this paper is that a critical aspect of Martin Luther’s legacy, often overlooked in Reformation studies, is his influence on biblical hermeneutics. Luther’s sixteenth-century biblical hermeneutics became the bedrock of subsequent Protestant theological-hermeneutical development. Luther’s Reformation hermeneutic was a hermeneutica sacra; it was a hermeneutical paradigm shift which not only rescued biblical interpretation from the magisterium of the church of the day but also utilized scientific tools of textual analysis to interpret the Bible as sacred Scriptures. Luther’s Christological-hermeneutical focus, and his embrace of the illumining work of the Holy Spirit in biblical interpretation, were hermeneutical moves that sought to combine biblical interpretation with theological reflection. Thus, his hermeneutical method integrated biblical exegesis with Christological-pneumatic-theological reflection.
Although Luther’s Reformation paradigm was foundational for Protestant hermeneutical development from the sixteenth century onward, this paradigm was derailed in the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment in which biblical hermeneutics were not only secularized but also divorced from theological reflection. Recent developments in canonical criticism not only hark back to Luther’s Reformation hermeneutics but also seek to render the biblical message meaningful for the contemporary communities of faith, for the meaning of Scripture extends hodie ueque ad nos (even to us today). Luther’s integrative hermeneutica sacra is particularly instructive for the contemporary Church, which, on the one hand, studies the Bible with cold objectivity as though the Bible has no divine relevance for the Church today; while on the other hand, the Pentecostal-Charismatic wing of the Church, whose pneumatic hermeneutic apparently underrates the value of scientific tools of textual exegesis and tendentiously privileges pneumatology over Christology in its theological reflection, has a lot to learn from Luther’s hermeneutica sacra.
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