r

CHAPTER 1

Biblical Hermeneutics
Since Vatican I I

Sandra M. Schneiders

After several frustrating atternpts to fulflIl my assignrnent for

this volume, I decided that trying to surnm arize the status of biblical
herrneneutics since the Second Vatican Council was like trying to
build a three-masted tall ship under full sail in a Classic Coke bottle.
So I have abandoned any attempt to treat the matter historicaliy, or
acc.ording to personalities, or by classification of theories. Instead, I
arn goin g to try sornething much more modest, namely, to place a few
sets of pegs in the wall on which discussion materials can be hung, in
order to supply some cornmon vocabulary and a repertoire of concepts
that will facilitate further thought and discussion.

Three Factors That Shaped Biblical flerrneneutics

Since Vatican II
Three factors have decisively shaped post-coriciliar biblical herme-
neutics. One occurred before the Council, one spanned the Council
from preparation to afterrrrath, and one developed in the wake of the
Council. It is hard to overstate the importance of the first, namely,
the publication in i94) of Pope Pius XII's encyclical Divino ffiante
Spiritu.t The encyclical was certainly not revolutionary in content,

I
Pope Pius XII, Encyclical Divino AfJlante Spiritu ( September 30, 1943),http://w2.vatican
.valconrent/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hfl-xii_enc_30 09L943
-divino-afflante
-spiritu.html.
4 State of the Questions-Part I
at least by today's standards, and reinforced virtually aII the restric-
tions and caveats of Pope Leo XIII's lB93 encyclical, Providentissimus
DeLts,2 especially the assertion of the supreme control by doctrine as
promulgated by the magisterium over scholarly biblical interpretation.
Brlt Divino ffiante Spiritu opened a new era in Catholic biblical schol-
arship by recognizing the irnportance of using certain contemporary
methods, especially forrn criticism, in the interpretation of Scripture.
This was one of those recognitions of fact, like that of heliocentrism,
that can never be effectively reversed and that is bound to expand in
significance. Divino Affiante Spiritu thus began the still uncompleted
liberation of Catholic biblical scholarship from the dogrnatic shackles
clarnped upon it at the Council of Trent and reinforced by subsequent
Vatican documents and actions until Pius XII's encyclical. There is still
a tendency arrrong the guardians of orthodoxy in the Vatican to start
with rnagisterial forrnulations and judge biblical work in terrns o{'its
conforrnity to and defense of such propositions and to equate "tradi-
tions" in the sense of long-held opinion oi-practice with "Tradition" in
a credibly theological sense. A rlajor exarnple of this was the refusal
of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in its 1976 declara-
tion Inter Insigniores, which attempted to "close" the discussion of the
possible ordination of wornen, to recognize the carefully grounded
and qualified flnding of the Pontiflcal Biblical Cornmission that the
New Testarnent evidence by itself did not preclude the ordination of
women.3 But at least in principle, the virtual total irrrprisonment of
biblical scholarship in anti-rnodernist obscurantism was undermined
by Divino ffiante Spiritu.
Catholic scholars have gone well beyond anything Pius XII autho-
rized or probably would have approved, and post-conciliar documents

2
Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Providentissimus Deus ( November I B, 1893 ), http://w2.vatican
.valcontent/leo-xiii/enlencyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_l8I I 1893_providentissimrrs
-deus.htrnl. For a good brief treatment of these two most irnportant Vatican docu-
ments on Scripture in the modern period within their respective historical contexts.
see Raymond E. Brown ancl Thomas Aquinas Collins, "Church Pronouncements," in
The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, and
Roland E. Murphy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 196S), 1166-74.
rCongregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration Inter Insignores (October
1 5, 1 97 6 ), http / /www.va tican.valrornan - curia/congre ga t ion s/cfaith/document s
:

,ire_con_cfaith_doc_ | 97 6 L O 15_inter- insignores_en.html.

 Biblical Hermeneutics Since Vatican II 5

such as the Pontifical Biblical Cornrnission's "The Interpretation of the

Bible in the Church" (1993) trave recognized, albeit timidly, the need
for contemporary Catholic biblical scholarship not only to rnake use
of modern critical methods but to engage the agenda of rnodernity
itself.a This agenda was pushed forwrard most recently by the Pontif,cal
Theological Cornrnission's docurnerrt, "sensus Fidei in the Life of the
Church" (2Ol ) by the recognition that faith is, first of all, a response
to revelation rather than to theological formulations.5 Pope Francis has
underlined this irnportant principle by his repeated exhortations to pas-
tors at all levels of the Church to preach the Gospel, not the Catechisrn.
The second factor shaping post-conciliar biblical hermeneutics was
the ernergence, rnainly in francophone Europe during the decades
preceding Vatican II, of what was flrst pejoratively called la Nouvelle
Th4ologie. The leitrnotif of this intellectual rnoverrrent, which actually
undergirded and found expression in so rnuch of the Council's work,
was ressourcement, or the rooting of the conciliar renewal in a "retrlrn
to the sources." These life-giving sources r,vere Scripture, the patristic
tradition, which was itself pervasively and profoundly biblical, and
the liturgy, which was originally totally shaped by Scripture. Nouvelle
Thdologie was not an espousal of archaisrn or prirnitivisrn, much less
of anachronistic approaches to biblical interpretation. It was an af-
flrmation of the non-negotiable centrality of the Bible as Scripture in
the faith and life of the Church. It was a promotion of the proverbial
"living faith of the dead against the dead faith of the living."
One of the major effects of this biblical renewal in all areas of the
Council's work was the reclairning by the baptized of their identity
and dignity as "the people of God" and their rnission as the Body
of Christ in the world. A major need of this rejuvenated people was
nourishment by the living Word of God in Scriptui:e. It is interesting
that a presiding rnetaphor in Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution
on Divine Revelation, which was one of the most contested in the
Council's experience and was only passed at the end of the very last

a
Pontifical Biblical Commission, "The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church"
(April 23, L994), http://catholic-resources.orglChurchDocs/PBC_Interp.htm.
s lnternationai
Theological Cornmission, "sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church"
(2O14), http://vvvvw.vatican.va,/roman_curia/congregations /cf aith/cti_documents/rc
cti 2OL4O6lO sensus-fldei en.html.
6 State of the Questions-Part l
Session, was that of the "table of the Word," deliberately paralleled to
the table of the Eucharist.6
The Council Fathers, with the exception of the tiny minority who
held out to the very end for a two-source theology of Revelation that
would have effectively left Scripture subject to the. rnagisteriurn (the
final vote to pass the Dogmatic Constitution was 2,344 to 6), recog-
nized and were deterrnined to end the four-hundred-year biblical fast
that had been imposed on God's people in the wake of the Council
of Trent. This holy people, spiritually emaciated by scriptural starva-
tion, was flnally to be fed and their thirst slaked. By means of new
translations, the Word was to be taken out of the deep freezer of an
incomprehensible ancient language in which it had been assiduously
preserved frOm " Contarnination" by "private interpretation," Sumptu-
ously prepared by knowledgeable preachers and musicians rather than
served up in the pious mush of irrelevant "ferverinos," and joyously
consurned by a farnished cornrnunity, not once in awhile on special
occasions, but daily if possible, always on the Lord's Day, and espe-
cially on the Great Feasts and in the conpext of the celebration of all
the Sacrarnents. The baptized were to become deeply familiar with the
whole of Scripture, not just Matthew 16:18.
The enthusiasrn of the post-conciliar church for Scripture was
a rnajor irnpetus for the development of Catholic biblical studies in
the irnrnediate aftermath of the Council. The Council had called the
church's pastors to a responsibility for which they were largely un-
prepared by pre-conciliar seminary education, namely, to preach the
Gospel well, in the vernacular, daily, and to incorporate it into the life
of the church at every level and in every venue. Lay people thernselves
were clarnoring for biblical education. Rather than a dry trek through
an inventory of proof texts, biblical education of serninarians and
newly rninted lay ministers now involved serious, adult study of the
Bible as Scripture, and that required professors of Scripture who were
capable of providing such education. Demand was creating the supply

See, esp., Second Vatican Council, Dogrnatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei
6

Verbum), ch. 6, sec. 2 L, http://vwvw.vatican.valarchive/hist_councils/ii-vatican-council

/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html. This chapter is especially
important in its insistence on the centrality of Scripture in every aspect of the life of the
Church. For the story of Dei Verbum's trajectory in the Council, see John W. O'Malley,
what Happened at vatican 11 (cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,2ooS), 276-a9.
 Biblical Hermeneutics Since Vatican II 7

and Catholic biblical scholarship leaped ahead, not without rnissteps

and occasional crashes, but ahead nonetheless- And, of course, once a
critical rrrass of the people of God began to learn what Scripture really
had to say about church, the spiritual life, mature rnorality in the
exercise of a free conscience, God, Jesus, and the call to discipleship
and rninistry, there was no way that the attempt to squeeze thern back
into their pre-conciliar pews was going to be, finally, successful. Nor
were scholars who were learning to interpret the text according to the
canons of the modern academy going to re-assume ttreir dogrnatically
controlled catechetical identities and functions-
By the tirne the retrenchrnent began under the papacy of John
Paul II, with its "creeping infallibility," suppression of "dissent" and
expansion of loyalty oaths, re-imposition of the pre-conciliar clericalist
and rnisogynist ethos in seminaries, and punitive treatrnent of theo-
logians who attempted to engage pastorally with the real issues of the
people of God rather than sirnply enforce discipline, it was really too
late to re-embargo the Word of God. The thirty-year trek in the theo-
logical desert that ended with ihe election of Pope Francis certainly
darnpened the biblical renaissance that had begun in the period before
the council, that blossomed during the Council, and that had flourished
for a decade or so after it. But it did not succeed in reinstating among
either biblical scholars or the laity who had tasted the fruits of their
research the pre-conciliar biblicat farnine that the Council had ended.
The third factor shaping post-conciliar Catholic biblical scholar-
ship emerged very quickly after the Council. Catholic biblical schol-
arship was rapidly resituated in the larger secular acaderny. Many of
those who would becorne the best Catholic biblical scholars of the
first post-conciliar generation were being trained not only in the great
theological faculties of Europe (e.g., Paris, Louvain, Tiibingen, Oxford,
Carnbridge, the Pontiflcal Biblical Institute, the Ecole Biblique in Je-
rusalern) but also in the great research universities in this country
(Johns Hopkins, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, Emory, the
University of Chicago, and elsewhere).'The serninary, even with its

7
For example, the three editors of The Jerome Biblical Commentary, Raymond E.
Brown, Joseph A. Fitzrnyer. and Roland E. Murphy, were examples of the ecclesially
comrnitted scholars who received c'xcellent modern biblical educations in the immedi-
ate aftermath of the Council and went on to prepare not only the laity bttt successive
8 State of the Questions-Part l
post-conciliar curriculurrr revised to centralize Scripture studies and
with the recognition that Scripture was the soul of all theology (Dei
Verbum 24),was no longer the only place to study the Bible, and there
was general recognition that those who would teach Scripture in the
serninary or Catholic universities and colleges needed doctoral-level
preparation, much of which was, at first, available primarily only
outside Catholic institutions in this country.
Immersion in the secular academy, often followed by active par-
ticipation in professional societies that were not exclusively Catholic
or even religious (such as the Society of Biblical Literature), exposed
Catholic biblical scholars to the dynamics that were convulsing higher
education in the l96Os and after. Increasingly, the religious sciences
were being studied ecurrenically and inter-religiously, and often
enough even without explicit religious comraritment on the part of
professors or students. Interdisciplinarity was ernerging as the hall-
rnark of late rnodern and post-rnodern higher education. Wornen and
ottrer rrrarginalized populations were being adrrritted for studies and,
eventually, joining faculties bringing perspectives to biblical scholar-
ship that had been simply non-existent for the first two millennia of
the Church's engagernent with the biblical text. These newcomers were
bringing questions and answers that the establishment had no cate-
gories for handling. But once again, atterrpts to defend the academy
against this novelty or to re-establish the patriarchal or hegernonic
status quo, though painful, were ultirnately futile.
The first and perhaps rnost noticeable effect of the relocation of
Catholic biblical study and teaching from the enclosed confessional
serninary into the mainstrearrl of intellectual life in the centers of
higher learning, \ /as the rnethodological explosion within the disci-
pline. Development s in secular historio graphy, archaeology, philology,
literary studies, sociology and cultural anthropology, politics and eco-
nornics, the physical sciences, linguistics, art, comparative literature,
and aesthetics were increasingly seen as highly relevant to biblical
interpretation, and their ernployment a source of new and exciting
paths into heretofore unirnagined realms of meaning and relevance.
As members of rnarginalized groups, especially women, discovered

generations of biblical specialists who would keep the conciliar approach to biblical
scholarship alive in the decades from the Council to the election of Francis.
 Biblical Hermeneutics Since Vatican II 9

that the Bible was not entirely liberating for thern but, conversely,
had functioned powerfully in the legitirnation of their oppression in
family, society, and Church, ideology criticism emerged.s As biblical
scholars fanned out into these different fields and began to apply their
findings in the task of interpreting the biblical texts, a wide range of
new approaches, new forms of criticisrn, and new rnethods of exegesis
emerged that went considerably beyond the classical historical and
theological approaches of the pre-conciliar period. Of particular im-
portance were literary rnethods such as narrative criticism, which was
especially enriching because so rnuch of both testaments is, in fact,
narrative; a renewal of the engagement between biblical interpretation
and spirituality which had been in abeyance since the Middle Ages;
and the ideology criticisrn which becarne an important resource for
liberation theologies of all kinds, frorrr ferninist to racial and ethnic,
fi'om flrst world to third world.e
A conundrurn was developing ciuring this tirne that would even-
tually lead to an engagement of biblical studies with philosophical
herrneneutics: the rnore different methods refined and extended the
quest of biblical scholars into the history of the biblical texts, the fur-
ther away frorrr the texts' message and rneaning they got. Historical
criticism has a built-in propensity for eternal regress. The answer to
every historical question poses a new question about the even rrlore
rerrlote history. But the rr,zhole point of studying sacred (that is, ca-
nonical) texts, as opposed to purely historical ones, is to "translate"
these religiously norrnative texts into the lives of the people for whom
they are religiously normative. "Translation" in this sense is not merely
a linguistic transaction between different languages. It is an existential

8I have discussed this issue at considerable length as well as supplying some ex-
amples of feminist interpretation in Sandra Schneiders, 'A Case Study: A Feminist
Interpretation of John 4:l-42," in The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as
Sacred Scripture,2nd ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), I80-99; Schneiders,
"John 2O: I I - 18: The Encounter of the Easter Jesus with Mary Magdalene-A Trans-
formative Feminist Reading," inWhat Is John? Readers and Readings of the Fourth Gospel, ed.
Fernando F. Segovia (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), i55-68. For a more comprehensive
study of the problem of patriarchal biblical language and imagery for God in the Bible
as a whole, see Schneiders, Women and the Word: The Gender of God in the New Testament
and the Spirituality of Women (New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, l936).
e
I have treated this development at greater length in Schneiders, The Revelatory
Text, esp. in chs. 4-5.
lO State of the Questions-Part l
transaction between worlds. The question for the interpreter of a
normative and authoritative sacred text ( that is, a text regarded not
rnerely as an historical record but as Scripture) is always and primarily
not just what did this text mean to those who produced it, nor even
what does this text mean in the abstract, but what does this text
rrrean for the believing community in the present? In other words, the
ckrallenge is how to get the interpretive project going forward into the
present and future of the community rather than sirnply backward
into an ever-receding past.

Three lVlediating Tfiads

Let rne turn now frorn this rapid overview of factors influencing
the developrnent of biblical herrneneutics in the post-conciliar period
to three other sets of pegs I want to set into the wall of our herme-
neutical reflection. Each of the three sets has three pegs each. I hope
these sets of interrelated concepts will help clarify later discussions.
The flrst triad is one that no one seerns to be able to trace to its
actual originator, although most scholars probably encountered it,
irnplicitly or explicitly, in the writings of the French philosopher Paul
Ricoeur.ro (Sorne biblical scholars, especially the "ne\A/ historicists,"
do not like it at all, but I think it is more clarifying than any alterna-
tives I know. ) It is the inter-related categories of the "world behind
the text," the "world of the text," and the "world before or in front
of the text." This is a heuristic schema, not a description of physical,
historical, geographical, sociological, cultural, or any other kind of
entity in the real world.
The world behind the text refers to what produced the text. There are
at least two categories of such factors: flrst, the events (historical or
meta-historical) to which the texts purport to refer (e.9., the exodus,
the exile, the life and ministry of Jesus, the crucifixion, the resurrection
and the experience of it by of the first disciples, Paul's ministry, the
foundation of the early church); second, the agents who/which puta-
tively or actually produced the text (e.g., Moses, the Deuteronomist,

roThe most succinct treatment of this topic (although not explicitly under these
three headings) is Paul Ricoeur's srnall chef d'oeuvre: Interpretation Theory: Discourse and
the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1976).
 Biblical Hermeneutics Since Vatican II II

Matthew's cornrnunity, Paul or pseudo-Paul, an anonymous or pseud-

onymous redactor, or an oral or textual tradition). Notice that talking
about the "world behind the t-ext" does not involve any implication
that a named event or agent ever happened or even existed. That is a
different question. It means the researcher is choosing to investigate
how, why, when, where, bywhat agency, etc., this text came to be, and
that involves raising questions about all the theories or clairns that
can help give a plausible explanation of or answer to that question.
This is the type of investigation that is usually subsurned under the
collective heading of "historical criticisrn" and makes use prirnarily of
historical methods. The historical critic will disassemble, deconstruct,
artalyze, cornpare the text with other texts and sources of historical
data in the effort to elucidate its genesis and trace its development.
This is essentially a diachronic process.
The world of the text refers to what has been produced, that is, to the
literary entity in its integrity', e .g., this particular epic, psalm, gospel,
pericope, parable, etc. Using primarily literary methods, both syn-
chronic and diachronic, the investigator atternpts to establish the
nature or type or genre of this textual entity as it now stands, how it
works linguistically and rhetorically, how it affects or intends to affect
its audience. The prirnary interest is not who wrote it. when, \A/here,
and so forth, or even necessarily what it rneans in sorne singular or
discursive way, but how it operates on its reader to produce meaning,
which is virtually always multivalent. The literary critic works with
the text as it now stands rather than with hypothesized earlier fonns
or edition5-1fiat is, with the final form of the text, and how readers,
past and present, respond to it regardless of how the text carne to be.
For the literary critic the meaning rs in the text, not behind it. Literary
criticisrn is essentially a synchronic process.
The world in front of the text refers to what the text produces when
text and reader interact. As we will see, this is the sphere of herme-
neutics and it feeds into theological reflection, spirituality, pastoral
engagement, social commitrnent, liberation theology, and so on-rr

I' I address these topics at some length in reference to the Fourth Gospel in Sandra
Schneider s, Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, rev. ed.
(New York: Crossroad,2AO)), esp.part l, chs. l-4.
L2 State of the Questions-Part l
In the actual work of biblical interpretation more than one of these
areas is likely to be investigated and the results critically cornbined, but
the interpreter is usually primarily concerned with one or the other.
Any serious biblical study is going to involve, in differing degrees
and combinations, the categories of a second triad: exegesis, criticism,
and interpretation which correspond roughly to historical, literary, and
herrneneutical approaches. Exegesis, a terrn which was once thought
to cover the whole scholarly enterprise of biblical interpretation, is
actually prirnarily an effort to establish "what the text actually says,"
regardless of whether that is factually accurate, whether it is true,
whether the exegete agrees with it, even whether it is moral or helpful,
etc. The classical tools of historical criticisrn are the rnost useful for
this task, but literary tools such as structural analysis, form criticism,
rhetorical criticisrn, and so on are also useful and important. One of
the rnajor developrnents in post-conciliar biblical work has been the
realization that exegesis is not synonymous or coterminous with in-
terpretation. One cannot interpret a text until one knows what it says,
but one can know quite well what it says without knowing what it
rreans. (Parenthetically, this can be a hideout for an ecclesiastically
threatened biblical scholar who says, "This is what responsible exegesis
shows this text to be saying. Don't ask rne whether it is true or what
its irnplications are for the ordinary believer or how it does or does not
relate to doctrine or rnagisterial positions." )
Criticism, which is an effort to analyze and evaluate the text's con-
tent in relation to the reader, that is, its meaning in and of itself, usu-
ally finds literary or sociological or psychological rnethods most useful.
Again, criticisrn can be appreciative, highly reserved, or even practiced
as rejection. The point is not the biblical scholar's reaction to what the
text says or means but ascertaining how this text operates in relation
to its readers or hearers. Thus, a ferninist biblical critic might want
to know whether John 2O'.1-18 actually presents Mary Magdalene
a-s an apostle in the technical, theologically significant sense of the
terrn, and (regardless of whether there ever was a Mary Magdalene
or whether she did or said what the text presents her as doing and
saying ) how the answer to that question can be substantiated frorn the
text, whereas an historical critic might be using the same passage in
relation to its analogues in Matthew and Luke to determine whether
the tomb was really empty on Easter morning.
 Biblical Hermeneutics Since Vatican II 13

Finally, interpretation, the full flowerin g of the herrneneutical

project, which is an effort to assimilate the/a rneaning of the text,
involves the personal and transformative response of the reader or
the reader's readers to what the text says and means. One's response
may be positive or negative, accepting or rejecting, perplexed or chal-
lenging or argumentative or exhilarating. But the act of interpretation
involves the reader personally with the text's rneaning. Interpretation
is the heart of the hermeneutical enterprise. It is where exegesis and
criticism terrninate in transforrnative appropriation.
In short, exegesis asks what the text says; criticisrn asks what
the text rneans; herrneneutics engages the reader, individual and/or
corrrrrlunity, in the ongoing transforrnation that is required when one
inhabits the text as Word of God.
In the period irnmediately following Divino Afflante Spiritu, Catholic
biblical scholars reveled in the real, albeit limited, freedorn to do ac-
tual exegesis, to realiy raise the question of what the biblical text says
rather than starting with dogrnatic answers and trying to find proof
texts in the Bible to support those answers. Exegesis was the focus
of their efforts, and historical criticism was seen by rnany Catholic
biblical scholars at that tirne as the totality of the scholarly project.
They left questions of meaning and irnplication to pastors or activ-
ists. In the wake of the Council, however, they becarne interested in
ttre variety of critical methods that opened the text in exciting new
ways for the life of the individual believer and- the Church comrnunity.
More synchronic rnethods such as semiotics, structuralism, and then
deconstruction were investigated. Even rnore exciting approaches in
the later post-conciliar period were literary rnethods, such as narrative
criticism, and social scientific and psychological analysis. Most recently,
praxis-oriented liberationist approaches such as ideology criticism
and forays into the relationship between the bibticai text and spiritu-
ality, social justice involvement, inter-religious dialogue, and the new
ccsmology have emerged. But as scholars saw how diverse were the
results of this wide variety of critical methods, they found themselves
increasingly aware of the necessity of flnding some way to determine
the validity of their interpretations and to adjudicate among conflicting
results.t2 The issues were not purely technical or methodological. It

'2 I take up these hermeneutical questions in some detail in Schneiders, The Reve-
latory Text, 157*67 .
14 State of the Questions-Pzvt l
is not necessarily the case ttrat if one applies a rnethod appropriately
the resulting interpretation is valid. Scholars were beginning to see
that different interpretations of the sarrle tcxt might be equally valid,
that is, well-grounded in the text and methodologically justifiable, but
not (or not equally) relevant or meaningful. The issue was not purely
rnethodological or even episternological. The issue was herrneneutical.
Hermeneutics is the global enterprise of interpreting texts as meaning-
ful and transformative of persons, social structures, intellectual com-
rnitments, and so on. Hermeneutics allows texts to transform "world,"
the imaginative reality constructions within which individuals and
corrrrrrunities live, and thereby the readers who inhabit those worlds-
Not many biblical scholars were willing to engage this philosoph-
ical enterprise. Most were not philosophically trained, and, like many
older scholars who had grown up intellectually in the over-specialized
academy of the first half of the twentieth century, interdisciplinarity
was intimidating. A "Scholar" \A/aS, by definition, Someone who had
mastered his (and it was virtually always "lnis" ) field and respectfully
left to other specialists things that were not part of his own specializa-
tion. But the intellectual world was changing. The days of total rrrastery
of a single defined fleld, or even the existence of a rnethodologically
deflned "field" that was totally distinct frorn other fields, were over,
if indeed such a situation had ever really existed.
Sorne twenty years ago,with a brashness that befitted and ex-
posed my inexperience in regard to the conventions of the modern
academy, I suggested in writin g, to the combined vehement denials
of sorne and shocked recognition of others in biblical scholarly circles,
that we Catholic biblical scholars had becorne experts on how to do
what we did without realizing that we did not really know what we
were doing.rs In other words, we had becorne highly proficient in the
use of current exegetical and critical methodology but lacked a co-
herent herrneneutical theory to explain or justify our critical choices,
exegetical practice, or even our interpretive success, to say nothing
of how our approach to Scripture and its results flt into a coherent
theology of revelation. There were a few of us, still unestablished
enough in our fields to know that this was in fact the case and that
biblical scholars had to venture into the philosophical thicket of theo-
retical hermeneutics just as we were venturing into the rnethods of

Ir Ibid., 2t (the comment had already appeared in the 1991 edition).

 Biblical Hermeneutics Since Vatican II l5
non-biblical flelds such as literature, the social sciences, ideological
analysis, and aesthetics. Biblical scholars had lived their way into
and had to find their way through the problematic relation between
validity of investigation (guaranteed by rnethod ) and rneaningfulness
of interpretation (truth ).
The whole problernatic was symbolically captured in the title of
what was perhaps the most irnportant book on the subject in the last
half of the twentieth century, Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method,
whickr, in fact, was really an attempt to challenge and reverse the,ac-
cepted relationship between these two tern-rs. According to Gadamer,
method does not, as the high priests of the Scientific Revolution and
then the Enlightenrrrent would have us believe, control our access to
truth nor deterrnine the validity of our engagernent with it. Rather,
the hegemony of method is actually an obstacle to the search for truth,
because it defines (and thereby limits) truth rather than using rnethod
to facilitate the quest for truth.'4 If one's rnethod of investigation is a
ruler, and that rnethod is allowed to determine what questions can be
asked and what answers are valid, only longitudinal rneasurements
will count as truth. But if the rnost significant dirrrensions of the object
of investigation far exceed linear measurernent, then the hegernony
of rnethod rules out the real quest for truth. It is hard to exaggerate
the radicalism of this proposal irr an Enlightc'nrnent epistemological
context. However, it has been generaliy recognized as valid even by
those who do not fully subscribe to Gadarrler's theory as a whole.
Herrneneutics, as applied tc "texts" broadly understood, is the
theory and practice of the corrrplex process by which a text, through
its engagernent by interpretation, gives birth to understanding or life
transforming appropriation of meaning. Hermeneutics, in other words,
is critical to biblical scholarship's facilitation of the Bible becoiling
Scripture, that is, truly revelatory in and for the believing cornmunity.
It is the bridge from "pure" exegetically based biblical criticisrn to
preaching, to theology, to spirituality, to social commitrnsnl-flncleed,
the bridge from understanding our self and our world to changing
them. The most important theorist of hermeneutics, writing at the

ra
See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundztige einer philosophischen
Hermeneufik (Tribingen: Mohr, 1960); ET: Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel
Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 2006 [based on the 5th
German ed., f 9861).
16 State of the Questions-Part l
Same tirne as Gadarner, was Paul Ricoeur, who produced an enor*
mous corpus on the subject but whose theory of discourse under the
conditions of inscription (i.e., textual discourse), which underlies his
theory of biblical interpretation, is available in his srnall but dense
work Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning.t5
In the last quarter of the twentieth century these two philosoph-
ical giants, neither of whorn was a theologian or exegete by m€tier
but both of whorn were intensely interested in the role of texts in
the hurnan enterprise, especially those texts held sacred in societies,
laid out the parameters of the herrneneutical project in which the
field remains engaged. Gadarner atternpted to develop an ontology of
understanding, and Ricoeul a phenornenology of language, especially
written language, that is, textual discourse. Together they provide, in
my opinion, a theoretical model of what is involved in knowing when
we interpret the Bible as Sacred Scripture, as the canonical revelatory
text of the people of God. Scholars can and do disagree about the ex-
planatory success of the particular theories of Gadarner and RicoeuL
and they have been rnuch expanded since their flrst appearance. But
these two scholars laid out the challenge to biblical studies to engage
futly the task of developing an adequate herrneneutical t'rarnework
for biblical interpretation, one that takes full account not only of exe-
getical and critical rnethods but also of the historical, literary, theo-
logical, and spirituality dirnensions of the project. Such an integral
theory of biblical interpretation is the sine qua non for achieving fully
the task that the Counci) bequeathed to the biblical academy, narnely,
laying the table of the Word of God for the nourishrnent of the people
of God in their task of transforrning the world which God so loved as
to give the only Son.

Where Are We Today?

where does this leave us? Catholic biblical scholarship today is
So,
polarized by, at one extrerne, a Tridentine literalism that leans toward
oppressive rnagisterial fundamentalism and, at the other extreme, a
fascination with methodological experirnentation, often for its own
sake, that flirts with exoticisrn or even nihilism. In between are most

r5 See note lO.

 Biblical Hermeneutics Since Vatican II L7

serious biblical scholars who are doing yeoman service in and for the
church in the quest for learning and faith, or indeed, a learned faith.
We would be more effective, in my opinion, if we were more willing
to risk deeper forays into hermeneutics in the strict sense of the word.
This is the meeting ground between biblical scholarship and theology,
which rernains sornething of a "no rnan's land" when it could and
should be the arena of fruitful mutuality. The two fields need each
other both to neutrahze the extremes and to rnaxirnize their contri-
bution to the acaderny and the Church.