BOOK REVIEW:
Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation. By Christopher Ocker. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xvi + 265 pp. ISBN 0521810469.

The thesis of this book by a professor of history at San Francisco Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley is that from the 12^th century to the beginning of the 16^th biblical exegetes gradually moved away from recognizing a distinction between the literal/historical and the spiritual senses. Increasingly exegetes saw the literal sense as the bearer of spiritual meaning. Early Protestant exegesis reflects this change in exegetical method; it was not a break with the previous several centuries of exegesis, but their outcome. However, the first Protestant exegetes also benefited from the resurgence of the study of rhetoric that began in the 15^th century.

The core of Christopher Ocker’s argument is found in three chapters devoted to three aspects of late medieval exegesis: signification, rhetoric and divine speech. These central chapters are framed by an overview of medieval exegesis and a brief look at how Reformation exegesis prolonged or altered these three dimensions.

In late antiquity, Christians developed an allegorical reading of Scripture, which studied the literal meaning, but also sought spiritual understandings. The twelfth-century theologians of the monastery of St. Victor in Paris, who pondered and perfected this method of exegesis, insisted that the spiritual interpretations ought to be rooted in the literal meaning. In the Victorine scheme, the words of the text referred to created things whose qualities in turn referred to spiritual realities. Created things mediated between biblical words and spiritual realities.

The traditional theory regarding the literal and spiritual senses had difficulty locating the signification of metaphorical language. In the later Middle Ages, metaphor was placed in the literal sense, so that both figure and figured pertained to the literal sense. Similarly the words of the prophets could have more than one literal sense: they could refer to the prophet’s own circumstances and also to Christ. These developments were connected with a growing conviction that words themselves signify, and so the words of the Bible signify spiritual realities more directly than the Victorine theory suggested. However, Late medieval exegetes read the Bible as a contemporary document. They were not interested in studying the historical setting and thought world of the author. They also thought that doctrine was a logical summary and development of what the Bible taught in a discursive way. Hence, biblical commentaries included treatment of theological questions.

By the middle of the thirteenth century, logic supplanted rhetoric in the arts faculties. Whereas early monastic exegesis had consisted in compliant, prayerful thinking with the ancient authors, with the rise of scholasticism, tradition was less an act than received doctrines and arguments. However, late medieval exegetes did insist that the Bible had its own rhetoric; with a simple style the biblical authors conveyed profound mysteries.

Emphasizing the simplicity of divine speech, late medieval authors like Jean Gerson sought to free exegesis from subtle and useless philosophical issues. God was the moving efficient cause of a biblical book; the author was a moving and moved cause. Since the Holy Spirit was the primary author, the Bible could be read ahistorically, and one could expect to find in the literal meaning doctrinal truth that the human author may not have directly intended. The reader of the Bible read charismatically under the guidance of the same Holy Spirit, but also communally within the living tradition of the church shaped by the Holy Spirit. In interpreting, learned readers transformed the narrative speech of the biblical authors into sentences that they could then subject to logical analysis.

Early Protestant exegetes accepted the late medieval understanding of verbal signification and the immediacy of the thought world of the text to that of the interpreter. The new interest in rhetoric helped them move from biblical narrative to theological discussion. They used the traditional idea of the simplicity of the Bible to argue against the need for authorities outside the faith-filled reader.

This is a well-researched, well-produced book. Ocker argues his position by analyzing a wide selection of published and unpublished sources. Some of the most important of those Latin sources are edited in an appendix. In citing sources, Ocker almost always gives both an English translation and the Latin text. It is sometimes difficult to grasp the thread of the argument, as the author moves from minute analysis to generalization.

Ocker studies late medieval exegesis primarily, then looks briefly at its continuation and development among the early Protestant exegetes. His approach is nicely complemented by the festschrift for David Steinmetz, Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation, edited by Richard A. Muller and John L. Thompson (Eerdmans, 1996), which begins with an overview of late medieval exegesis, then studies specific examples of Reformation exegesis.

Hugh Feiss, OSB
Monastery of the Ascension
Jerome, ID

PUBLISHED IN THE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR REFORMED THEOLOGY, WINTER 2004, VOL. 4, #1.