Letteratura scientifica selezionata sul tema "Perspicuity of Scripture"

AbstractAdolf Schlatter (1852–1938) found himself time and again caught in the crossfire between the opposing camps of fundamentalist Pietism and liberal historical-criticism. This article suggests that Schlatter, by avoiding the pitfalls of both extremes, provides a unique way of uniting faith and scientific criticism through his creative reinterpretation of classic attributes of scripture, namely, (1) inspiration as organic and historic-pneumatic, (2) unity as Christocentric, (3) scriptural authority as evoking discipleship, (4) infallibility as relational-volitional, and finally, (5) perspicuity as catholic. In times where there still seems to exist a big gap between ‘evangelical’ and ‘scientific’ approaches to scripture, Schlatter's focus on scripture not only as a means to know God (Erkenntnismittel), but primarily as a means to receive God's grace (Gnadenmittel), remains valuable, helping us to do away with possible misunderstandings and stereotypes and enabling us to recalibrate our perspective on scripture.

The purpose of this article is to examine the biblical exegesis of two seventeenth-century Dutch Remonstrant theologians, Simon Episcopius (1583–1643) and Étienne de Courcelles (1586–1659). Their hermeneutic was characterized by an emphasis on the perspicuity, or clarity, of scripture through the use of reason, combined with the marginalization of spiritual meanings in favor of the literal-grammatical sense alone. In both of these emphases, they went beyond their theological forebear, Jacob Arminius (1559–1609), and adumbrated the methods of later Enlightenment thinkers. The stress on perspicuity and authorial intention led to increasing fascination with text criticism, linguistic analysis, and historical contextualization, highly rarefied disciplines that became prerequisites for correct, scholarly biblical interpretation. This development also pushed the question of biblical fallibility closer to the center of the doctrine of scripture. As a consequence of the philological, scientific study of the Bible, biblical interpretation was relegated to the field of scholarship and doctrinal formulation to the church. The original ideal of biblical perspicuity resulted in biblical obscurity.

The doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture maintains that the meaning of Scripture is clear to those who are enlightened by the Holy Spirit through faith. But this definition provides no way to know whether one has true faith or has been so enlightened by the Holy Spirit, a problem accentuated by persistent disagreement among persons who claim to be Christians of good will. This is a specific instance of a more general problem afflicting “closed” theological epistemologies. This essay provides an exposition of Kevin Diller’s synthesis of the “closed” theological epistemologies of Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga and critiques it on phenomenological grounds. It then concludes with a phenomenologically redefined description of Christian faith which entails rejecting the doctrine of the claritas scripturae and motivates an “open” theological epistemology.

Summary Discoveries in the last century which contribute to the field of Old Testament textual criticism raise challenges for Protestant use of the Masoretic Text and canon, and for evangelical doctrines of the authority and perspicuity of Scripture. Protestants maintain that the authority of the New Testament is self-attesting, not derived from the Church. Difficulties arise when Protestants apply this understanding to the Old Testament, particularly to the Masoretic Text and canon used to exclude the Apocrypha. Of particular interest is the Masoretic Text of Jeremiah, which is widely acknowledged by textual critics to represent a later version of the book than the LXX text of Jeremiah. Protestant use of the Masoretic canon (and later text of Jeremiah) in light of the early church’s preference for the LXX (text and canon) entails 1) a recognition that community reception plays a significant role in determining the extent of the canon ‐ and that, through Jerome, Rabbinic Judaism’s Bible served to ‘correct’ the Spirit-filled church’s canon; and 2) that catholicity cannot be an adequate basis for recognizing the Old Testament canon, given that the Church has never been unanimous on this point. Through the lens of the self-attesting witness of the New Testament to Christ, ‘theological interpretation’ of the Old Testament may allow evangelicals to maintain a high view of the Old Testament as Scripture while tolerating some uncertainties concerning the precise text and outer canonical bounds of the Old Testament.

Throughout his writings, the physician and essayist Thomas Browne (1605–82) grapples with the problem of how and whether to interpret the silence of texts. His innovative solutions to the problem of “negative authority,” the term used in early modern theological debates over the significance, or lack thereof, vested in things omitted by the scriptures, challenge more conventional reformed defenses of scriptural perspicuity and also reveal how these hermeneutic puzzles in turn shape Browne’s understanding of the relationship between theology and natural philosophy and between rhetoric and logic. This article analyzes Browne’s idiosyncratic treatment of textual silence within its historical moment and also considers the interpretive challenges posed by omissions in Browne’s own writings, focusing in particular on his Pseudodoxia Epidemica. À travers son oeuvre, le médecin et essayiste Thomas Browne (1605–82) se demande s’il faut interpréter le silence des textes, et si oui, comment. À la question de « l’autorité négative », ainsi que le problème était nommé dans les débats théologiques de la première modernité — que signifient les silences et les omissions des Écritures, s'ils signifient quelque chose? — il répond de manière originale et défie les défenses réformées, plus conventionnelles, de la perspicacité scripturale ; ces réponses révèlent également l'influence de ces énigmes herméneutiques, en retour, sur la conception de Browne quant aux relations entre théologie et philosophie naturelle, ainsi qu' entre rhétorique et logique. Cet article analyse la façon spécifique dont Browne, dans son contexte historique, traite du silence textuel, et il considère les problèmes d’interprétation que posent les omissions dans les textes de Browne lui-même, en particulier dans son Pseudodoxia Epidemica.

Abstract While there exists a robust scholarship on the cultural influences and public uses of the Bible in early American history, the historical development of biblical scholarship in America remains relatively understudied. The prevalent view suggests that biblical scholarship in America had its critical awakening with the importation of German Higher Criticism to northeastern divinity schools in the nineteenth century. This essay makes a corrective intervention by looking at Cotton Mather’s unpublished Biblia Americana (1693–1728), the first comprehensive Bible commentary to be authored in British North America. More specifically, the essay examines Mather’s response to critical interrogation of the canon and the Biblia’s numerous revisions of King James translation in light of recent philological scholarship. What connects these two issues is that they both concern the “givenness” of the Bible, which, in Mather’s day, was being fundamentally challenged. Behind the discussions about the canonicity of diverse books and over how to render the Hebrew and Greek texts into modern languages always lurked fundamental questions regarding the divine authority, integrity, and perspicuity of the Bible. Examining a broad range of examples from across the Biblia, the essay demonstrates how Mather’s work defies clear-cut categorization as either precritical or critical. In response to the intellectual currents of the early Enlightenment, Mather pioneered a new type of deeply learned, historically conscious but apologetically-oriented biblical criticism in America. The Biblia clearly reflects the challenges brought on by the deepening historicization of Scripture and the destabilization of texts and meanings through a new type of criticism. More widely read in current European scholarship and in many ways more curious and daring than any other early American exegete, Mather joined the infinitely complex and open-ended quest for better translations. Moreover, he was the first in New England to seriously address hard questions about the canon of the Bible and its historical development. But he always did so with the aim of providing constructive answers to these debates that would ultimately shore up the authority of Scripture, stabilize the scriptural foundation for what Mather regarded as the core of Reformed orthodox theological beliefs, and offer improved interpretations of the biblical texts, which would lend themselves even better to devotion and illuminate for Christians, with the help of the most up-to-date scholarship, the full riches of God’s Word.

L'affirmation de la claritas Scripturae constitue un dogme fondamental du protestantisme, commun, au moins dans son principe essentiel, aux deux confessions luthérienne et réformée, et très largement partagé par la plupart des tendances protestantes marginales ou dissidentes. Attachée au mobile général de la sola Scriptura selon des liens d'implications doctrinales dont nous tâchons ici de préciser la nature, cette proclamation protestante de la clarté de la Bible a favorisé ou accompagné, à l'époque moderne et dans un contexte de controverses religieuses, le développement d'argumentations et de constructions théoriques nouvelles, dans des domaines du savoir aussi divers que la théologie, les arts du discours, la théorie de la connaissance ou la science juridique. Nous nous efforçons ici de retracer l'histoire de l'élaboration et des évolutions de ce dogme dans la diversité des espaces confessionnels de l’Europe moderne, à partir de l'étude du jeu des conjonctures intellectuelles et contextuelles qui en ont motivé l'affirmation ou transformer le sens. À cette occasion, nous tentons de nous rendre particulièrement attentifs à l'hétérogénéité des figures et des motivations qui ont porté cette construction lente, aussi bien qu'à l'éclatement des genres discursifs au sein desquels celle-ci a pu trouver un cadre d'expression privilégié (écrits de controverses, écrits apologétiques, confessions de foi, sommes théologiques, manuels et catéchismes, traités philosophiques...) Suivant le fil de cette évolution, depuis les premières expressions luthériennes du principe de la claritas scripturae dans les années 1520 jusqu'au crépuscule des « orthodoxies » protestantes au début du XVIIIe siècle, nous nous confrontons, sous une perspective originale, à certains des plus grands débats – et peut-être des plus grands mythes – de l’historiographie protestante, du point de vue d’une histoire des idées déployée tant dans ses ramifications philosophiques (l’invention de l’herméneutique et de l’exégèse critique, l’invention de la subjectivité moderne), que dans ses aspects théologiques (la continuité doctrinale de la première Réforme et de l‘orthodoxie, l’émergence du rationalisme et de la théologie naturelle) ou politiques (l’invention de la liberté de conscience, le problème de la confessionnalisation)
The claritas Scripturae constitutes a fundamental dogma of Protestantism, common, at least in its essential principle, to both Lutheran and Reformed confessions, and very widely shared by most of the marginal or dissenting Protestant tendencies (arminian, socinian, baptist...) Attached to the general motive of the sola Scriptura, this Protestant proclamation of the clarity of the Bible has favored or accompanied, in modern times and in a context of religious controversies, the development of new theoretical arguments in fields of knowledge as diverse as theology, the arts of discourse, gnoseology or legal science. We endeavor here to retrace the history of the development and the evolutions of this dogma in the various confessional spaces of modern Europe, starting from the study of the intellectual and contextual conjunctures which motivated it. On this occasion, we try to pay particular attention to the figures and the motivations which led to this slow construction, as well as to the bursting of discursive genres within which it was able to find a privileged expression (controversies, apologetics, confessions of faith, theological systems, catechisms, philosophical treatises ...) Following the thread of this evolution, since the first Lutheran expressions of the principle of claritas scripturae in the 1520s until the twilight of Protestant ‘orthodoxies’ at the beginning of the 18th century, we then confront, from an original perspective, with some of the greatest debates – and perhaps the greatest myths – of Protestant historiography, from the point of view of of an history of ideas deployed both in its philosophical ramifications (the invention of hermeneutics and critical exegesis, the invention of modern subjectivity), whether in its theological (the doctrinal continuity of the First Reformation and orthodoxy, the emergence of rationalism and natural theology) or political aspects (the invention of freedom of conscience, the problem of confessionalization)

Like his other works, André Rivet’s magnum opus, the Exercitationes on Genesis (1633), was born from religious controversies. It aimed to uncover the one and only Reformed truth of the biblical message, against the multiplicity of Catholic traditions and textual ambiguities. Exploring the hermeneutical limits of what the Bible could teach, Rivet defended the homogeneity and perspicuity of the Bible, slyly relying on Catholic scholars such as Benito Arias Montano to assert the primacy of the Hebrew Bible and the integrity of its text. Catholic scholars, on the other hand, attempted to account for possible discrepancies in the Vulgate. Both sides deemed themselves holy, and both arrogated Providence to the legitimation of their church and their preferred text. This is to say that textual criticism was ultimately guided by theological and confessional considerations.

The prophet and biblical prophecy challenged Roman Catholic priestly authority and asserted the priesthood of all believers and then later functioned to clarify and strengthen Protestant clerical identity and authority. The prophet and biblical prophecy were also powerful tools for promoting distinctly Protestant visions of worship and its reform. The prophet and biblical prophecy ultimately enabled Protestants to establish Scripture as the prime authority; this goal relied heavily upon profound affirmations of Scripture’s perspicuity and the work of the Holy Spirit. Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin tied the proper uses of prophecy tightly to Scripture as a final, sufficient revelation and thereby domesticated it for the purposes of establishing an ordered ministry under the authority of Scripture. At the heart of confessional disputes over the right interpretation of Old Testament prophecy was a disagreement concerning its perspicuous content.

Abstract The reformers believed that nothing could inspire a sense of confidence more readily than to hear a leader expound upon the clarity and stark reality of evil. Luther, in his Bondage of the Will, for instance, rails against Erasmus’s disinterest in assertions, since to deny the clear claims of Scripture is to deny the promises of God. Luther holds back not at all in decrying such evils as he sees in “lukewarm” theology. And, as I have shown in chapter 2, Calvin is equally certain of the evil he perceives in the ideas and practices of the spiritual libertines. For the magisterial reformers, the ability to name evil correctly and clearly was closely allied with their understandings of justification by faith. Their claim for the clarity and perspicuity of Scripture made the naming of evil an essential ingredient in the proclamation of the gospel they had come to understand and believe.