it . . . It is Jesus Christ working in and through the Scripture who is the infallible and inerrant word.”126
Luther’s fourth hermeneutic pillar was his emphasis on the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit in scriptural interpretation.127 Luther argued that the word of God was not efficacious in conveying its inspired message apart from the illumining work of the Holy Spirit: “the Word of God is not spiritually effective apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit depends upon the Word of God for the content and means of His revelation . . . the Word of God speaks to the reader and the Holy Spirit enables the reader to hear the Word.”128 Luther went on to observe that, apart from the illumining work of the Holy Spirit, human rationality cannot decipher the divine message in Scripture since “the Holy Spirit is not only involved in the inspirational writing of Scripture but also in the illuminating aspect of the reading of Scripture.”129 This observation was underscored by the sixteenth century reformation theologian, John Calvin, who not only observed that “the authority of Scripture derived not from men, but from the Spirit of God,” but also that the Holy Spirit, who “is superior to reason,” illumines the minds of believers to understand the Scriptures; “these words will not obtain full credit in the hearts of men, until they are sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit.”130
Luther’s biblical hermeneutic had both objective and subjective dimensions. Whereas the Bible is the object that is studied using objective critical methods, the biblical interpreter “is the subject who must be influenced by the Holy Spirit for spiritual discernment of the inspired message in the biblical text.”131 Luther’s hermeneutical process thus entails two moments: The first moment is a focus on the verbum externum (verbal external “word”). This involves a literal understanding of the philological-grammatical and historical aspects of the text. As Luther argued, “this literal understanding is necessary before the exegete enters interpretation of meaning.”132 The second moment is when the exegete, through the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit, is enabled to discern the spiritual significance of the text. Luther was, however, careful neither to embed the Holy Spirit in the “letter” of the Bible nor to separate the Holy Spirit from the Scriptures: “The Spirit is not bound to the Word . . . the Word may exist without the Spirit, but when it does so, it is just a letter . . . Similarly, the Spirit can exist apart from the Word; He is not bound to the Word, but He cannot be God’s revealing Spirit without the Word.”133 The deciphering of the spiritual sense of Scripture is, thus, not simply an outcome of the philological exegesis of Scripture. Rather, it entails the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit. Without the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit, Scripture is simply letter or Law. As Luther put it, “All Scripture is Law without the Spirit; with the Spirit, all Scripture is grace.”134
According to Luther, the spiritual sense of Scripture is appropriated by faith, and faith is created by the Holy Spirit in the believer through the proclamation of the Word; “only God can create faith as the Holy Spirit works faith in man through the preaching of the Word, and the Word provides authority for the basis of faith.”135 Not only does faith resolve the hermeneutical tension between the letter and the Spirit, but faith is, indeed, central in the interpretive process. Thus, the Holy Spirit not only inspires the Word but also creates faith in the hearer of the Word in order to appropriate the Word’s spiritual sense.
The above arguments show that Martin Luther’s hermeneutic of Scripture is, indeed, pneumatic hermeneutic. The centrality of the Holy Spirit in Luther’s hermeneutic represents a sui generis integration of the third person of the Trinity, who had largely been neglected by the medieval Church, in the development of Christian theology. Martin Luther’s unique contribution to Christian theology in this regard is, arguably, the integration of Christology and pneumatology in biblical hermeneutics. This is a development in biblical theology that should be instructive for contemporary developments in biblical theology. In some quarters of the Church, the Holy Spirit is largely ignored, and hardly ever invoked, in biblical hermeneutics. In other quarters of the Church, particularly in the Pentecostal-Charismatic tradition, an overemphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit has tendentiously undervalued Christology in the task of biblical interpretation.
Luther augments his hermeneutic pillars with a significant rider that the context for biblical interpretation is the Church community. As James Smart aptly notes, “Luther sees the church as the matrix in which interpretation takes place, but is careful to ensure that the Church does not stifle the freedom of critical scholarship and also that critical scholarship does not bring alien concepts to the Church.”136 All in all, Luther’s Reformation hermeneutic constituted a paradigm shift in biblical interpretation; his hermeneutical method not only integrated biblical exegesis with Christological-pneumatic theological reflection but was, indeed, a hermeneutica sacra (sacred hermeneutics)—a biblical-hermeneutical approach which presupposed the Bible to be the sacred inspired Word of God and which, though utilizing critical or scientific methods of textual exegesis, nonetheless, sought to not only discern the divine message in the biblical text but also to render the biblical message meaningful for the contemporary communities of faith.137 As Lynn Poland remarks, concerning Luther’s hermeneutic, “the meaning of Scripture extends . . . hodie usque ad nos (even to us day).”138
Post-Reformation Protestant Hermeneutics
Luther’s grammatical-historical method of biblical interpretation became the foundational paradigm for the development of Protestant biblical hermeneutics from the sixteenth century onward. However, whereas Luther espoused the grammatical-historical method in order rescue biblical interpretation from the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church and to provide a secure historical and rational foundation for biblical faith, the subsequent developments, under the influence of the eighteenth century European ‘Age of Reason’ (the Enlightenment), reduced the historical critical method to historicism. This ideologically -driven hermeneutical approach viewed biblical texts as mere historical phenomena which had value of their own without any relevance for the contemporary communities of faith. Thus, biblical faith was reduced to a preoccupation with historical phenomena.139 A variant of historicism, the so-called minimalist view of biblical history, held that the narratives contained in the texts of the Bible had little or no historical connection to the events they depicted. They were thus viewed as mere religious legends to be studied as literary artifacts from the past.140
Historicism, as it applied to biblical hermeneutics, was enunciated in the hermeneutic thought of the nineteenth-century German theological scholar, Friedrich Schleiermacher, who developed a universal hermeneutic. Schleiermacher’s universal hermeneutic posited that “a text is a text, whether secular or religious.”141 Schleiermacher’s universal hermeneutic thus maintained that the Bible did not require any unique interpretive approach. Schleiermacher, in effect, “collapsed the distinction between hermeneutica sacra and hermeneutica profana in order to create a universal hermeneutic.”142 Unlike Luther’s hermeneutica sacra which, though utilizing secular methods of textual exegesis, held that the biblical texts were divinely inspired and that they revealed God’s will for humankind in all time, the universal hermeneutic reduced biblical interpretation to a Religionsgeschichte Schule (history of religions school) approach which, akin to the minimalist view, argued that “the Bible represents only what certain people thought at a particular time about divine matters, but their thoughts carry no absolute truths for today.”143 Little wonder that Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, disparaged historicism, calling it “historical sickness.”144 Nietzsche observed that “we require history for life and action . . . but there is a degree of doing history and an estimation of it which brings with it a withering and degenerating life.”145
Historicism also postulated that the Bible was plausibly fallible as a historical source and diverse in its origins as a literary entity. The Bible was thus tendentiously atomized into various hypothetical source components.146 Moreover, historicism presupposed that the Bible, as a religious and theological document, might be less unique than had been supposed.147 The Bible was, hence, studied anti-supernaturally with “cold objectivity” and as mere religious literature.148 Moreover, the anti-supernaturalistic bias tended to privilege the hypothetical source components over the extant texts of the Bible, in their canonical form, in deciphering the meaning conveyed in the
