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"THE PROCESS OF THE TEXT"
of the Psalms was christological. Luther did not separate the letter and the
spirit as if the spiritual sense were ontologically a higher one.
For Luther the spirit is concealed in the letter, the exegete must draw it out
from the letter. Thus he wrote: “The Spirit turns into the letter, but the letter
must in its turn constantly become its spirit again.”* Luther believed in the
primacy of a “spiritual understanding” and the “spiritual meaning” of the Bible,
but this has nothing to do with the allegorical sense or the spiritual meaning
of the Quadriga. Luther’s concept of spiritual understanding was, rather, the
recognition that man understands the proclamation of God in faith with the
help of the Holy Spirit. One can discern the spirit as distinct from the letter only
in an attitude of humility as God also humbled himself in human body, even to
the scandal of the cross. Only with the help of the spirit can man understand
that God hides himself in his revelation and reveals himself in his hiddenness.
Tyndale, like Luther, recognized that the spirit is not to be sought outside
of the letter but within.
“God is a Spirit, and all his words are spiritual. His literal sense is spiritual, and all
his words are spiritual. When thou readest (Matt. i.), ‘She shall bear a son, and thou
shalt call his name Jesus; for he shall save his people from their sins:’ this literal sense
is spiritual, and everlasting life unto as many as believe it... all God’s words are spi¬
ritual, if thou have eyes of God to see the right meaning of the text, and whereunto
the scripture pertaineth, and the final end and cause thereof.””®
At the end of my paper, let me turn to modern textual theory to show how
modern Tyndale’s view is. For modern critics, the text is not an objectivation of
an idea but it has a life of its own. Paul Ricoeur in his study “What is a Text?”
elaborates this idea. In the actualization of the text, he says, reading becomes
like speech. Interpretation should appropriate not the intention of the author
but the intention of the text. The essence of Ricoeur’s new theory of interpre¬
tation is that the text itself has intention: the text speaks, the text orientates
our thought. Therefore interpretation is not an act on the text but of the text. *°
Appropriation is the recovery of what is at work, in labour, in the text. Reading
is only resaying what the text says by itself, it is an act in which the destiny of
the text is “fulfilled”. Therefore it is more proper to speak about “textual inten¬
tion” rather than “authorial intention”.
28 EBELING, Gerhard, Luther. An Introduction to His Thought, London, Collins, 1972, 99.
29 TyNDALE, Obedience, 162.
30 RICOEUR, Paul, What is a Text?, in D. Klemm (ed.), Hermeneutical Inquiry Vol. 1, Atlanta, Geor¬
gia, Scholars Press, 1986, 253-246. Quotation, 241.
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