(!tntttnr~tu
m~tnln!lka1 .nut~l!l
Continuing
LEHRE UNO ~EHRE
MAGAZIN FUER Ev.-LuTH. HOMILETIK
T HEOLOGICAL QUARTERL y-THEOLOGICAL MONTHLY
Vol. XIX September, 1948 No. 9
CONTENTS
Essays in Hermeneutics. M. H. Franzmann ....
The Integration of the Lutheran Service of Worship.
Walter E. Buszin
The Nassau Pericopes
MisceUanea ..
Theological Observer _. __ . ___ .. _ .. _._.
IS3
664
676
885
Book Review _ _ ............. ... _ ._. __ ...... _ _ _ _ . ___ ._ ... _ .... . _ 713
E1n Prediaer mUllli nlcht alleln tod-
1Ie1l, alio daas er die Schafe Imter-
weise, wie ste rechte ChrIsten sollen
!Iein, sondem auch daneben den Woel-
(en well"", daas ste die Schafe ntcht
angreifen Imd mit faLscher Lehre ver-
tuehren und Irrtum elnfuehren.
Luthet'
Es 1st keln Ding, das die Leute
mehr bei der Klrche behaelt denn
die gute Predigt. - ApologW, AFt. U
II the trumpet give an uncertain
sound, who lIhall prepare hiBwelf to
the battle? -1 Cor. 14:'
Published by
The Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod
CONCORDIA PUBLlSWNG BOUSE, St. Louis 18, Mo.
nnn:D Dr 17 ... A.
Concordia
Theological Monthly
Vol. XIX SEPTEMBER. 1948
Essays in Hermeneutics
By M. H. FRANZ MANN
II. THE CIRCLE OF HISTORY
No.9
And it came to pass in those days . . .
In the circle of language the interpreter seeks to master
the language in which the Scriptures were originally written;
in the circle of history he seeks to master the world in which
and for which the Scriptures were originally written; he
strives to envisage and to keep before himself, as concretely
and as plastically as may be, the geographic, social, economic,
and cultural pattern in which the original pro claimers and
the first hearers lived and moved. This pattern, or complex,
includes also the past of which the proclaimers and hearers
were the inheritors, for by the very fact that a man is born of
parents he is irrecoverably linked with the past and comes
into the world with history upon him. This is especially true
of the all-influential and decisive past of the Old Testament
revelation of God, which was, of course, for the devout He-
brew and for the believing Church not strictly past at all,
but an ever-present and continually effective actuality. When
the Magi arrived in Jerusalem, Micah was no dim historical
figure, but a present voice; and at Pentecost the voice of
Joel, in the mouth of St. Peter, was a living, and for those who
would hear, a decisive tongue.
That is the circle of history in its wider sense. In the case
of the New Testament proclamation, which arose in Palestine,
fulfilling, not destroying, God's previous revelation of Himself
to His people, and spread over the whole Graeco-Roman
world, that circle embraces two cultures, the Semitic culture
41
642 ESSAYS IN HERMENEUTICS
of Palestine and the Graeco-Roman culture of the Mediter-
ranean world. The deeper and more comprehensive the 'inter-
preter's knowledge of those two cultures is, the more imme-
diate will his contact with the sacred text be; his under-
standing and appreciation of the text will be correspondingly
more vital and rich. Good commentaries will, of course,
give the material that bears on any given portion of text.
But commentaries must of necessity give the information
piecemeal; and piecemeal knowledge means little and dissf ..
pates quickly if it does not find a secure place in an organic
complex of previously acquired comprehensive and general
knowledge. Bible dictionaries and Bible encyclopedias supply
that historical knowledge in outline; but what they give us is,
for us, secondhand. Unless the mind have a basis of first-
hand knowledge of contemporary and precedent texts and
monuments, at least in selection, such information is likely to
remain a pale, sickly thing, and the understanding of the text •
remains feeble and incomplete. Here, as in the circle of lan-
guage, the value and purposefulness of our traditional pre-
theological curriculum is vindicated. Its emphasis on the
history as well as on the languages of the ancient world pro-
vides an excellent basis for the interpretation of Scripture on
the historical side. One might wish to see it pointed more
specifically to the fullness of times than has often been the
case; one might wish that Palestine and its history and culture,
both intra-Biblical and extra-Biblical, were made a more
equal partner with the world of classical antiquity; but the
general idea is sound, and the foundation so laid is in-
dispensable.
The circle of history in the narrower sense includes the
specific occasion that called forth a literary production, the
circumstances under which it was written and received, the
persons addressed, and so forth - the materials commonly
covered in courses in New Testament Introduction, materials
derived from the texts themselves, from other Biblical sources
(e. g., Acts for the Pauline Epistles), or from extra-Biblical
tradition. The very existence of courses in New Testament
Introduction, or Isagogics, is a testimony to the importance of
the circle of history in interpretation. Every book of the New
Testament is written for the times; if we are to get the
meaning which these books have for all time, we must first get
ESSAYS IN HERMENEUTICS 643
at the meaning they had for the first time. The character of the
New Testament books as occasional writings is most clearly
seen in the case of the Epistles; but even in the case of the
Gospels, the preface of St. Luke and the varied character and
emphasis of the Synoptics generally, to say nothing of the
distinctive character of St. John, leave no room for doubt that
they, too, were designed to meet definite needs. And as for
the Apocalypse, the persecuted Church is the unmistakable
background and occasion of its prophecies.
God makes all things serve the good of His Church: the
vagaries and impieties of the elder Higher Criticism have,
under His providence, had a beneficent by-product; they have
recalled Biblical scholarship to a more sanely historical ap-
proach to Scripture. We have been forced to study Scripture
in the live realities of its historical setting, and the result can
only be beneficial. Common sense should have taught us as
much: no man can be understood in a vacuum; he comes
into the world with the ties ready-fashioned that bind him to
his family, his people, his cultural setting. He must be under-
stood, if he is to be understood at all, in relation to his contem-
poraries and his ancestors - imagine trying to understand
Socrates without Athens or Demosthenes without Philip of
Macedon! A man's new birth does not alter, for this world,
the given historical facts of his human birth. Paul after the
Damascus road is the same Roman citizen that he was before
his conversion, and Paul the Christian and the missionary
makes use of that Roman citizenship; parts of his history are
unintelligible without a knowledge of what that citizenship
involved. Nor does the fact of inspiration break the historical
ties that bind a man to his present and his past: the converted
Saul writes the Greek he learned before conversion at Tarsus
and employs the imagery derived from the world about him, the
Hebrew world with its Temple and its cultus, the pagan world
with its athletics and its spectacles, its commerce and its law.
The Holy Spirit took men as they were, historically situated
and historically conditioned, and used them so. . .. There is
nothing novel in this renewed emphasis on the historical side
in interpretation; for Luther, too, the emphasis on history
went hand in hand with the return to the single sense: "Sola
enim historica sententia est, quae vere et solide docet."
To attempt to exemplify all the implications of history for
644 ESSAYS IN HERMENEUTICS
the interpretation of the New Testament, even in outline,
would be an ambitious undertaking. We might do better to
proceed modestly, and empirically: to take one of the shorter
and simpler Pauline Epistles, First Thessalonians, and point
out how history can further and enrich our understanding
of this portion of Holy Writ.
"Paul, and Silvanus, and Timotheus. . .." Within the
circle of history the very names in the greeting at the begin-
ning of the Epistle are luminous and meaningful. "Paul"-
suppose there were nothing known of this Paul save what
1 Thessalonians tells us. The Letter would still be m~aningful
and instructive, even as the Epistle to the Hebrews is instruc-
tive, although "God only knows for certain" who its author is.
But what riches we should have to do without! For we know
that this Paul had been Saul, an Hebrew of the Hebrews, a
fanatical Pharisee, who was before a blasphemer, and a per-
secutor, and injurious. The Epistle is a testimony, writ large,
to the fact that the grace of our Lord was exceedingly abund-
ant toward him: we see him writing to the Christians whom
he before had hated, to Christians from among the Gentiles,
whom he had before despised; writing with an overflowing
abundance of love and concern, with a fervent prayer of
thanksgiving that runs through the first three entire chapters,
with a burning zeal for their continuance and growth in the
Christian estate. The very fact that this Saul-Paul is writing
the Letter is a preachment of the power of God and the grace
of God.
"Paul, and Silvanus, and Timothy" - the linking of the
names is a testimony to the cohesive power of the Christian
faith. Here we have conjoined Paul, the converted enemy of
the Church, the former Pharisee, and Silas, member of the
first Jerusalem church, the charter aristocracy of Christendom,
and Timothy, one of the first fruits of Paul's missionary
journeys, a strangely diverse group, yet one in their servitude
to the Lord Jesus Christ. The three names thus joined are a
testimony, too, to the cosmopolitan character of the early
Church, and thus of the universal intent and scope of the early
Church, even at this early date. As Paul was also Saul, so
Silvanus also bore the good Jewish name of Silas, and both
men were Roman citizens, thus uniting in their own persons
the two cultures that constitute the historical background of
ESSAYS IN HERMENEUTICS 645
the New Testament, the Semitic and the Graeco-Roman.
Timothy is similarly cosmopolitan: his father was a Greek,
and his mother, though she bore a Greek name, was a devout
J ewess who had reared her son in the Holy Scriptures of
God's ancient people. By a sort of gracious irony, Timothy
had not been circumcised until about to begin his work as a
minister of the New Covenant. Salvation is marked in the
history of its proclamation and in the persons of its proclaimers
as being of the Jews but for all the world. The character
and the antecedents of these proclaimers are both a fulfillment
of prophecy and in themselves prophetic.
"Thessalonica," "Achaia," "Macedonia," "Athens": the
place names, too, are rich in meaning, within the circle of
history. The indistinctly premonitory "isles," "ends of the
earth," and "every man from his place" (Is. 41: 5; Zeph. 2: 11)
have become concrete and plastic place names in the fulfill-
ment of the new dispensation. In place of "isles" we have
now, as fulfillment unrolls, the great harbor city of Thes-
salonica as the center and theater of God's work, in which the
Gospel takes root, grows, and spreads. The interpreter will
do well to visualize this great city if he is to understand First
Thessalonians to the full. Like most of the cities in which St.
Paul labored, it is a crossroads city, being situated on the great
Roman highway, the Via Egnatia, and being by virtue of its
splendid and picturesque natural harbor a center of shipping
and commerce; history under the providence of God so shaped
this city, its character and site, as to make possible and to
underline the words of the Apostle: "For from you sounded
out the Word of the Lord not only in Macedonia and Achaia,
but also in every place your faith to God-ward is spread
abroad; so that we need not to speak anything" (1 Thess. 1: 8).
We may well believe, too, that it was an expensive city to live
in; for here St. Paul, despite the lahors of his hands where-
with he toiled day and night that he might not be chargeable
to any man, yet twice accepted help from the church of Phi-
lippi (Phil. 4: 16) . It was a populous city, and its population,
which according to inscriptions was made up of men of every
nation, included a goodly number of Jews, who had there their
own synagog (Acts 17: 1); it was here in the synagog that
St. Paul according to his usual practice had begun work in
Thessalonica "and three sabbaths reasoned with them out of
646 ESSAYS IN HERMENEUTICS
the Scriptures" (Acts 17: 2). Our Epistle and the history of
the church of Thessalonica impinge here on the tremendous
historical fact, important in more than one respect for redemp-
tive history, of the Diaspora of the Jews, that vast scattering
of Israel, whether by forcible deportation or voluntary emi-
gration, over the face of the whole ancient world, so that the
miracle of Pentecost was witnessed by men of Israel "out of
every nation under heaven" (Acts 2: 5); so that we read in
Philo a letter addressed to Caligula which contains the re-
markable statement: "Jerusalem is the metropolis, not of the
single country of Judea, but of most countries, because of the
colonies which she has sent out, as opportunity offered, into
the neighboring lands of Egypt, Phoenicia, Syria, and Coele-
syria, and the more distant lands of Pamphylia and Cilicia,
most of Asia, as far as Bithynia and the utmost corners of
Pontus; likewise unto Europe, Thessaly, Boeotia, Macedonia,
Aetolia, Attica, Argos, Corinth, with the most parts and best
parts of Greece. And not only are the continents full of Jewish
colonies, but also the most notable of the islands - Euboea,
Cyprus, Crete - to say nothing of the lands beyond the Eu-
phrates." We have grown so accustomed to reading that St.
Paul, again and again, at Pisidian Antioch, at Thessalonica,
at Athens, at Corinth, at Ephesus, begins his work in the
synagog that the wonder of that providential fact is likely to
be lost on us unless we look upon it freshly with the historian's
eye; and it is only in the light of that fact that we can under-
stand a statement like that of Acts 16: 3 regarding the half-
Greek Timothy: "Him would Paul have to go forth with him;
and took and circumcised him because of the Jews ... " and
yet the Epistle to the Thessalonians is addressed to a Gentile
church, to men who had "turned to God from idols to serve
the living and true God and to wait for His Son from heaven"
(1 Thess. 1: 9-10) . In Thessalonica, as elsewhere, St. Paul's
kinsmen according to the flesh fulfilled their tragic destiny,
both to serve as the preparation for the Christ and to spear-
head the rejection of Him; they who were the Israelites, to
whom pertained the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants,
and the giving of the Law, and the service of God, and the
promises; whose were the fathers, and of whom as concerning
the flesh Christ came (Rom. 9: 4-5), even they refused to
submit themselves unto the righteousness of God (Rom. 10: 3).
ESSAYS IN HERMENEUTICS 647
The bitterest words that St. Paul ever spoke concerning his
countrymen are found in our Epistle; they reflect the expe-
rience of the Apostle in Thessalonica as recorded in Acts 17: 5,
where we learn that it was the Jews (only some of them
believed), moved with envy, who were the instigators of the
persecution which made the Thessalonians followers of the
churches of God which in Judea are in Christ Jesus: "For ye
also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even
as they have of the Jews; who both killed the Lord Jesus and
their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please
not God and are contrary to all men, forbidding us to speak
to the Gentiles, that they might be saved, to fill up their sins
alway" (1 Thess. 2: 14-16) . Still it is true: "The captivity of
the Jew became the freedom of both Jew and Gentile, and the
scattering of Isra·el was the gathering in of all nations unto
God" (Plummer). The synagog was the starting point, and the
synagog was also the bridge to the Gentile world; for on the
fringe of the synagog were that fruitful group, "the devout
Greeks," or proselytes, among whom in Thessalonica, as so
often elsewhere, the Gospel obtained a sympathetic hearing.
We have the evidence of Acts that in Thessalonica "a great
multitude" of such believed.
The Prophets saw the "heathen" and "every man from
his place" worshiping Jehovah. We see the fulfillment, con-
cretely and in detail. We see the laborers and artisans of
Thessalonica - there were some Jews and "of the chief women
not a few," but the common Gentile men formed the bulk of
the congregation - men who are exhorted to do each his own
business and to work with his hands. We know from the
whole ancient economic picture how hard was the lot of the
free laborer (the problem of the Christian slave and the Chris-
tian master are not touched on in our Epistle; perhaps be-
cause they were few) in a slave-holding society; there is a
.new poignancy in St. Paul's description of the labor of their
faith, the toil of their love, and their patient endurance in
hope in their new Lord Jesus Christ if we remember that.
We know, too, that when St. Paul speaks of the churches of
Macedonia as giving liberally "in a great trial of affiiction ...
and deep poverty," he is stating sober fact (2 Cor. 8: 2). For
this young church suffered both persistent persecution and
chronic poverty.
648 ESSAYS IN HERMENEUTICS
We know, too, what were the temptations to which these
young Christians of Thessalonica were, by their position in a
Greek society and the ingrained attitudes acquired by life in
that society, especially exposed. "God hath not called us unto
uncleanness, but unto holiness"; this emphasis on sexual
purity, this foremost emphasis given in the hortatory part of
the Epistle to the warning against fornication, comes as no
surprise to anyone acquainted at all with the life of a Greek
city, especially the life of a harbor city. Passages like this, and
the Lasterkataloge, such as we have in Romans 1, evoke a
thousand echoes in the mind that come to them conditioned by
Archilochus and Mimnermus, Aristophanes and Greek comedy
generally, the amatory epigrams of the Palatine Anthology,
or their lineal Roman descendants, such as Catullus and
Martial. To one who has walked the pavements of Pompeii
and has seen the obscene mark of the brothels engraved on
its stones, the strongest words of Scripture under this head
will seem mild enough. 'Axu{}uQo[u was in the grain of Graeco-
Roman life. The Epistle to the Thessalonians is a living and
immediate word spoken to an actual and concrete Thessalonica.
The forms of the Epistle are also well within the circle
of history; they are in the main current of contemporary
epistolography and can be paralleled, feature for feature, from
the non-literary letters of the time. The greeting XUQL<;; xu!'
dQ~v'Y] is so familiar and has become so much a part of eccle-
siastical language that we are likely to be blinded to the fact
that in these two words we have again the meeting and fusion
of the two cultures that constitute the historical setting of the
New Testament: XUQL<;; reproduces the conventional greeting
of Greek letters, XU[QELV (cf. James 1: 1 and Acts 15: 23),
while dQ~v'Y] is the Semitic shalom, which in ordinary daily
usage had become so perfunctory and conventional that Our
Lord had to mark it as "My peace" and "not as the world
giveth" when He wished His disciples to feel the full force that
the word had had in the Old Testament and was again to have
in the mouth of His Apostles. We have not, of course, "ex-
plained" the greeting when we have traced its historic origins.
Both words received in Christian usage a wealth and depth of
content that pre-Christian and non-Christian usage never
dreamed of. It is both the assimilative and the transforming
power of the inspiring Spirit that we witness in even so slight
an instance as this.
ESSAYS IN HERMENEUTICS 649
It is the same transforming power that we behold in the
form that the opening of the Epistle takes: both the thanks-
giving, here extended to unusual length, and the prayer can
be paralleled from non-literary letters in the papyri; for in-
stance, the letter of Apion, the Egyptian soldier, printed by
Deissmann in Light from the Ancient East (pp.179 ff.), who
points out that this is "a thoroughly 'Pauline' way of begin-
ning a letter and that St. Paul was ... adhering to a beautiful
secular custom when he so frequently began his Letters with
thanks to God (1 Thess. 1: 2; 2 Thess. 1: 3; Philemon 4;
Eph. 1: 16; 1 Cor. 1: 4; Rom. 1: 8; Phil. 1: 3) ." These lines
are not theological lucubrations of generalized intent and im-
port; history here underlines what Scripture asserts of itself;
Scripture is "profitable," cb