Abstract
Some kinds of interpretative difficulties with the Bible seem capable of undermining Protestant perceptions of its authority. It has often been assumed that the first really focused engagements with these emerged in the context of the thinking and quests associated with the Enlightenment. Alison Knight, setting out to shatter this assumption, argues that ‘the strangeness, awkwardness, and flakiness of the Bible was not (and indeed, never has been) new’ (p. 10). The author presents us with a clear, well-ordered and detailed study that takes us on a journey through the vicissitudes of biblical interpretation during the early modern period in England (here, 1525–26 until roughly the mid-seventeenth century). The reformers, broadly wedded to an ideology of sola scriptura, were not always finding the clarity and consistency in the Bible text that they needed and expected. The ‘dark places’ in the Bible posed a ‘perennial threat’ (p. 15) while playing into the hands of their Catholic opponents. Their coping strategies were varied, but often convoluted and occasionally comical, with Tyndale believing that some of the difficulties had actually been caused by ‘Catholic inventions’, thus blaming the Papacy rather than the pages of Scripture; or were due only to the ‘blinde hertes’ of faithless readers (p. 16)!
The detailed issues in the Reformation context that Knight’s book explores are tackled not as areas of doctrinal debate (e.g. sacraments, church authority) but as ‘features of biblical language which gave rise to controversy between the confessions and confusion in the individual reader’ (p. 26). These features are neatly considered under a series of chapter headings: ‘Contradiction’, ‘Ambiguity’, ‘Defects’, ‘Disorder’, ‘Idiom’ and ‘Figures’. Interestingly, this helpful method of classification owes its origin to Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), a star of the Counter-Reformation who was accommodating towards Galileo by allowing his Copernican insights to exist as a useful predictive theory as long as they were not held as a ‘true-to-reality’ doctrine.
‘Figures’ features a section on ‘The meaning of manna’ (its enigmatic properties inspired all kinds of wild theological speculation); ‘Defects’ describes how early modern writers compensated, occasionally with great creativity, when something appeared to be missing from a verse or passage.
The ‘Contradiction’ chapter contains the author’s tour de force, a 30-page treatment of ‘Henry VIII’s Great Matter’. Long considered an issue of matrimonial, legal, national/international and ecclesiastical significance, it is seen here as a hermeneutical one: Leviticus 18.16 (or 20.21) or Deuteronomy 25.5? Sadly, ‘from an interpretative point of view, nobody “won”. Neither side put down their weapons and capitulated; they only compounded argument upon argument, until Henry made his own Church in which he could define the rules’ (p. 71). The real-life historical controversy framed in this way and with the author’s concluding insight, quoted above, could inform thinking about present-day disputes that are currently presenting within the Church of England. The Living in Love and Faith process, which was intended to address and even resolve disagreements around the interpretation of Scripture, may well have exacerbated them. It is unlikely, though, that any ‘solution’ will be as decisive as Henry VIII’s.