255.
130. See Calvin, Institutes, 1:52–55. See also Torrance, The School of Faith, 23.
131. Shelton, “Martin Luther’s Concept,” 231.
132. Schultz, “The Problem of Hermeneutics,” 44. See also Poland who notes that, for Luther, “the proper understanding of Scripture concerns not only the ‘outer clarity’ of the theological content gained from exegesis, but also the ‘inner clarity’ of the reader’s heart—the experience of grace and salvation given by the Holy Spirit through the external word of Scripture.” (Literary Criticism, 19). See also Grondin, who understands Luther to mean that “the literal meaning rightly understood, contains its own proper spiritual significance,” (Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 40).
133. Larry Shelton, “Martin Luther’s Concept,” 239–50.
134. See Wood, Luther’s Principles, 32.
135. Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 6, Genesis Chapters 31–37, 40.
136. Smart, The Interpretation of Scripture, 59. However, in the contemporary church world of denominational sectarianism, the notion of the “the church context” is problematic. Different church traditions are apt to emphasize different hermeneutical principles as their faith distinctive. Perhaps Luther’s notion of “church context” is best understood in terms of sacred hermeneutics, that is, the biblical hermeneut should be a believer rather than a secular critic who is a stranger to sacred life. As the Chicago Statement of Faith (1978) aptly states, “The Holy Spirit, the Scripture’s divine author, both authenticates it to us by His inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning” (Packer, God Has Spoken, 143).
137. Grondin defines hermeneutica sacra as “the art of practical interpretation that applies general hermeneutical rules to Scripture” while still upholding the Scriptures as sacred writings, see his Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 58.
138. Poland, Literary Criticism, 12. See also Waltke who remarks that “Ours is a sacred hermeneutic because the Author is spirit and known in the human spirit through the medium of the Holy Spirit.” Waltke, An Old Testament Theology, 80; and Brueggemann who remarks that “there is no innocent or neutral scholarship, but that all theological and interpretive scholarship is in one way or another fiduciary,” that is, based on faith or ideological presuppositions (Theology of the Old Testament, 18).
139. For a detailed account of the development of historicism, see McLean, Biblical Interpretation, 31–67.
140. For contemporary arguments for the minimalist view of the Bible, particularly with respect to the Old Testament, see Davies, In Search of Ancient Israel, 11–18; Lemche, “Is it Still Possible to Write a History of Ancient Israel,” 156–90; and Thompson, The Mythic Past, 20–25.
141. See Schleiermacher, “The Hermeneutics: Outline of the 1819 Lectures,” 85–100. See also Ricoeur, for a further development of the universal hermeneutic, Hermeneutics, 45–48; and McLean, Biblical Interpretation, 37.
142. See Ricoeur, “Philosophical Hermeneutics and Theological Hermeneutics,” 30. It is worth noting that the universal hermeneutic had a humanistic orientation; it was a product of the European Enlightenment which was viewed as “the era when human rationality overthrew religious myth and blind superstition and liberated civilization from ignorance, installing humanity as master of its own destiny.” See McLean, Biblical Interpretation, 83; and Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 7–32.
143. Waltke, An Old Testament Theology, 68.
144. Nietzsche, On the Advantage, 7.
145. Nietzsche, On the Advantage, 7.
146. The Pentateuchal documentary hypothesis associated with Julius Wellhausen, which atomizes the Pentateuch into Yahwist, Elohist, Priestly, and Deuteronomist sources, is a case in point. See Wellhausen, Prolegomena.
147. Barr, The Concept of Biblical Theology, 19.
148. These ideas are readily embraced in such works as Gunkel, The Legends of Genesis and Wellhausen, Prolegomena.
149. Frei, The Eclipse,130.
150. A hermeneutic of suspicion, a term coined by Ricoeur to depict the hermeneutic methods of Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzche and Karl Marx, is the tendency to approach a text with the presupposition that there are authentic and inauthentic elements in the text and an attempt to strip away what is considered to be inauthentic. It is a deconstructionist critique which, in effect, sows doubts in the minds of readers of the text. See Paul Ricoeur’s discourse on hermeneutics of suspicion in his Freud and Philosophy. See also Stewart, “The Hermeneutic of Suspicion,” 296–307.
151. Barton, Reading the Old Testament, 79.
152. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, 16.
153. Bray, Biblical Interpretation, 483.
154. See de Villiers, “Perspectives on Canon History,” 11–26.
155. Childs considers this attempt as very absurd indeed; he argues that “a corpus of religious writings which have been transmitted within a community for over a thousand years cannot be properly compared to inert shreds which have lain in the ground for centuries” (Introduction to the Old Testament, 79).
156. de Villiers, “Perspectives on Canon History,” 11–26.
157. See Clines and Exum, “The New Literary Criticism,” in 18–19.
158. Whereas it is acknowledged that the reader’s worldview influences understanding of the text, some extreme versions of the reader-response criticism are decidedly ideological viewpoints. For extreme versions of the reader-response criticism, see, for example, Fish, Is There a Text?, 322–26; and Fish, “Interpreting the Variorum,” 182–87. A moderate reader-response approach is posited by Iser, who observes that, since the text is external to the reader, it serves as a restraint