpretation is, at least on this point if not others, superior.

Jowett expresses what might be called a “tragic” hermeneutics. Way off in the distant past there was an “edenic” moment of communication, when the author first communicated with his audience. Everything since then has been so much decline, but the interpreter’s hope is that he can recover this lost paradise. Steinmetz is, I think, right to say that “Medieval theologians defended the proposition, so alien to modern biblical studies, that the meaning of Scripture in the mind of the prophet who first uttered it is only one of its possible meanings and may not, in certain circumstances, even by its primary or most important meaning.”