Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.2012, Blaðsíða 13
decisive role in the theological work together with systematic and practical
theologians.
In general, Kristján and I lived in a very optimistic time with regard to
exegesis of the New Testament. Krister Stendahl’s famous article on biblical
theology, written in 1959 and published in 1962, is a telling proof of that.
The centre of all exegesis was the descriptive study of the Bible from its
own original presuppositions and its own structural principles. This was,
according to Stendahl, something new in the history of Biblical interpreta-
tion. The analysis should be - as he said - “pure scientific” and “pure
historical”. No pragmatical or apologetical purposes. The term “descriptive”
makes the impression that there is one objective meaning in the texts. This
is strengthened by his very sharp distinction between what the text meant,
what the text came to mean and what the text means today. When Stendahl
later on published his lexicon article in a monograph called Meanings
(1984) he noted that he had been more and more interested in “plurals”.
In the sixties he was focusing the singular meaning. The theological model
was clear: First a descriptive, “objective”, historical exegesis, after that the
work of systematic and practical theologicans.
One text => Many interpretations
However, “die exegetische Methode”, often presented in rules for interpreta-
tion of small biblical passages, or a pure scientific, historical analysis could
not produce a singular, original meaning. The situation was very clear.
There was one text but a multitude of interpretations, primarily as regards
details within a text, but also concerning each text taken as a whole. One
text, but many interpretations. That is my second point. Every commentary
was a proof of that. And the new translations had notes which offered the
readers different interpretations of many passages in the Bible.
Why this multitude of interpretations? Did it depend on the old, some-
times fragmentary, texts we analyzed, or did it depend on our methods.
Discussions of method took place, especially in connection with various
attempts to apply structuralistic methods to exegesis or take advantage
of results in generative grammar, in literary science or in communication
theory. Greimas Semantique structurale had been published in 1966. The
usefulness of the historical-critical method and its results was questioned
both in the academy and in the church. Scholars began to use scientific
theories in their historical investigation and in interpretation of texts.
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