Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 03.djvu/39

BIBLE. constantly to make the Scriptures clearer to the understanding, while, under the growth of relig- ious fervor, the Scriptures themselves were stud- ied for the .lid they could give religious life, serving to make them increasingly impressive to the spiritual sense. The Spirit was recognized not only as having spoken to the writers of Scripture, but as then and there -speaking to those who came to Scripture in studj' or in med- itation, and so the tendency asserted itself to refer all Scripture in its meaning to Christ, and naturally also claim was laid upon the need of faith in Christ and general spiritual illumination in order to understand the meaning which Scrip- ture really conveyed.

This tendency to centre everything on Christ, however, naturally opened the way to a return to the old habit of allegory; while the tendency to interpret Scripture in the light of itself led to the sole emphasizing of what was called, after the Pauline phrase (Rom. xii. 5), '"the propor- tion of faith." This idea of proportion was use- ful primarily in preventing the distortion of single passages against their context or against the statements of Scripture as a whole, but it shifted its course most easily from the 'faith' given by Scripture in its own teachings to that laid down by the teachings of the Church, and in so doing started the whole process of interpre- tation toward the baneful exaggerations of the scholasticism which followed upon this first period of the Reformation.

(2) The period of the Counter-Reformation, represented bv Cajetan. 1409-1534: Bellarmin, 1542-1621; Francis of Sales, 1567-1622; and Jansenius, 1585-1638.

Though the Roman communion did not change its conception of the Church's authoritative rela- tion to interpretation, nor alter its idea of the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, yet the humanism which had been so influential in bring- ing Protestantism to life had had its effect also within the Mother Church. In both churches it had emphasized the value of the sources of the- ology; yet. owing to the fact that with the Roman Catholic Church the old belief in eccle- siastical authority and Scripture inspiration still obtained, it was natural, not only that while the Reformers went back for their sources to Augustine and Paul, the Roman Catholic schol- ars stopped with Aquinas ; but also that such revival of theological learning as their study of the sources brought about did not produce with the latter any vital change in interpretative methods.

In fact, the merits of the Counter-Reforma- tion, which are to be freely and fully recognized, were in the purifying of the Church's organiza- tion and the spiritualizing of its life, rather than in the liberalizing of its methods of interpreta- tive work. What impulses toward this there might have been were impossible of realization in view of the reactionary decrees of the Council of Trent (1545-63), which united cccleiJiastical tradition to the Scriptures and the Apocrypha as the authoritative sources of the Church's faith, and made the Church itself the sole expounder of the sense they should have.

(3) The Post-Reformation Period. (1) Tlie sub-period of Protestant Scholasticism, repre- sented bv Gerhardt, 15821637: J. G. Carpzovius, 1679-1787; and Calovius, d.l686.

It was natural that, having rejected the infal- lible authority of the Papacy, the Reformation Churcli should not only look around for another objective authority to take its place, which it found in the Scriptures, but that, having secured a political right to its peculiar doctrines, and be- ing thus compelled to maintain them against the attacks of opposing Protestant theologies, as well as against the teachings of Rome, it should come to make the authoritative Scripture an oracle to serve it in its needs, and so substitute for a. scholarly interpretation of the Scriptures a dog- matic distorting of them.

This was the result produced by the Protest- ant scholasticism, which differed from the Catho- lic scholasticism of the Middle Ages in being less ingenuous. It professed to base its system only on the Scriptures, but in reality based it on the Scriptures as interpreted by the party creeds in the Church, so that the Scriptures became an armory of controversial proof-texts without any recognized difference between the Old Testament and the Xew, or any understood idea of progress or development in revelation.

(2) The sub-period of Rationalism, represent- ed bv Lessing, 1729-81; Michaelis, 1817-91; and Eichhorn, 1752-1827.

Such degeneration in the spirit and life of in- terpretation was not without protest on the part of those who held equal right to Reformation principles with those who were responsible for the degeneration. It was not, however, until the philosophical movement, which saw its begin- ning in Descartes and Spinoza, reached its full vigor in Lessing that this protest effected the revolution in interpretative method which 13 known as rationalism.

The underlying principle of this revolution was its insistence upon reason as the test of rev- elation and the judge of the meaning of Scrip- ture, which was taken only in its literal sense. It was anti-supernatural in its bias, however, and consequently negative in attitude and es- sentially destructive in results. It brought to ridicule the confessional dependence upon a me- chanical inspiration by emphasizing the ditlieul- ties and discrepancies of Scripture, and held up to such scorn the speculative squabbles of the credal parties in the Church that the way was opened in men's minds to a general skepticism and an unbelief of the crudest kind. There was little in the Church to oppose this movement, since pietism and mysticism had spent their force, and scholarship was all arrayed on the critical side.

(C) The Modern Stage, represented bv Semler, 172.5-91; Schleiermaeher, 1768-1834; Baur, 1792- 1860; Meyer, 1800-73; and Ritschl, 1822-89. It was from scholarship, however, that the first impulse was to come toward the newer in- terpretation which characterizes the present day; since, however difficult it may he to state the year and day with which the rationalistic period ceased and the modern stage of interpre- tation began, it is quite clear that with the effort of Semler to interpret the Scripture writ- ers in the light of the circiimstiinces and con- ditions with which they were surrounded, there was given to interpretation a historical basis which has characteristically marked it ever since. Semler's interprettative work necessarily par- took of the rationalistic spirit of his day, though it improved upon the rationalistic method. The