LITMIR.BIZ

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hierarchical church structures empowered Protestants in matters of salvation and selfhood. The need to distinguish a literal sense in the Bible highlights the concept of scripture as an accommodation for fallen human intellect. We need the scripture because we are fallen; yet, precisely because we are fallen, we need help in understanding scripture. The five solas, then, function as reminders of human debility even as they offer salvation from that fallen state. These premises of debility are at the core of the negative dictates of Puritan writing—the plain style, the literal sense, the formulaic aspects of sermon composition. One might reasonably expect these premises and dictates to restrain literary production—not only in terms of quantity of spoken, written, and printed texts but in terms of what efficacy is expected from those human words. This expectation is shattered by the excesses of Puritan literary output: the sermon continua on a single passage that lasts weeks, months, or even years; the potentially infinite branching capacity of Ramist logic structures; the physical heft of a printed sermon cycle; the obsessive quality of notetaking and self-writing.

      The apparent preference for restraint in plain style might begin with the Puritan insistence upon the literal sense. Reiterating the Protestant rejection of the “4. senses of the scriptures, the literall, allegoricall, tropological, & anagogical”—a trend that begins at least with William Tyndale in the first half of the sixteenth century—William Perkins insists in his Arte of Prophecying: “There is one onelie sense, and the same is the literall.” Those senses that have come to be called “Anagoge and Tropologie are waies, whereby the sense may be applied.”⁴² Certainly, this is largely a matter of semantics; Perkins can retain the hermeneutic scope of the three traditional nonliteral senses if he just recasts them as “application.” Nevertheless, the implications of a single literal sense that unifies all moral, spiritual, and eschatological aspects in its historical truth have created profound repercussions from the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers to present-day Fundamentalists, as Simpson has recently argued.⁴³ Perkins tells us that the “principall interpreter of the Scripture is the holy Ghost,” essentially arguing for a self-explicating text. The problem is, of course, that those “dark places” in scripture⁴⁴ are not merely spaces for deeper contemplation but also potential sites of confusion, doubt, controversy, intolerance, and violence. Sola scriptura, as Simpson points out, is surely as terrifying as it is comforting.

      In his preface to the New Testament in English, William Tyndale urges the reader to partake but also points out that the vernacular Bible functions like a crucible. The elect are saved by reading, and the reprobates are damned by the same act.⁴⁵ Thus conceived, the vernacular Bible was not a simple self-help book.

      Many standard dictates associated with Reformation—sola fide, sola scrip-tura, and literal sense in particular—frustrate in part because they suggest a closed interpretive system. In her extensive treatment of Preaching in the First Half Century of New England History, Babette May Levy refers to “an occasional tendency” on the part of Puritan ministers to argue circularly—to maintain, for example, “that a just God by his very nature has certain attributes, and, having these attributes, is therefore a just God; or that man by his sinful nature fell from grace, and, having fallen, was therefore obviously sinful.” Despite the fact that the “modern non-believer in Puritanism” will find such reasoning unsatisfactory and unconvincing, Levy assures her reader that “individual points of doctrine and usually individual sermons remain lucid in the sense that there is rarely any doubt about what the minister thought and wished his reader to think.”⁴⁶ Within the system is interpretive clarity and salvation; outside the system is ambiguity and damnation. In The Arte of Prophecying, William Perkins offers the reader both the substance and evidence of scripture’s gospel truth in a single proof:

*The Maior, or Proposition.*The Minor, or Assumption.*The conclusion.

The Summe of the Scripture is conteined in such a syllogisme (or forme of reading, as this is which followeth.). *The true Messias shall be both God and man of the seede of David; he shall be borne of a Virgin; he shall bring the Gospell forth of his Fathers bosome; he shall satisfie the Law; he shall offer up himselfe a sacrifice for the sinnes of the faithfull; he shall conquer death by dying and rising againe; he shall ascend into heaven; and in his due time hee shall returne unto judgement. But * Iesus of Nazaret the Sonne of Mary is such a one; He * therefore is the true Messias.47

      Within the proof by reason is proof by faith. Perkins concedes that although there exist “verie strong proofes, which show that the [scripture] is the word of God,” “there is onlie one, namely the inward testimony of the holy Ghost speaking in the Scripture, and not only telling a man within in [sic] his heart, but also effectually perswading him that these bookes of the Scripture are the word of God.”⁴⁸ So while the proof of Jesus Christ as the true messiah can be demonstrated with formal logic, a previous acceptance of the conclusion and its terms is necessary to make the syllogism work. Then again, Perkins would never expect this or any intellectual syllogism to cause belief. The mistake is to suppose that the various examples of circular reasoning met with in Puritan texts are meant to be convincing on their own. It is the heart, not the intellect, that needs convincing.

      To the extent that Puritanism is a closed system, its dictates short-circuit a clear theory or an explanation of language. In his study of the grammatical origins of Reformation theology, Brian Cummings points out that “the phrase ‘literal truth’ is at best a paradox, perhaps an oxymoron.”⁴⁹ Etymologically, to say something is literal is to reference its manifestation in letters (or, synecdochally, language). To say, then, that truth does manifest itself in the contingencies of language flies in the face of theories from the Greeks to the early Christians and on down that make much of the difference between res (the thing itself ) and verba (words). Furthermore, one of the obstacles to understanding the effectual working of the sermon is the seeming paradox of its theory and practice: disproportionate human technology of branching explication and iterative dissemination of the sermon through print, manuscript, and oral means flies in the face of premises of literal sense, plain style, and the self-authenticating revelation of the Word.

      The complicated status of scripture is not a problem that begins with the Puritans. Perkins was simply continuing the objections raised by Tyndale and other early Reformers against what they saw as the corruption of the scriptural integrity by the human interference of fourfold exegesis. The hermeneutics of the fourfold method may have developed into full scholastic elaboration over centuries, but its roots were planted firmly in the writings of Origen, Augustine, and others who were revered by Protestant Reformers as “primitive” church fathers. Recognizing what Augustine called the “dark places” in scripture, Origen categorized and promoted figurative readings of problematic passages that had already been in use for generations. Determining whether the literal meaning of a particular passage was governed by common sense served as the primary litmus test for determining if figurative interpretation was warranted. For Jesus to point to a piece of bread and call it his body, for example, was absurd if taken literally, as were competing verses that placed Christ both on earth and in heaven. In such cases, a more flexible understanding of the letter of the scripture was required. Throughout the history of the Christian church, simple flexibility in textual reading has been insufficient to stave off violent controversy. The surface absurdity of bread as body, to use the same example, has produced not merely competing interpretations but competing claims for orthodoxy and charges of heresy, as well.

      According to Mather, Hooker advised young ministers to undertake a long, systematic development of their exegetical prowess, recommending that “at their entrance on their ministry, they would with careful study preach over the whole body of divinity methodically, (even in the Amesian method,) which would acquaint them with all the more intelligible and agreeable texts of Scripture, and prepare them for a further acquaintance with the more difficult, and furnish them with abilities to preach on whole chapters, and all occasional subjects, which by the providence of God they might be directed unto.”⁵⁰ Hooker’s suggestion that this initial preaching cycle might be “even in the Amesian method” (an exceptionally plain and very “use”-oriented style) indicates a gradation of levels of sophistication attainable

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