Luther’s hermeneutics

In a 1964 article in Theology Today , Gerhard Ebeling laid out some of the hermeneutical directions found in Luther’s early writings. He focuses on three areas where Luther displays both some continuity with the terminology and problems of medieval interpretation, but also breaks free in significant ways.

At the beginning of his early treatise on the Psalms, Luther is still functioning within the constraints of the medieval fourfold method, applying it more “intensively” and more “on principle” than other exegetes of his time. Yet, he fundamentally shifts the ground of the fourfold by arguing that the literal sense is already a Christological sense. The “I” of the Psalms – even the penitential Psalms – is Christ, and from this Christological-literal sense, Luther develops the other senses so that they uncover a theology of the cross embedded in the text.

As Ebeling puts it, “to connect the psalms with Christ in the sensus literalis promoted a christology which clearly emphasized the characteristics of the true humanity of Christ up to the God-forsakenness on the cross, thus a theology of the cross. And, to make the sensus literalis the basis for the other interpretative possibilities of the fourfold sense of Scripture made the christological starting-point of the theology of the cross central for ecclesiology (sensus allegoricus), soteriology (sensus tropologicus), and eschatology (sensus anagogicus). As a result, the sensus tropologicus did not aim toward man’s deed but toward faith as the actual manner in which man responds to Christ. This means that Christ, tropologically understood, is faith.”

Ebeling also examines the difference between Luther’s understanding of letter/spirit and earlier views. Like Origen, Luther reads the letter/spirit distinction as a distinction between two worlds, but these two worlds are interpreted not as referring to a cosmic Platonic dualism but as an existential dualism, man coram Deo and man before the world:

“In overcoming the conception of Origen with regard to 2 Cor. 3: 6, the interpretation of Holy Scripture is not concerned with the disclosure of an allegorical hiddenness, but with the revelation of God in the hiddenness under the opposite. Thus the interpretation of Holy Scripture is concerned with the theology of the cross as the substance of Holy Scriptures, the significance of which must be established through exegesis. This new stamp which Luther presses upon the understanding of letter and spirit is the preparation of Luther’s later distinction between law and gospel. The traditional structure of the twofold sense of scripture is thus principally destroyed. Luther does continue to use the allegorical method in a limited way as a means of decorative application. But, in the correct understanding, the one, plain, grammatical sense is the truly theological one which includes within itself the duality of law and gospel in its orientation to the substance of Holy Scripture; or, to say it more exactly, the basic task of theological hermeneutics occurs in the distinction between law and gospel. To the degree to which Luther’s distinction of law and gospel differs from the scholastic differentiation of the natural and the supernatural, Luther’s understanding of the doctrine of the two kingdoms changes, too, in comparison to the Middle Ages.”

Finally, Ebeling finds a crucial difference between medieval interpreters and Luther in their conceptions of the very purpose of hermeneutics. For Thomas, the big linguistic problem of theology was finding language adequate to God: “With reference to God one can only speak by approximation, since all linguistic possibilities are contingent upon space and time and hence cannot describe God as such. The very structure of a sentence which is by necessity determined by a time-word is contradictory to the nature of God.”

Ebeling connects this to the relative priority of love over faith, and of sacrament over word, among medievals: “Theologically, the inadequacy of linguistic communication can be felt especially well. The Catholic-scholastic tradition shows this in two ways: First, the true means of grace is not the word but the sacrament. For the word keeps man at a distance from God and God at a distance from man. The sacrament, however, unifies man with the divine itself. Grace is infused into man in form of a created reality, as habitus of the soul; it becomes a property (virtus) of man. And secondly, the highest so-called theological virtue and the very heart of the reality of grace is, correspondingly, not faith as expression of distance, but love as the expression of the unification which overcomes distance.”

The subordination of the word/faith combination is part and parcel of the view that “the word basically considered as weak and dark. It is inadequate and must be explained. Hermeneutics in this understanding is, to a certain extent, the result of this weakness of language and, as a therapeutic measure, it is simultaneously the evidence for that weakness and darkness of language.”

For Luther, theology does not aim primarily at descriptions of God but at attempting to expose man’s condition, to announce God’s judgment over sinners. In this context, “the word-event in human language is the most suitable form of God’s communication with man. Hence the relationship of God and man is a relationship of word and faith. This does not contest the sacrament, but re-interprets the sacrament as one aspect of the word-event.”

This also has soteriological import. Luther’s approach does not “eliminate love but it refers love to its proper place as the fruit of faith. For faith and love are to each other as doer and deed, as person and work. And the decisive question is what constitutes man’s being as person, i.e., the question of man’s being before God. Here the distance of distinction between man and God is affirmed and considered as something in keeping with true communication.”

The goal of the interpreter for Luther is to enable the word to do its work, not to unveil hidden mysteries: “This understanding of language is not defined from the point of view of signification but from the viewpoint of the word-event which must be accounted for and which, in turn, enables such accountability. The hermeneutical result is, therefore, that the very word as such is of hermeneutical importance and is able to illumine, to bring about clarity, and to give life. The hermeneutical task can only consist of the fact that we devote ourselves to the service or the word-event in such a way that the word becomes truly word, and that it occurs as pure word in the fullness of its power.”

One noteworthy stray comment from earlier in the article: “In keeping with this is his conscious attention to the specifically biblical use of language in distinction from the theological terminology which was philosophically tinted. Furthermore he attempted to establish a language, free from the scholastic structure of language, which would be closer to the subject and more suitable for it.”

Overall, Ebeling’s article helps to show how central hermeneutics is to the Reformation, and how crucial was Luther’s effort to refurbish theological language by speaking as the Bible speaks.