Stuart Murray, Biblical Interpretation in the Anabaptist Tradition
Pandora Press, 2000, 277 pgs.
Summary: Stuart Murray (1956- ) is an Anabaptist theologian who has been a church planter and a director of Spurgeon’s College church-planting program in London. He has a PhD in Anabaptist hermeneutics.
Biblical Interpretation is my favorite sort of book. It’s historically grounded but presents the argument that the past may serve to assist if not correct the present. The author is at his strongest when he is describing and analyzing the historical Anabaptist interpretation methods with one exception to be noted below. His use of Anabaptist sources is a fascinating consideration of the general attributes of Anabaptist hermeneutics in response to Roman Catholic and Reformed polemics from about 1515 to the mid-1600s.
Much of Murray’s arguments about the contours of Anabaptist hermeneutics can be collapsed into the fact that the Anabaptists he embraces (i.e. the non-violent ones) took a first thought reading of the Sermon on the Mount and made it their fundamental method for understanding the life of Jesus and the rest of the Bible (74). Some Anabaptist even lacked the Old Testament to assist them in understanding Jesus’ historical context (109).
Murray puts it this way, “The Sermon on the Mount seems to have acted as a further canon within an already Christocentric canon” (79). So in the early Anabaptist tradition the significance or use of a passage in developing doctrine and practice was dependent on its perceived agreement with the “radical” reading of the Sermon on the Mount.
The hope of the Anabaptist was “to avoid the dilution of Jesus’ authority by reducing his commands to generalizations hedged about with exceptions and qualifications” (79). The canon within the canon worked itself so that Paul was understood through the first thought reading of the Sermon on the Mount, the Old Testament was marginalized if not ignored along with church history. And all of this is duly noted by Murray.
At the same time the overriding task of the book is to encourage present Christians to consider the positive attributes of this system as a response to modernism. Murray believes that modernism or the historical critical-method is derived from “Reformed hermeneutics” (10), and so he has come to the conclusion that a modified form of the Anabaptist method would be edifying for the church as a rejection of modernity and Reformed theology.
The author summarizes on page 90: “Furthermore, operating with the Gospels (a narrative genre) as the primary canon within the canon, rather than with the propositional and doctrinal focus of the Reformers, has positive implications for hermeneutics. In particular, it encourages practical application and personal discipleship rather than intellectual discussion. It fosters an encounter with the Lord of Scriptures rather than with the text alone. It also goes some way towards bridging the gap between the biblical and contemporary horizons by involving the reader in a story, a genre which contains many transcultural elements.”
It is Murray’s attempt to bridge from the Anabaptist past to the present that things start to break down. In the section on the uniqueness of “congregational hermeneutics,” the weaving about and caveats suggests if not requires that he is overreaching the historical data: “We find no extended discussion of this role within Anabaptist writings and relatively few explicit references to it” (157). “It is not easy to discover how widespread communal hermeneutics was, how firmly it was established, or how long it survived” (165). “[T]hese principles sometimes lead to the development of hermeneutic communities” (177). “Designating the congregation as the locus of interpretation may not have been uniformly practiced by the sixteenth-century Anabaptist” (249).
Back formation would also explain how sixteenth-century leaders like Meno, Munzter, and Hubmaier can be described thus: “Congregational hermeneutics required an understanding of the leader’s task as guiding rather than dominating, acting as facilitator rather than sole participant” (163). It’s difficult to reconcile the words “guiding” and “facilitator” with Meno’s The Blasphemy of John of Leiden or Munzter’s Sermon to the Princes or The Prague Protest.
Since part of Murray’s hope is to foster an Anabaptist hermeneutic as a positive response to modernity, it would appear that he has read back community consensus as a hermeneutical and epistemological principle. But I am at a loss as to how judging “any interpretation by its usefulness to the congregation” (176), departs from either Machiavelli and Hobbes’ utilitarian hermeneutic or Nietzsche’s will-to-power for congregations, or for that matter Lenin’s principle that it is useful to break eggs to make an omelet.
The author’s goal of encountering “the Lord of Scriptures” is laudable. The difficulty is that as the congregation discusses “practical application and personal discipleship” through the Gospel narrative they develop propositions: “Jesus loved social outcasts.” And then they apply this insight by creating an ought statement: “We ought to love social outcasts.” Also, a proposition. Perhaps, some in the congregation might ask: “Why should Jesus’ non-violent example be given priority over Che or Muntzer’s example?” The traditional Christian response is the proposition: “Jesus is Lord.” But then we’ve slipped right back to the “propositional and doctrinal focus of the Reformers.”
It should also be noted that much of Murray’s critique of Reformation interpretation lacks footnotes to primary source documents. The footnotes are almost exclusively to modern secondary sources such as Rogers and McKim or McGrath. Unless, I am badly misreading the Reformers, for instance Whitaker’s Disputations on Holy Scripture, Murray’s reliance on secondary sources has led him into some misunderstanding of Reformed hermeneutics and the development of the historical-critical method.
Detriments/Benefits: A helpful overview of Anabaptist’s hermeneutics, but it requires some “deconstruction” of Murray’s historical narrative and his reading back of post-modern community hermeneutics into the Anabaptist community.
Recommended as an interesting first discussion of historic Anabaptist hermeneutics. Helpful for understanding post-modern takes on Christianity by neo-monasticism and the like.