A Hermeneutic of Hope—and Faith and Love

I The early church bequeathed us two rules for interpreting Scripture: the rule of faith and the rule of love. This paper argues that these should be complemented with a rule of hope. It uses Thomas Aquinas to suggest how a hopeful reading might complement a loving and a faithful reading, and it suggests that we see this sort of reading in contemporary liberation theologians. keywords I rule of faith, patristic exegesis, hermeneutics, hope, theological virtues, liberation theology, Oscar Romero The two great rules inherited from the early church for interpreting Scripture are the rule of faith—that interpretation should accord with “the faith preached to men, which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops”1—and the rule of love: “whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.”2 As the Second Helvetic Confession says, “We hold that interpretation of the Scripture to be orthodox and genuine which is gleaned from the Scriptures themselves ... and which agree with the rule of 1. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.3.2. Translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, from: Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, eds., Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885). 2. Augustine, De Doctrina, 1.36.40. Translated by James Shaw, from: Philip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 2 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887). doi: 10.5325/jthe0inte.12.2.0264 Journal of Theological Interpretation, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2018 Copyright © 2018 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 265 A Hermeneutic of Hope—and Faith and Love faith and love, and contributes much to the glory of God and mans salvation.”3 What has received less attention is the hermeneutical role of the third theological virtue, hope. As Augustine goes on to say: “these are the three things to which all knowledge and all prophecy are subservient: faith, hope, and love ... [And if one] is bent upon making all his understanding of Scripture to bear upon these three graces, he may come to the interpretation of these books with an easy mind.”4 Since Augustine himself does not go on to explicate the role of hope in any detail, I want to outline here how it might operate as part of a hermeneutic of the theological virtues—especially, following Thomas Aquinas, its place relative to the other theological virtues and, following some liberation theologians, its renewed salience in contemporary theological hermeneutics. My contention will be that a certain kind of theological conservatism, in its emphasis on the church fathers and scholastics, leads us to expect a prominent role for hope in the interpretation of Scripture, and that we see this role fulfilled in a certain kind of liberal theologian, the kind of liberal who is a kind of liberationist. And one upshot of this contention will be that terms like conservative and liberal are not particularly helpful when talking about this sort of conservation and this sort of liberation. Why should we expect hope to have a central place in a theological hermeneutic? Briefly, because the interpretation of Scripture is a theological act in the sense that it is a graced participation in the life of God, and as such it should be governed by the virtues that are theological in just this sense—of which hope is one. That is, first, the interpretation of Scripture requires not just our natural hermeneutical capacities but the work of the Holy Spirit in us; second, this work does not simply establish a set of rules for decoding the meaning of specific passages but transforms us into the kind of people who can hear the Spirit speaking in these passages; and third, this transformation involves the infusion of all three of the theological virtues traditionally associated with the indwelling of the Lord and giver of life. I will for the most part take the first two of these points as premises, but the third point is worth some attention. Why is hope considered necessary for enumerating the transformation that the Holy Spirit works in us? Here is Thomas on the difference between faith, hope, and love: A virtue is said to be theological from having God for the object to which it adheres. Now one may adhere to a thing in two ways: first, for its own sake; secondly, because something else is attained thereby. Accordingly 3. Second Helvetic Confession, ch. 2. From: Arthur Cochrane, Reformed Confessions of the 16th Century (Westminster Press, 1966). 4. Ibid., I.37.41, 40.44. JOURNAL OF THEOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION 266 charity makes us adhere to God for His own sake, uniting our minds to God by the emotion of love. On the other hand, hope and faith make man adhere to God as to a principle wherefrom certain things accrue to us. Now we derive from God both knowledge of truth and the attainment of perfect goodness. Accordingly faith makes us adhere to God, as the source whence we derive the knowledge of truth, since we believe that what God tells us is true: while hope makes us adhere to God, as the source whence we derive perfect goodness, i.e. in so far as, by hope, we trust to the Divine assistance for obtaining happiness.5 Hope is a necessary complement to faith and love, then, because it attains to God under a different aspect. Thomas does not apply his threefold distinction to the reading of Scripture, but its application is fairly straightforward: the virtue of charity disposes us to read Scripture as a means to adhere to God for his own sake; the virtue of faith disposes us to read Scripture as a means to adhere to God as the source of truth; the virtue of hope disposes us to read Scripture as a means to adhere to God as the source of happiness. This already suggests a question: should not faith alone be the virtue that governs interpretation? After all, interpretation is concerned first with truth and therefore with God as the source of truth, whatever else may follow from that. Even Augustine’s hermeneutic of love is interested in right understanding, and with building up love only as a measure of right understanding. But this is to mistake Thomas’s distinction. The question that divides these virtues is which is for the sake of the other: are we loving God and neighbor in order to understand, that is, for the sake of our own appreciation of the truth; or are we understanding in order to love, with our own appreciation of the truth pursued for the sake of God and neighbor? It is not the case that one of these is bad and the other good—both have their place in the ascending gyre of the Christian life—though of course the latter is more perfect. The first case is one of faith, the second one of love; and as Paul says, love is the greater. This is why it so naturally becomes the focus of Augustine’s hermeneutic: to interpret Scripture is in the first place to come to some understanding, but this understanding is not for its own sake so much as it is for the sake of God. But love is not the only virtue, nor does it represent the only way in which our understanding can be ordered. Thus with a hermeneutic of hope, its immediate object is a kind of understanding, but this understanding is for the sake of our happiness. Of course, it is also 5. Summa Theologica II-n.17.6c (translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Second and Revised Edition, 1920). The general features of this distinction were shared by the Scotists as well; compare Scotuss account in Reportatio 3, d. 26, where hope and love are mapped onto the affectio commodi and affectio iustitiae respectively. 267 A Hermeneutic of Hope—and Faith and Love good to understand for its own sake, and this is why there is a virtue of faith, but that is not the only reason the saints will want to understand things, and in particular it is not the only reason they will want to understand the Scriptures. A second question, then: how well does Thomas’s division map the two patristic rules mentioned above? And especially, is there a need for some additional hermeneutic of hope, or is it already implicit in one or other of these rules? Two things make this difficult to answer: on the one side, what count as the patristic rules are not precisely defined, and the rule of faith in particular receives many different formulations.6 On the other side, the theological virtues do not operate independently of one another, and love in particular is necessary for the proper working of faith and hope. Thus what is generally meant by the rule of faith is not something that operates without love; it is not a rule of what Thomas would call dead faith but a rule of living faith, of faith formed by charity. The rule of faith looks at the whole of what the church has held to be true in order to understand any given passage; that it is for the sake of understanding the passage is what makes it particularly appropriate to faith. But its examination of the tradition is as much an act of love as an act of study; it as much requires sentire cum ecclesia as it requires a sociology; and its sententiae, like all acts of the church, are ultimately ordered to God and not just human understanding. So also a rule of hope is not a rule of purely selfish hope, as if we could hope virtuously without loving Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for their own sake. But faith and hope are real virtues because our happiness (and our understanding) is also something worth pursuing, though not of course in the same way or to the same degree as God. To use another famous image from De Doctrina, faith and hope are, in a sense, virtues of use whereas love is a virtue of enjoyment: though faith and hope direct us toward God, they do so in a way that directs God back towards our own good. And this is finally only beneficial i