Though the Church Fathers defended the canonicity of the Old Testament, they in effect denied its clarity in a couple of ways. First, they denied perspicuity by employing the allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament. Augustine, for example, learned the allegorical method from Ambrose. He writes, “This [the defensibility of the Catholic faith] was especially clear after I had heard one or two parts of the Old Testament explained allegorically — whereas before this, when I had interpreted them literally, they had ‘killed’ me spiritually.” James Preus, a scholar of the early and medieval hermeneutical developments, says that Augustine believed that .. . whenever the interpreter encounters a passage which does not literally teach faith or love, his task is to interpret it figuratively: he must raise it to the level of the edifying. Because the passage that in its literal meaning does not edify must (according to Augustine’s understanding of the divine intention) be a figura of something that does edify — a signum of something spiritual or a theological res whose true meaning must be revealed . . . as doctrina, lex, or promissio. Larry D. Pettegrew -- THE PERSPICUITY OF SCRIPTURE
Posted on: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 10:45:29 +0000
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