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Hamlet was born too soon. That melancholy Dane, thrust into the dark, disordered world of early modernity, pined his life away, searching for a subject worthy of his capacious mind. Over the course of Shakespeare's early play, the young man constantly agonizes about his own indecision and tries to quit reflection and take action against his father's murder. Unable to act, Hamlet compounds his frustration with guilt about his cowardly indecisiveness. "Conscience does make cowards of us all," he concludes, "And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."
Had he come upon the scene in the second half of the twentieth century, Hamlet might have found in hermeneutics the proper subject for his "pale cast of thought." It might have been the perfect subject for a dithering prince. With its seemingly infinite capacity for prompting reflection on the conditions for the human act of interpreting, hermeneutics could have fit the needs of a man prone to endless rumination about the conditions that make human action and understanding possible. Guilt-free and grant-supported, our contemporary Hamlet could spend his time in tenured reflection upon textuality rather than in tenuous meditations about vengeance and sexuality.
Yet poor Hamlet will always be a source rather than a beneficiary of our contemporary passion for thinking and talking about our talk and thought. Situated as he was in the sixteenth century, this Wittenberg student was a party to the process that would eventually generate the interpretive preoccupations of our present age. Hamlet's world is a thoroughly Protestant one, forsaking the interpretive uniformity and sacramental faith of the Middle Ages for the hermeneutical liberty and psychic inwardness of modernity. Indeed, if we try to track down the sources of our contemporary fascination with the theory of interpretation, the trail takes us to the century between Martin Luther and William Shakespeare, for it is there, at the beginning of the Protestant era, that we discover the mix of theological ideas, ecclesiastical practices, and social and historical changes in which our present preoccupation with interpretation is rooted.
Modernity and the loss of consensusIf one doubts the degree to which we are at present consumed with questions of understanding, he or she might do well to survey the eight books under review in this essay. All have been written by North American or English Protestants and have appeared within the last two years.1 These books represent the wide array of viewpoints available within Protestantism about hermeneutics; they stake out positions that range from dispensationalism to postmodernism.
Just as one wonders what it is that unifies the multitudinous diversity of the Christian churches spread across the world, so might one ask what conceivable principles could unite such disparate books about such a controversial topic. What do Duke and Dallas have in common?
At the most fundamental level, these books share an earnestness of purpose. The authors consider the practices of right reading and biblical interpretation either to be threatened or in dire need of reform. "The holy Scriptures carry immense authority," explains Eugene Peterson in the foreword to The Act of Bible Reading. "Read wrongly, they can ignite war, legitimate abuse, sanction hate, cultivate arrogance. Not only can, but have … do. This is present danger."
Gerald Bray begins his treatment of the history of interpretation by pointing to contemporary scholars who are "confusing issues and muddying the waters of biblical study. … In the midst of such confusion, the church needs to reflect again on the whole process of biblical interpretation."
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