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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Some form of our familiar distinction between letter and spirit in the interpretation of a text is surely older than written language itself. Whenever understanding becomes problematic—and this includes not only instances when an utterance is opaque or ambiguous, but also those frequent instances in which the obvious meaning of an utterance is not its intended meaning—this distinction may come into play as a way of attacking the problem. We find the distinction useful in our ordinary conversation with one another, when we are trying to decide how to take what someone has just said to us: ‘I know what he said, but how did he mean it? What was the spirit of what he said?’ In irony, sarcasm, understatement, allusion, and other devices of our common speech, there is often considerable divergence between the letter and the spirit of the utterance, or between what is said and what is meant. These distinctions were not invented by hermeneuticians trying to rationalise the devious interpretations to which canonical literatures are sometimes subjected. They have grown up with our language.
page 102 note 1 Frei, Hans W., The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 96–104.Google Scholar
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page 104 note 1 Credit for giving this distinction its place in modern theology is given to the Wolffian theologian Sigmund Jakob Baumgarten by Hirsch, Emanuel, Geschichte der neueren evangelischen Theologie, II (4th ed.; Gütersloh, Gerd Mohn, 1968), p. 378.Google Scholar
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page 105 note 2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations (3rd ed.; New York, Macmillan, 1958), p. 432.Google Scholar